This image of a building appears to have been intentionally treated. The overall texture has been made less sharp, almost weathered, resulting in a blur that strengthens the fleeting nature of the scene. The vertical lines make it look corrugated, ratifying its existence in a move than seems to reinforce the vertical axis of the image. When this is juxtaposed against the frame of my computer screen the textures seem to compete for my attention, each justifying the other's existence by being.
This image moves you. The viewer is moving fast, making the image blurry. Or the building is moving quickly away from the stationary viewer. Either way, this image is fast. Detail cannot be caught, teaching me not to always take a moment to smell the roses. Straight lines of the building help move this image from left to right or right to left. I am seeing film on rewind, or fast-forward, and this image is a Stopped Image Of Motion.
The size of the vehicles elevates the viewer above the scene and the angle suggests the viewer has turned his/her head to catch a moment that is passing too fast. The blur of the building indicate the speed in which the moment is passing, though the photo is a still image. In the moment you take in so much and while the senses recoil from enjambment you notice the sky is murky at the outer edges of the image. You notice the building elevates itself in steps as though leading the way to a murky heaven. All the while you go nowhere fast; even in the fictional temporal blur remains the fact it is a still image and you can still see...though you expect it to fade away into a distant, unremarkable moment.
Suction. My eyes are tugged into this image, jerked aggressively by it's overpowering movement. It is not soft persuasion; it is merciless force.
I am torn from my time and place and flung into pure grainy textures and blurry pieces of world. I don't sense a loss of color, just the presence of what I see. Nor do I feel completely alienated, I just lose my sense of consolation.
As I fly through this image, I can't latch onto anything because nothing is stable or permanent. I am perpetually in movement and ungrounded. I can recognize only fractions of what surrounds me, and so the thingness of all this stuff makes me conscious of my own thingness.
I have lost track of my self-prescribed context and exist purely in a present--a now of the world.
a piece of continuous movement. its origin a natal secret; its destination an unthinkable infinity. all things in motion, a transport into contrast. a static slice of speed divorced from past and future but nevertheless magically pointing towards them stretching the image through invisible elastic.
This image evokes a feeling of fear for me. I feel like this building is getting ready to fall. It appears to have some sort of motion to it, though the image is still. Buildings, especially ones as large and rectangular as this one, should not move in the fashion that this one appears to be moving.
The other perspective to take is that I, myself, am moving since the whole scene appears to have a smear of speed to it. The elevation of my line of sight implies that I am well above ground level. This strange perspective also brings about a feeling of dizziness.
Is it clear that this is a photograph? What are the consequences if it is not? The consequences would seem to go something like: the architecture of this site of seeing would be different. Rather than motion perhaps we have a happening, perhaps we have a building. Here, shutter and shudder have collided, colluded in the sensible, in an eye, in a hand, in an image. Here, static goes staticly, but it goes nonetheless. Hardly static: an administrative building building Richter building Administrative building.
Stepping back from the picture, a blurred scene is infinitely rushing by. Building smudges into railing, trees, cars. Is it the viewer or the view that is rushing? Looking closer the black and white seems scratched on to the canvas, or perhaps etched out of it. It is no longer a building, but angular lines and squares. The viewer's perspective can't help but move with the lines and feel the 'swoosh' of the image.
The quickness of this image -- the speed of it -- literally moves the viewer. If speed is work over time, this image works you over in the time of the event of seeing. It pushes you. Your eyes move in a different way because this is a different image. It is perpetual motion in a perpetual motion defined world.
Color is extracted but there is no lack here. Windows and sky and dark and light are all pixels on a level playing field. There are no hierarchies, no empty spaces. Architectural certainty gives way to liquid; structures sway and play in the viscosity of the fabric. Hushed vibrations, variations of light fuse and melt to create rippling echoes. This scene is full, full of this moment, every frozen fragment teeters on the edge of mutation and movement. This is the ineffable micro-flash of the now, lingering in the past and lusting for the future. Time is no separable entity or invisible impression; it is gushing through the atmosphere leaving swarms of stuff mingling and in flux.
The reader is confronted with an image that lacks no point of focus; the image's being blurry makes difficult an attempt to distinguish the "foreground" from the "background." Thus, the image doesn't consist of evidence of an act occurring amidst a background. Instead, the image is everything associated with it.
The point from which this image is being viewed immediately interrogates the viewer. The image is blurry, but for what reason? Is the viewer in motion? Who is doing the viewing here? The image is thus not simply of the building itself, but also functions to complicate the orientation of the viewer.
This image brings home the fact that the viewer always favors their own position. In this case a camera has captured a moment from a moving vehicle. The cars that move at nearly the same speed as the camera are seen in focus, everything else is a blur of movement. The building which a viewer presumes is stationary is seen in a blur of movement while those objects that are moving are clear because they move along with the viewer. While this does show that the viewer favors self, who is to say that the viewer’s perspectivial view is less valid than the view from a stationary position. Why is stillness favored as truth?
Movement plays a central role in the working of this image. The blur of the building indicates it movement, but movement does not directly penetrate every aspect of the image. Instead, both the top of the image, the skyline, and the bottom of the image, the ground and cars, remain static. The building has no beginning, no end. It is as continuous as the movement it depicts, never resting or slowing, but maintaining a consistent blur of action. The image organizes the viewer by refusing the viewer a narrative explanation or comfortable point of focus. Just as the movement of the image is continuous, the viewer continually searches for a place to rest or a certain point to direct his or her attention. However, the viewer is only able to keep gliding across the back and forth across the image, mirroring the motion and restlessness with which the image operates.
The image appears at first as a proliferation of frames. But then the viewer notices a distorion. The frames seem to bleed. They are not merely squares or rectangles. Frames here lose their shape and form. The same is true for the building which houses the windows. Its paralell vertical lines make for a curious texture. Whether this is the effect of some distortion or the buildings true nature is irrelevant. The structure is reduced to mere cardboard by these lines.
This moving-vision demonstrates a world that is always in motion, always morphing. It is the speed of seeing. The image is in an infinite state of modification and allows the eyes to intertwine with the image as it goes. The speed of this image demands the viewer to see what is happening as opposed to what has already happened. This isn’t a moment that can be explained by other moments, it is simply the event taking place directly in front of the eyes. Therefore, any distinctions between viewer and image are effaced; the two emerge and become a part of the “flesh” that makes up the world.
This image is a seemingly physical impossibility. It moves and stands still at the same time. It is the experience of looking out the window of a moving vehicle, but its vantage point is adjacent to the building, not the cars on the street. This image is the familiar and unfamiliar at once and always.
It is difficult to tell whether this is a photo or a painting. The answer is irrelevant however, for either way it produces the effect or feeling of motion. The viewer feels as if he or she is looking out of the window of a car in motion, capturing a blurry rendition of the passing scenery. Actually it is unclear what is moving. Is it the viewer or the object being viewed? It seems as if the motion comes from the city itself. This image endows the object being viewed, the building street, cars, etc. with an apparent vibrancy. This image seems to actually capture the affect of motion, the motion of a city, the motion of the viewer, they are one and the same.
An image in motion, this picture feels as though it was taken from the window of a moving train. This image, rather than capturing a moment in time, captures an event; the event of a vehicle moving past a building and the event of seeing something which is continuous rather than a static. This subsequently dynamic aesthetic allows the viewer to see more than one single image. The viewer instead sees image after image laid one on top of the other. As images collide, the picture gets blurry; this blurriness coming from the place of image multiplicity
cycles of reverberation. constant state of motion and superimposition. gives a state of motion when in reality the frame is frozen on the screen. lack of color presents the idea that this is not just a camera taking in the world, but imposing it, and altering it. frames within frames and lacking the mechanism that provides the speed or the motion that streams right through the center of it.
There is nothing sensational about the architecture of this building. this banality seems to spill over to it's colorless appearence.
Can we say the image is blurred? Or, is this how we would see this building, even more clearly photographed? How we would remember it, this muddled archtectural piece? Like a haze?
What time is it? Time seems really important to this image, it's black and white color, it's blur, it's almost already dated and filed away as insignificant. before our eyes have even left the screen.
or...
is this building, this image alive? It's moving. We're moving Does this image move you, or does it move by you? Who's standing still, you or the image? Neither? Both?
**I also find it difficult to tell whether this is a photograph or a painting. Whether it was SNAP, taken up by the lens and edified in to the world of photographic images, or brought to life with the slow speed of a brush, still slightly trembling beneath it's strokes.
The image moves in two different directions for the viewer. The image of the blurred building is moving to the right; the cars are moving to the left. This works because the viewer is able to find a center that is otherwise not there.
This building looks as though it is passing you by at an incredible speed. Thick dark lines function as tracks that ascend from the background, widening at the opposite end of the frame right before they are lost to the vanishing point. These rails guild the trajectory of this windowed freighter. If we could take a wider view of this building perhaps we would not see the motion as dramatically. But we would still be changing our position to achieve this. This image reorients the notion of speed (or at least the observable affects of speed) as based on position rather then observed movement.
The image gives a very obvious projection of movement. However, which direction it is moving is not clear. Also, it is unclear whether the image is moving or the viewer. All that is clear is that the image is hazy and unfocused because of the movement. It resists efforts to make it come into focus and to determine the details of the image, just as it resists efforts to determine which direction it is moving. It alienates the viewer, not allowing him to associate the image with memories of anything he might have seen or any locations he may associate with the iamge. The blurriness and lack of sharp details forces the viewer to look at the image without associating it with memories.
Everything is in motion: This image is in motion, and I am in motion. The building, the cars, trees, and lamp posts are whizzing by me so quickly that they lose all color. In this image everything is out of focus, blurry, and so constantly keeping me on my toes, moving me, shifting my gaze from left to right, right to left.
The speed at which this image moves is in stark contrast to the speed at which we must take in and make sense of the image. We slow down the image, while the image tries to speed us up. But the details of the image need to be observed slowly in order to see how this image goes (in more ways than one).
What is the direction of this speed? My eyes fall upon the smudged vertical lines. Is this image a photograph or a painting? I look at the graininess of the building’s roof, which resembles traces of brush strokes.
And so my eyes wander. The very speed of the image obfuscates the answers to these questions and literally blurs the distinction between image and reality.
The image is a sketch. The medium of the photograph exhibits a tendency toward freehand-like interpretation. Lines and forms are drawn, and erased, an impression of all tracings is imbued on the sheet. Importantly, the photograph is not a mirror image - it is an artist's rendering prone to a human articulation, re-examination, self-censure, and re-articulation. Photography in charcoal and synthetic rubber.
There have been comments questioning the artistic medium of the image, some suggesting it's a photograph, some suggesting it's a drawing or painting, and some suggesting it's irrelevant. While I would say it's irrelevant which medium it is exactly, I do not think it is irrelevant that the image seems to call forth this question.
The subject seems a bit more typical of photography, yet the smearing and fine texture throughout the image suggest either heavy digital editing or an artist's hand from the beginning. This question is better solved by another question than the answer--that is, what would be the difference? Thus the issue behind the frame zooms past at the speed of the image itself. The viewer is left with the rush and vertigo of the image, where things blur into one another, become indistinct, and fly by before they can be stilled and parsed.
An image of becomes an image being. The supposed photo OF a building unsettles the viewer - it shakes the ground beneath the viewer as the viewer's position and orientation is shaped by the solid, concrete,... quivering building. This is just the beginning, soon everything gets shaken up. The image takes up and in the "detached observer" and pulls out the foundation of reference on which he stood. Is this a photo or a painting? Perhaps it is a painting of a photo? If so, then what becomes of the notion of the photo? The photo becomes an image to be painted. The photograph then, is not a photo OF something, but rather, IS image. Then this painting also is not a painting OF a photograph but rather, is image.
Images are never static. Even if they are not moving, fixed upon a screen or a frame, they always act upon and move around the viewers as viewers to images. It’s because they are not a representation ‘of,’ but existence of its own it’s self. This image seems to emphasize that point a little bit more. Slow or fast, images are constantly in fluid or mechanical motion and this what it seemed from subway point of view, it doesn’t allow viewers to focus but to take the image as an whole, as it shifts really fast or really slow. Detailed enough to let someone recognize that VW bug, but fast or slow enough in shifting to make it not matter. Maybe it’s an image that wants to school everyone, to aid a frame of mind to be free from recognition, categorization, and representation, but just to take it as it is already beautiful.
No, there is not a moving object in this frame. At first glance its movement is lateral, the kind that could be seen from the window of a train. But the absence of the stretch marks of such a movement or any evidence at all of a “direction” force another look. Now the movement goes between high and low points of the kind found on topographical reliefs. Think of the way that, in low light when you’re holding your wine glass at an angle in front of you and your eyes are a bit blurry and the stem and your hand are out of frame, you can’t be certain if your glass is tipped toward you or away from you. This frame is a moving object.
This image is moving still. This image is moving fast, but positions the viewer still - hopeful to catch a glimpse. The angle, the tilt, the smeared elements of the image suggests the speed of image. Moving quickly. Away. The cars, the industrial building, the light pole, are all quickly going, yet at the same time they appear to be still.
This image breathes and swells. Its motion is unfrozen and simultaneously frozen in the capture of the event. The building calls attention to this phenomenon, while it converts the totality of the event to the entire setting of unsettling. It drags out the things of the image for extended moments that demonstrate a fluid flexibility. Each area reflects and floods upon the immediate area. The individuals comprising the whole shake and tremble, hooking onto each other to entrench a semblance of stability.
Immediately, this image demands the viewer rationalize its blur—its linear, not out-of-focus, intimating the sensation of motion. The fastest part is where the image is least distinct: center of the frame, towards the bottom, above the tree. This white flash appears to be part of a whole—giving the impression of a train descending. Ironically, the cars are the part of the image that appear most static; though the blur makes the viewer want to imagine them moving, but instead they appear too close together to be in motion themselves, instead look as though they are parallel parked.
The sketch presents an interesting insight into images and their motion. The viewer stands before an image with definite motion (blur, parallel lines), however unlike a photograph this image does not derive its motion from the movement of either the camera or the subject matter. The motion is not a representation of the circumstances of the photograph. The notion of motion as a secondary characteristic, an effect, is inverted. Now, because of the contrived nature of the sketch, the building becomes motion, at least in as much as it remains in the frame.
Distortions and speed. Photograph a stasis of motion. Itself, like recording sound, words, a temporal contradiction. A memory forged into materialization. Catpuring the after of the before and the before of the after in a snap. snap the fingers. An anamorphic shutter on light and object and movement. World, like picture, blurs in a sprint, clears to lucidity in the trudge. Sense panic. Go.
This image is Bound Movement, or Movement Bound. It is still for the viewer gazing upon it for the first millisecond; however, after that, the viewer moves with it and within it, almost unstoppably. The graininess and apparent palpable texture of the image contrasts with the WHOOOOSHING of the building, creating the effect of a controlled movement that fights to be bound. We are caught within this movement at first glance.
The regimented organization of the building's window frames, dominating more than half of the image, demands the viewer's attention. The top half of the image appears evidentiary: that the frames adhere to a strict, systematic pattern confirms the world. However, upon gazing at the image's lower half, this reading of the image as mnemonic becomes unmoored. As the viewer scans from top to bottom, the framing descends towards the unfamiliar and the absurd. The frames inhabiting the upper portion fall in line into an orderly (even oppressive) system, where the borders between frames are clearly demarcated. This reifies our human understanding of the what the concept "building" means. Conversely, in the lower half, the lines between frames blur, giving way to a liberating proliferation of frames. Far from redefining precisely what "frame" can mean, the image challenges the viewer's inclination to confirm the world. Most conspicuously, the black blotch confronts the viewer as an abberation, a defect to the image. On the contrary, the blotch goes further in effacing the distinction of what it means to be in the frame and out of the frame. The blotch seems as if it has been superimposed on the image (as if it was the thumbprint of the artist), but it is inextricably enmeshed in the frame. That its gradation and form parallel other frames occupying the image underscores its very own authentic habitation of it.
This image makes me think of fps, or frames per second, and how any image is not "still." Many blur effects arise from having a single image stretched past a single frame...this image is one of those. The "richter building" is simply stretched beyond the concept of a frame, sucking a period of time (the little stretch of time) into an instance (the image). As such, it challenges this notion of time, as the image is both still here and moving all at once.
The building walls are rippling, a tree is shaking unsteadily. A lamppost is recoiling both into itself and into the building at once, leaving traces of its moving through time.
Is this a photograph of a still image? Or is the image already always in motion?
This is the sight of an image moving. The glimpse of the clear and opaque glass and cement of the building walls are contrasting and smearing into each other in this one ‘still’ moment. How could this be if it were simply an image of the still? What appears as a photograph of a monument—something fixed and unyielding—is suddenly shifting, in motion, taken from a lens already in motion. The sight of the still image moving thus performs a two fold reorientation; repositioning both the viewer of the image, and the viewer of the object within the frame—the camera. This image teaches its viewer about the way the still image moves, the way objects are always and already in motion. As we move, we are constantly shifting and resituating ourselves in proximity to other objects. As our bodies move, so does our seeing of the object, of the still image.
I would like to elaborate on my post the other day: This image of course has a particular speed to it in that it appears as if the building is is moving away from the viewer before the viewer's eyes. Where the viewer's capacity to see ends at the borders of the photo, the building's capacity to move knows no borders.
The photo is contrived in that the camera had to be set in a certain way to portray the building as blurry, and convert it to black and white, but it forges a link to a pre-existing memory, a reality the viewer has once experienced, driving in a car, riding in a train. The building can only look like this in the world of images, but in a way we've seen this image before because we've moved at this speed before. In viewing, we move with the image and we enter into the image's speed by seeing its perpetual motion within the photograph, and thereby we enter its specific world, and yet we are not transported away from reality, rather closer to a reality we once found feasible but could never pause for continual enjoyment.
This image at first glance gives the obvious impression of horizontal momentum, but there is really much more going on then that. Even with the image lacking any points of clarity throughout the composition, it still has several points of interests and a focal hierarchy. The eye is instantly drawn downwards towards the darker contrasts and shadows. The building windows make a interesting grid pattern, but at the same time, each one is a home.
Its almost ghostly to look at as it is a moment that was not meant to be analyzed. It was just a fleeting instance in time that disapeared to make way for the next moment as time tick tocks by on this train ride to nowhere...
Each week, we will consider an image. This image may come from anywhere—from a painting, the news, an art photograph, a picture of my child.
Your job is to read this image. You need write only four lines; you may write more. Inflect the image. Give it a spin. Make us see what we may not be seeing. Take up the image, do something with it, then give it back to us—in words.
The goal is multifold. It is to learn to reckon a diversity of images. It is to learn the art of the riff, the spin, the take. And, in the end, I hope we have created an exquisite symphony, a chorus of voices, each distinct, each singing an image in its own register.
ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED. You may miss 3 classes during the semester. For each class missed after that, your grade will be lowered a full grade—from an A to a B.
EVERY weekend, I will post an image on this blog. By Thursday's class, you must write a response to that image as a comment on this blog. -You will have to create a Google account. -Please use your name in your identity so I know who you are when you post your comment. If you already have a Google identity but it does not reflect your name, please create a new one. -Your comment can be brief; in fact, it should be—anywhere from 3-10 lines. Try to make it pithy, astute, sharp. -These are not optional: each one you miss will translate into the loss of a full grade for your class participation grade.
There will be three papers scattered through the semester; they will be @ two pages long. These are not optional. If you fail to do one, you will fail the class.
Grading -Class participation: 30% -Paper 1: 20% -Paper 2: 20% -Paper 3: 30% -I WILL NOT GRANT INCOMPLETES.
This image of a building appears to have been intentionally treated. The overall texture has been made less sharp, almost weathered, resulting in a blur that strengthens the fleeting nature of the scene. The vertical lines make it look corrugated, ratifying its existence in a move than seems to reinforce the vertical axis of the image. When this is juxtaposed against the frame of my computer screen the textures seem to compete for my attention, each justifying the other's existence by being.
ReplyDeleteThis image moves you. The viewer is moving fast, making the image blurry. Or the building is moving quickly away from the stationary viewer. Either way, this image is fast. Detail cannot be caught, teaching me not to always take a moment to smell the roses. Straight lines of the building help move this image from left to right or right to left. I am seeing film on rewind, or fast-forward, and this image is a Stopped Image Of Motion.
ReplyDeleteThe size of the vehicles elevates the viewer above the scene and the angle suggests the viewer has turned his/her head to catch a moment that is passing too fast. The blur of the building indicate the speed in which the moment is passing, though the photo is a still image. In the moment you take in so much and while the senses recoil from enjambment you notice the sky is murky at the outer edges of the image. You notice the building elevates itself in steps as though leading the way to a murky heaven. All the while you go nowhere fast; even in the fictional temporal blur remains the fact it is a still image and you can still see...though you expect it to fade away into a distant, unremarkable moment.
ReplyDeleteSuction. My eyes are tugged into this image, jerked aggressively by it's overpowering movement. It is not soft persuasion; it is merciless force.
ReplyDeleteI am torn from my time and place and flung into pure grainy textures and blurry pieces of world. I don't sense a loss of color, just the presence of what I see. Nor do I feel completely alienated, I just lose my sense of consolation.
As I fly through this image, I can't latch onto anything because nothing is stable or permanent. I am perpetually in movement and ungrounded. I can recognize only fractions of what surrounds me, and so the thingness of all this stuff makes me conscious of my own thingness.
I have lost track of my self-prescribed context and exist purely in a present--a now of the world.
a piece of continuous movement. its origin a natal secret; its destination an unthinkable infinity. all things in motion, a transport into contrast. a static slice of speed divorced from past and future but nevertheless magically pointing towards them stretching the image through invisible elastic.
ReplyDeleteThis image evokes a feeling of fear for me. I feel like this building is getting ready to fall. It appears to have some sort of motion to it, though the image is still. Buildings, especially ones as large and rectangular as this one, should not move in the fashion that this one appears to be moving.
ReplyDeleteThe other perspective to take is that I, myself, am moving since the whole scene appears to have a smear of speed to it. The elevation of my line of sight implies that I am well above ground level. This strange perspective also brings about a feeling of dizziness.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIs it clear that this is a photograph? What are the consequences if it is not? The consequences would seem to go something like: the architecture of this site of seeing would be different. Rather than motion perhaps we have a happening, perhaps we have a building. Here, shutter and shudder have collided, colluded in the sensible, in an eye, in a hand, in an image. Here, static goes staticly, but it goes nonetheless. Hardly static: an administrative building building Richter building Administrative building.
ReplyDeleteStepping back from the picture, a blurred scene is infinitely rushing by. Building smudges into railing, trees, cars. Is it the viewer or the view that is rushing? Looking closer the black and white seems scratched on to the canvas, or perhaps etched out of it. It is no longer a building, but angular lines and squares. The viewer's perspective can't help but move with the lines and feel the 'swoosh' of the image.
ReplyDeleteThe quickness of this image -- the speed of it -- literally moves the viewer. If speed is work over time, this image works you over in the time of the event of seeing. It pushes you. Your eyes move in a different way because this is a different image. It is perpetual motion in a perpetual motion defined world.
ReplyDeleteColor is extracted but there is no lack here. Windows and sky and dark and light are all pixels on a level playing field. There are no hierarchies, no empty spaces. Architectural certainty gives way to liquid; structures sway and play in the viscosity of the fabric. Hushed vibrations, variations of light fuse and melt to create rippling echoes. This scene is full, full of this moment, every frozen fragment teeters on the edge of mutation and movement. This is the ineffable micro-flash of the now, lingering in the past and lusting for the future. Time is no separable entity or invisible impression; it is gushing through the atmosphere leaving swarms of stuff mingling and in flux.
ReplyDeleteThe reader is confronted with an image that lacks no point of focus; the image's being blurry makes difficult an attempt to distinguish the "foreground" from the "background." Thus, the image doesn't consist of evidence of an act occurring amidst a background. Instead, the image is everything associated with it.
ReplyDeleteThe point from which this image is being viewed immediately interrogates the viewer. The image is blurry, but for what reason? Is the viewer in motion? Who is doing the viewing here? The image is thus not simply of the building itself, but also functions to complicate the orientation of the viewer.
This image brings home the fact that the viewer always favors their own position. In this case a camera has captured a moment from a moving vehicle. The cars that move at nearly the same speed as the camera are seen in focus, everything else is a blur of movement. The building which a viewer presumes is stationary is seen in a blur of movement while those objects that are moving are clear because they move along with the viewer. While this does show that the viewer favors self, who is to say that the viewer’s perspectivial view is less valid than the view from a stationary position. Why is stillness favored as truth?
ReplyDeleteMovement plays a central role in the working of this image. The blur of the building indicates it movement, but movement does not directly penetrate every aspect of the image. Instead, both the top of the image, the skyline, and the bottom of the image, the ground and cars, remain static. The building has no beginning, no end. It is as continuous as the movement it depicts, never resting or slowing, but maintaining a consistent blur of action. The image organizes the viewer by refusing the viewer a narrative explanation or comfortable point of focus. Just as the movement of the image is continuous, the viewer continually searches for a place to rest or a certain point to direct his or her attention. However, the viewer is only able to keep gliding across the back and forth across the image, mirroring the motion and restlessness with which the image operates.
ReplyDeleteThe image appears at first as a proliferation of frames. But then the viewer notices a distorion. The frames seem to bleed. They are not merely squares or rectangles. Frames here lose their shape and form. The same is true for the building which houses the windows. Its paralell vertical lines make for a curious texture. Whether this is the effect of some distortion or the buildings true nature is irrelevant. The structure is reduced to mere cardboard by these lines.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis moving-vision demonstrates a world that is always in motion, always morphing. It is the speed of seeing. The image is in an infinite state of modification and allows the eyes to intertwine with the image as it goes. The speed of this image demands the viewer to see what is happening as opposed to what has already happened. This isn’t a moment that can be explained by other moments, it is simply the event taking place directly in front of the eyes. Therefore, any distinctions between viewer and image are effaced; the two emerge and become a part of the “flesh” that makes up the world.
ReplyDeleteThis image is a seemingly physical impossibility. It moves and stands still at the same time. It is the experience of looking out the window of a moving vehicle, but its vantage point is adjacent to the building, not the cars on the street. This image is the familiar and unfamiliar at once and always.
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult to tell whether this is a photo or a painting. The answer is irrelevant however, for either way it produces the effect or feeling of motion. The viewer feels as if he or she is looking out of the window of a car in motion, capturing a blurry rendition of the passing scenery. Actually it is unclear what is moving. Is it the viewer or the object being viewed? It seems as if the motion comes from the city itself. This image endows the object being viewed, the building street, cars, etc. with an apparent vibrancy. This image seems to actually capture the affect of motion, the motion of a city, the motion of the viewer, they are one and the same.
ReplyDeleteAn image in motion, this picture feels as though it was taken from the window of a moving train. This image, rather than capturing a moment in time, captures an event; the event of a vehicle moving past a building and the event of seeing something which is continuous rather than a static. This subsequently dynamic aesthetic allows the viewer to see more than one single image. The viewer instead sees image after image laid one on top of the other. As images collide, the picture gets blurry; this blurriness coming from the place of image multiplicity
ReplyDeletecycles of reverberation. constant state of motion and superimposition. gives a state of motion when in reality the frame is frozen on the screen. lack of color presents the idea that this is not just a camera taking in the world, but imposing it, and altering it. frames within frames and lacking the mechanism that provides the speed or the motion that streams right through the center of it.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing sensational about the architecture of this building. this banality seems to spill over to it's
ReplyDeletecolorless appearence.
Can we say the image is blurred? Or, is this how we would see this building, even more clearly photographed? How
we would remember it, this muddled archtectural piece? Like a haze?
What time is it? Time seems really important to this image, it's black and white color, it's blur, it's
almost already dated and filed away as insignificant.
before our eyes have even left the screen.
or...
is this building, this image alive? It's moving. We're moving
Does this image move you, or does it move by you? Who's standing still,
you or the image? Neither? Both?
**I also find it difficult to tell whether this is a photograph or a painting. Whether it was SNAP, taken up by the lens and edified in to the world of photographic images, or brought to life with the slow speed of a brush, still slightly trembling beneath it's strokes.
The image moves in two different directions for the viewer. The image of the blurred building is moving to the right; the cars are moving to the left. This works because the viewer is able to find a center that is otherwise not there.
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ReplyDeleteSpeed and Position
ReplyDeleteThis building looks as though it is passing you by at an incredible speed. Thick dark lines function as tracks that ascend from the background, widening at the opposite end of the frame right before they are lost to the vanishing point. These rails guild the trajectory of this windowed freighter. If we could take a wider view of this building perhaps we would not see the motion as dramatically. But we would still be changing our position to achieve this. This image reorients the notion of speed (or at least the observable affects of speed) as based on position rather then observed movement.
The image gives a very obvious projection of movement. However, which direction it is moving is not clear. Also, it is unclear whether the image is moving or the viewer. All that is clear is that the image is hazy and unfocused because of the movement. It resists efforts to make it come into focus and to determine the details of the image, just as it resists efforts to determine which direction it is moving. It alienates the viewer, not allowing him to associate the image with memories of anything he might have seen or any locations he may associate with the iamge. The blurriness and lack of sharp details forces the viewer to look at the image without associating it with memories.
ReplyDeleteEverything is in motion: This image is in motion, and I am in motion. The building, the cars, trees, and lamp posts are whizzing by me so quickly that they lose all color. In this image everything is out of focus, blurry, and so constantly keeping me on my toes, moving me, shifting my gaze from left to right, right to left.
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ReplyDeleteThe speed at which this image moves is in stark contrast to the speed at which we must take in and make sense of the image. We slow down the image, while the image tries to speed us up. But the details of the image need to be observed slowly in order to see how this image goes (in more ways than one).
ReplyDeleteWhat is the direction of this speed? My eyes fall upon the smudged vertical lines.
Is this image a photograph or a painting? I look at the graininess of the building’s roof, which resembles traces of brush strokes.
And so my eyes wander. The very speed of the image obfuscates the answers to these questions and literally blurs the distinction between image and reality.
The image is a sketch. The medium of the photograph exhibits a tendency toward freehand-like interpretation. Lines and forms are drawn, and erased, an impression of all tracings is imbued on the sheet. Importantly, the photograph is not a mirror image - it is an artist's rendering prone to a human articulation, re-examination, self-censure, and re-articulation. Photography in charcoal and synthetic rubber.
ReplyDeleteThere have been comments questioning the artistic medium of the image, some suggesting it's a photograph, some suggesting it's a drawing or painting, and some suggesting it's irrelevant. While I would say it's irrelevant which medium it is exactly, I do not think it is irrelevant that the image seems to call forth this question.
ReplyDeleteThe subject seems a bit more typical of photography, yet the smearing and fine texture throughout the image suggest either heavy digital editing or an artist's hand from the beginning. This question is better solved by another question than the answer--that is, what would be the difference? Thus the issue behind the frame zooms past at the speed of the image itself. The viewer is left with the rush and vertigo of the image, where things blur into one another, become indistinct, and fly by before they can be stilled and parsed.
An image of becomes an image being. The supposed photo OF a building unsettles the viewer - it shakes the ground beneath the viewer as the viewer's position and orientation is shaped by the solid, concrete,... quivering building. This is just the beginning, soon everything gets shaken up. The image takes up and in the "detached observer" and pulls out the foundation of reference on which he stood. Is this a photo or a painting? Perhaps it is a painting of a photo? If so, then what becomes of the notion of the photo? The photo becomes an image to be painted. The photograph then, is not a photo OF something, but rather, IS image. Then this painting also is not a painting OF a photograph but rather, is image.
ReplyDeleteImages are never static. Even if they are not moving, fixed upon a screen or a frame, they always act upon and move around the viewers as viewers to images. It’s because they are not a representation ‘of,’ but existence of its own it’s self. This image seems to emphasize that point a little bit more. Slow or fast, images are constantly in fluid or mechanical motion and this what it seemed from subway point of view, it doesn’t allow viewers to focus but to take the image as an whole, as it shifts really fast or really slow. Detailed enough to let someone recognize that VW bug, but fast or slow enough in shifting to make it not matter. Maybe it’s an image that wants to school everyone, to aid a frame of mind to be free from recognition, categorization, and representation, but just to take it as it is already beautiful.
ReplyDeleteNo, there is not a moving object in this frame. At first glance its movement is lateral, the kind that could be seen from the window of a train. But the absence of the stretch marks of such a movement or any evidence at all of a “direction” force another look. Now the movement goes between high and low points of the kind found on topographical reliefs. Think of the way that, in low light when you’re holding your wine glass at an angle in front of you and your eyes are a bit blurry and the stem and your hand are out of frame, you can’t be certain if your glass is tipped toward you or away from you. This frame is a moving object.
ReplyDeleteThis image is moving still. This image is moving fast, but positions the viewer still - hopeful to catch a glimpse. The angle, the tilt, the smeared elements of the image suggests the speed of image. Moving quickly. Away. The cars, the industrial building, the light pole, are all quickly going, yet at the same time they appear to be still.
ReplyDeleteThis image breathes and swells. Its motion is unfrozen and simultaneously frozen in the capture of the event. The building calls attention to this phenomenon, while it converts the totality of the event to the entire setting of unsettling. It drags out the things of the image for extended moments that demonstrate a fluid flexibility. Each area reflects and floods upon the immediate area. The individuals comprising the whole shake and tremble, hooking onto each other to entrench a semblance of stability.
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ReplyDeleteImmediately, this image demands the viewer rationalize its blur—its linear, not out-of-focus, intimating the sensation of motion. The fastest part is where the image is least distinct: center of the frame, towards the bottom, above the tree. This white flash appears to be part of a whole—giving the impression of a train descending. Ironically, the cars are the part of the image that appear most static; though the blur makes the viewer want to imagine them moving, but instead they appear too close together to be in motion themselves, instead look as though they are parallel parked.
ReplyDeleteThe sketch presents an interesting insight into images and their motion. The viewer stands before an image with definite motion (blur, parallel lines), however unlike a photograph this image does not derive its motion from the movement of either the camera or the subject matter. The motion is not a representation of the circumstances of the photograph. The notion of motion as a secondary characteristic, an effect, is inverted. Now, because of the contrived nature of the sketch, the building becomes motion, at least in as much as it remains in the frame.
ReplyDeleteDistortions and speed.
ReplyDeletePhotograph a stasis of motion. Itself, like recording sound, words, a temporal contradiction. A memory forged into materialization.
Catpuring the after of the before and the before of the after in a snap.
snap the fingers.
An anamorphic shutter on light and object and movement.
World, like picture, blurs in a sprint, clears to lucidity in the trudge.
Sense panic. Go.
This image is Bound Movement, or Movement Bound. It is still for the viewer gazing upon it for the first millisecond; however, after that, the viewer moves with it and within it, almost unstoppably. The graininess and apparent palpable texture of the image contrasts with the WHOOOOSHING of the building, creating the effect of a controlled movement that fights to be bound. We are caught within this movement at first glance.
ReplyDeleteThe regimented organization of the building's window frames, dominating more than half of the image, demands the viewer's attention. The top half of the image appears evidentiary: that the frames adhere to a strict, systematic pattern confirms the world. However, upon gazing at the image's lower half, this reading of the image as mnemonic becomes unmoored. As the viewer scans from top to bottom, the framing descends towards the unfamiliar and the absurd. The frames inhabiting the upper portion fall in line into an orderly (even oppressive) system, where the borders between frames are clearly demarcated. This reifies our human understanding of the what the concept "building" means. Conversely, in the lower half, the lines between frames blur, giving way to a liberating proliferation of frames. Far from redefining precisely what "frame" can mean, the image challenges the viewer's inclination to confirm the world. Most conspicuously, the black blotch confronts the viewer as an abberation, a defect to the image. On the contrary, the blotch goes further in effacing the distinction of what it means to be in the frame and out of the frame. The blotch seems as if it has been superimposed on the image (as if it was the thumbprint of the artist), but it is inextricably enmeshed in the frame. That its gradation and form parallel other frames occupying the image underscores its very own authentic habitation of it.
ReplyDeleteThis image makes me think of fps, or frames per second, and how any image is not "still." Many blur effects arise from having a single image stretched past a single frame...this image is one of those. The "richter building" is simply stretched beyond the concept of a frame, sucking a period of time (the little stretch of time) into an instance (the image). As such, it challenges this notion of time, as the image is both still here and moving all at once.
ReplyDeleteThe building walls are rippling, a tree is shaking unsteadily. A lamppost is recoiling both into itself and into the building at once, leaving traces of its moving through time.
ReplyDeleteIs this a photograph of a still image? Or is the image already always in motion?
This is the sight of an image moving. The glimpse of the clear and opaque glass and cement of the building walls are contrasting and smearing into each other in this one ‘still’ moment. How could this be if it were simply an image of the still? What appears as a photograph of a monument—something fixed and unyielding—is suddenly shifting, in motion, taken from a lens already in motion.
The sight of the still image moving thus performs a two fold reorientation; repositioning both the viewer of the image, and the viewer of the object within the frame—the camera. This image teaches its viewer about the way the still image moves, the way objects are always and already in motion. As we move, we are constantly shifting and resituating ourselves in proximity to other objects. As our bodies move, so does our seeing of the object, of the still image.
I would like to elaborate on my post the other day:
ReplyDeleteThis image of course has a particular speed to it in that it appears as if the building is is moving away from the viewer before the viewer's eyes. Where the viewer's capacity to see ends at the borders of the photo, the building's capacity to move knows no borders.
The photo is contrived in that the camera had to be set in a certain way to portray the building as blurry, and convert it to black and white, but it forges a link to a pre-existing memory, a reality the viewer has once experienced, driving in a car, riding in a train. The building can only look like this in the world of images, but in a way we've seen this image before because we've moved at this speed before. In viewing, we move with the image and we enter into the image's speed by seeing its perpetual motion within the photograph, and thereby we enter its specific world, and yet we are not transported away from reality, rather closer to a reality we once found feasible but could never pause for continual enjoyment.
This image at first glance gives the obvious impression of horizontal momentum, but there is really much more going on then that. Even with the image lacking any points of clarity throughout the composition, it still has several points of interests and a focal hierarchy. The eye is instantly drawn downwards towards the darker contrasts and shadows. The building windows make a interesting grid pattern, but at the same time, each one is a home.
ReplyDeleteIts almost ghostly to look at as it is a moment that was not meant to be analyzed. It was just a fleeting instance in time that disapeared to make way for the next moment as time tick tocks by on this train ride to nowhere...