Sonntag, 19. Januar 2020

These Photos Bend Time and Space. Literally – WIRED

” It was the hottest thing in the digital world 15 years ago,”Johnson states. By playing with the video camera’s settings, Johnson was able to catch an entire story in a single frame. Johnson sought out topics for the series all over the world, from an open-pit coal mine in Kentucky to a commuter train in Johannesburg, South Africa. “People doing tai chi move extremely slowly for long durations of time,” Johnson states.”For something to capture my interest it has to be tough or curious or stand out in some way,” Johnson states.

In 2005, multidisciplinary artist Jay Mark Johnson flew to Germany to purchase a very unique, really costly brand-new gadget– a hand-made digital cam efficient in recording 360-degree panoramic images at resolutions as high as 500 megapixels.” It was the hottest thing in the digital world 15 years ago,”Johnson says.”It’s built like a tank, however very smooth-running, as high-end German innovation can be.” Johnson purchased the camera to assist create visual results for Hollywood movies– he’s worked on The Matrix, Titanic, and Outbreak— but as he experimented with his elegant new toy he started to press the borders of what the maker might do.

Those experiments all ultimately discovered their way into Johnson’s Spacetime photography series, which has been commonly displayed and is in the irreversible collections of museums worldwide. (Images from the series will be on view at the

Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California from February 8 to April 19.) Johnson has actually kept the techniques behind the images a secret, the outcome is that by modifying how the German cam operated he was able to dramatically render things in motion while turning their backgrounds into colorful streaks.

The eureka minute, he said, came when he realized that panoramic cams really produce timeline images. When you take a panorama photo on your smartphone, for example, you aren’t catching a single moment in time– you’re catching a provided landscape over the course of the 30 seconds or so that it takes to pan your electronic camera across the horizon. By tinkering with the camera’s settings, Johnson had the ability to catch a whole story in a single frame. “I approached my topics like a cinematographer,” he describes.

Johnson looked for topics for the series all over the world, from an open-pit coal mine in Kentucky to a commuter train in Johannesburg, South Africa. Some of the earliest images in the series reveal a female carrying out tai chi at a photography studio in Hamburg, Germany. “People doing tai chi relocation extremely gradually for long periods of time,” Johnson states. “So I could stand next to someone and just keep shooting all kinds of angles, trying different lenses and tape-recording speeds.”

An authentic Renaissance male, Johnson trained as a designer before moving into efficiency art, political activism, filmmaking, special effects work, and now fine-art photography. In the 1990s he invested 2 years studying linguistics and biological sociology at UCLA. What connects all these diverse endeavors is Johnson’s polymorphous curiosity about the world. In describing the Spacetime series, he referred to theoretical physics, Japanese poetry, the philosophical field of epistemology, director Ridley Scott, and Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.

“For something to capture my interest it needs to be difficult or curious or stand out in some method,” Johnson says. “The exact same applies whether I’m looking at art or making it.”

Johnson is the very first to confess that the Spacetime photos can be tough to decipher–“the human brain isn’t equipped to process them”– but for him, that’s exactly the point. He wants to force audiences to reassess their classifications of perception. “In my view, time and space are simply cultural constructs,” he states. “They’re blended together, and we separate them conceptually.”

To estimate from one of the films Johnson dealt with: Whoa.


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