DSDN 144 Project 2: Revised Revised Proposal

For the second project, the idea that that we have to portray is the idea of Time. I want to capture the movement and flow of people over time. I want to investigate the way people flow through certain places, however I want to also investigate this flow through 3-D space independently. I find it incredibly interesting seeing how people flow together regardless of the structures (or lack of them). The temporal aspect I want to investigate is how people flow over a timeless period. I want the images I create to feel like a documentation of the way people flow all the time around structures that also have no concept of time. The flow is going to be a representation of something that transcends the notion of time altogether.

For the techniques I want to use, I really want to capture these moments in a brief space of time, but I really want to show everything else, society around the man-made world, continuing to move, I want to show that the world is immortal. Since it has no concept of the passage of time, is the man-mad world not in itself immortal? I want to experiment in a variety of different places where different levels of flow and traffic can be observed. I want to show the motion of society through the 3-D space. To do this, I won't be able to just take a long exposure shot in the middle of the day, since regardless of the aperture, the image will completely blow out. Also seeing people over a long exposure, even if it were visible, would be painfully difficult, except if there were a huge amount of people. So what I plan to do is to take multiple 1-2 second exposures from the exact same spot, so that I can then combine them into a single composite image for that sequence. Amalgamating the photos will result in a much more visible flow, without sacrificing the lower light intensity.

I saw some of the ideas shown in the "time" lecture slides, and loved how some photos really just captured the moment, and I thought, "I want to distil the concept of the flow of society down to its most basic form." I think showing the way people move around a non-visible space in time would be a really interesting-but-ordinary feature, and showing that flow effectively would look phenomenal.

Ideally I want to end up with a series of photos, where the inherent idea transfers seamlessly across all the photos. The idea I have really wouldn't be suited to any kind of time lapse or stop motion, but could possibly be suited for a short video. We'll see.