Film as Sculpture: Time, Space and Celluloid

• Screened at New Nothing Cinema: February 2004
  The Puppies and Kitten Show curated by Jen Choe
• Installed at Live Worms Gallery: May 2004
  seeing steriled sticky stitch stitched stories the thresholding transformation translation attempting brightly claustrophobic concrete, The Group Show

In my first film class, I became fascinated by the idea of film being a piece of celluloid plastic traveling through a projector. The illusion of movement and animation is created by individual images passing through lenses and a shutter illuminated by a light bulb. Both the motion of celluloid and shutter(s) create what is called persistence of vision. It is the phenomena of human sight in which one holds an image in one’s mind one-twentieth of a second after seeing the image itself. Having been a transportation design student I was naturally curious about the relationship of film, being a medium based in time, to the idea of traveling as a medium dealing with space. I got the idea after reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Scott McCloud:

“…the basic difference (between comic and film) is that animation is sequential in time but not spatially juxtaposed* as comics are. Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space—the screen while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film!”

So I started to think of the experience of watching a film as journey. I imagined that a very long, ten feet high strip of film winded along a desert highway and the viewer is traveling along the side watching. Bill Brand, an artist, applied this idea in September 1980. He named the piece Masstransiscope. Commuters in Brooklyn, New York were astonished to their surprise to find moving animations flashing from the dark tunnels on their way to work. Instead of the static viewer sitting in a darkened theatre and the celluloid moving through a projector, it is the viewer who is moving through space while the film remains stationary.

I’ve experienced a similar phenomena watching the moving landscapes on long train rides between Los Angeles and San Francisco… The sensation of feeling as though I’m one in a fixed position, while the landscapes move about me. The hypnotic trance of watching motion through a window while moving rapidly through the country side…not being able to tell whether I am still or moving.