OS Agnostic

The above video is a video of a water balloon popping taken with a camera that will take 2000 frames per second.It reminds me of a painting by David Hockney:

David Hockney - A Bigger Splash 1967
acrylic on canvas, 243.8 x 243.8 cm, tate gallery, london

We take for granted the shape of the splash. When I first saw the painting, I thought “big deal.” But the splash is not what we see- it’s a painting of what we see when we look at a photograph of a splash. A frozen moment in time. Photography has now been around long enough that there isn’t a person alive that hasn’t grown up in a world where a machine can capture an image in an instant. The first Kodak camera was manufactured in 1888.

Muybridge pioneered high speed photography around 1880:

I can’t imagine not knowing what something looks like in stop motion. When I see a splash, I carry with me what water looks like frozen, thanks to the research of Harold Eugene Edgerton, who inspired the below photo.

For a long time, I was obsessed with the freezing of time. Hockney partially inspired it, but I also was influenced a lot by the work of Bill Viola, who uses special cameras (like the above, but ‘only’ 300 frames per second) and other methods to explore the stopping or slowing of time. One such artwork was called “The Greeting,” and was a recreation of a renaissance painting slowed down thanks to the use of technology to slow the motion down.

Another work that was very influential was The Reflecting Pool

This inspired a few paintings, none of which were very good.

I’m still interested in these new ways of seeing- ways that change what we see, how we think about things, and what we know about the world. I can’t go back to not knowing what a frozen drop of water or, now, a water balloon popping look like. I can’t imagine a world without stop motion photography, a world that I couldn’t freeze the action of anything I want simply by taking out my camera. It is technology that enables work like this - not just because computers are used in the creation of the artwork, but because before photography, we wouldn’t be so trained to see frozen time.

PS- you can see an interview with Bill Viola here.