2.12 Burroughs Time-Lapse

Process of Observation
In my interview with Daniel Paluska, he said, “…time-lapse makes me think about the pace of life and how I interact with the machinery around me: the ticking of the clock, the nine to five bells, are all external times. The time-lapse camera is a timer that is taking a picture every thirty-seconds. How does that relate to my internal state and experience in the world? I think that’s something that really seems tied to a process of observation…” I have been capturing my own time-lapse footage every day over a six-month period, searching for this process of observation. As Paluska asserts, “…time-lapse allows us to experience self and remember self.” Burroughs Time-Lapse showcases the first month of my time-lapse capture in chronological order as a constant element. Using a cut-up technique of editing split screens and juxtapositions, allows me to craft a unique relationship to create an open narrative. The cut-up technique is an aleatory technique in which a text, image or film is cut up and rearranged to create new content. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts. Burroughs describes the process of Cut-ups as “…establishing new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.”

2.13 Vertov Time-Lapse

Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film, Man With a Movie Camera, is a brave attempt at visual epistemology, to reinterpret the often banal and seemingly insignificant images of everyday life. — Lev Manovich

Recursive Loop
Vertov Time-Lapse uncovers month-two of my time-lapse database; it echoes the avant-garde editing style of Soviet Montage filmmakers of the 1920s such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Soviet Montage emphasizes dynamic, often discontinuous, relationships between shots and the juxtaposition of images to create ideas not present in either shot by itself. Vertov’s film, Man with a Movie Camera, influences this piece. Vertov’s film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style. Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put them in a database. Vertov Time-Lapse is imbued with many of these editing techniques in order to represent one month as a recursive loop.