Ubiquitous Moving Image
Every cinematic scenes are composed of small digitized dots. Arrangements of these pixels would construct a larger scene and a moving image would be delivered to viewers. The goal of this project is to explore ideas of fragmentation and understand how even pixelated images of a footage could be reinterpreted. I pictured how compositions of flickering lights and traces of circuits would create a scenery in cinema. For this project, I focused on fundamental components of the moving image, and decided to generate different story through dynamic pixels. I broke down screens of random footage into an extremely low quality image until it was impossible to relate the new scene to its original source. I also filmed small parts of an actual movie screen and magnified the content. After creating series of flickering images that were at most 10 frames long, I literally drew out interesting compositions on each frames by using these new scenes. Then I went through the same process of stripping down my new composition to its fundamental stage. Lastly, I collected all of my visual fragmentations to build up a new moving image that delivered a strange, yet familiar story of digital traces.
Traces of Circuits
To create white noise and bits of fragmented screens, I loosely connected my lab top to an HD television with a cable. I filmed the screen and then played it again with the cable connected to the TV. I filmed the screen over and over and until I found interesting results. The music I used is Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Brazil. I played the music and kept on recording the music periodically until the quality was broken down to a certain level. Then I added noisy sounds from the fragmented scenes I have created to the low quality song. While working on the piece, my initial goal was to have a footage constantly broken down to fragments until it had only flickering lights. Those lights would become the main character of the motion piece and playfully dance with the music. However, the final project seemed to be more interesting without the music turned on. Each and every frame of the motion piece had a unique story of the moving electronics inside circuits. The visualization of the fragmented screen was an interesting process of exploring how things are constructed and learning new ways to understand fundamental aspects of things.
Making
The collection of fragmented scenes was the essential part of the process. During the first week, I used footage from the internet as source. However, because of the limited amount, I found constraints. Later on, I decided to create my own noise effects and broken down scenes. I used loosely connected cables and filmed what was displayed on the scene. I also magnified existing movie clips until majority of the scene was large pixels. Eventually, I was able to collect a massive amount of archives related to visual fragmentation. Here are some examples.