1 JULY 1997
Elisions


I'm interested in the elision between working analog and working digital and what working between, with the elision, would be.

The physical panels* I'm working on use the same beach "image" as the digital screens (or files) but there are things I can do digitally that I can't physically. Animation is the most obvious. I cannot create a panel that changes form without going to some kind of projection or machine.

The machine as the "between"? The nineteenth-century concept of the painting as a machine?

An example is the "landscape" at left. I would have to create at least eight panels to show the progression of the tree across the field. Then I would rely on the viewer's eye making the linkage between the panels.

I could, of course, print out each frame of the animation and mount them as panels, but at this point I wouldn't do that. I want to work on the same object from different perspectives, with different materials and methods. Different spaces where the elision (or the switch?) happens.

The number of sequences in the animation is infinite but at some point (16 frames per second) the eye sees the elision as movement and the granularity doesn't matter visually.

What is the equivalent of 16 frames per second with the panels? If I made 16 panels and spun them past the viewer in one second the tree would appear to move.



*I call the panels the "Ithaka Panels" but at one point I called them the "Odysseus Panels". I consider the literary reference important as a clue that the viewer may or may not understand. Odysseus seemed too obvious and burdoned with meaning. Ithaka denotes both Odysseus and his home and seems much more flexible and to point in the direction I want to travel. The series is also about my father, or rather my father's name. Murphy means "man of the sea" in Irish. However, I don't want the relationship with my father to be a part of the work. Only the name of my (the) father.
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