Space and time are interesting things. We're locked into an a priori understanding of space and time that our immediate environment and our senses relay to our minds. So, time moves in one direction; teacups always fall to the floor and break. Shards of broken teacup never spontaneously reassemble themselves and fly up against gravity to sit precariously on the edge of a table.
Many technologies help to suggest other ways of thinking about time and space. For example, time lapse photography shows plants moving like animals and film can be run in reverse to abuse the laws of causality. These manipulations of time perception suggest alternative ways of understanding and perceiving reality.
With the advent of digital media, the possibilities for manipulating time and space have again grown. Video encodes both time and space. Space is encoded in the x and y dimensions of the screen, while time is encoded in a z dimension. Thinking about video in this way it becomes a three dimensional solid. A video cube is defined as equal units of height, width and frames. A 256 by 256 pixel video with 256 frame (around 10 seconds for PAL) is a video cube.
A 256 by 256 video cube.
The above image of a video cube when watched as a video looks like the following.
Treating video as a cube opens up the possibility of a range of 3D and 2D manipulations and transformations. The approach adopted here is the idea of slicing the video cube with an arbitrary projection plane. When passed through the video cube at 25 units per second with the plane's normal aligned with the video's z dimension, we get a standard video.
If we take a projection plane inclined into the video, we get a video that shows time+n at the top, and time at the bottom. In other words, the top of the video is the future, compared to the bottom. The effect of this depends a little on the material. Real world video is more interesting than basic 3D scenes. But basic 3D scenes help to show accurate visualisations of what is going on.
While this is interesting, more surprising effects can be achieved by moving the projection plane through the cube sideways or even top down. Here's the effect sideways on the reference video cube:
As I said above, real world video is more interesting. Here's a video that uses a cylindrical gradient as the projection plane. The thing I liked best about this one was the way the legs on the people walking form a helix that seems to spirit people along.
Perhaps the weirdest effects occur when the projection plane is passed through the video sideways or top-down. It was the top-down projection that for me produced the most inruiging results when half way through the helixes formed by people's moving legs was rendered flat. Watch the two videos below. The left one shows a projection plane cutting left/right, the right one shows top down.
Playing with these video techniques forced me to think about the relationships between time and space. Objects persist in time when the time dimension is viewed spatially. People break into two, different temporal representations sharing the same spatial area. Others persisting across frames, while still others pop into and out of existence like quantum particles. In these videos it is static images like backgrounds that become blurred, while motion becomes the key to solidity.
There's nothing new about this. It's all been done before - even before I was born. So where to from here?
2006