WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.680 --> 00:00:06.980 This session of the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Ideas was recorded by Radio Adelaide, 2 00:00:07.020 --> 00:00:10.500 through the support of the Bar Smith Library, University of Adelaide, 3 00:00:10.640 --> 00:00:14.480 the University of South Australia Library and Flinders University Library. 4 00:00:15.380 --> 00:00:19.720 I'd like to introduce one of our speakers, Daniel Crooks. Thank you. 5 00:00:23.820 --> 00:00:29.160 And also joining us today, all the way from New York City, is Lawrence Weschler, 6 00:00:29.160 --> 00:00:34.060 a distinguished American cultural writer, curator and award-winning author, 7 00:00:34.280 --> 00:00:40.720 who is currently writer-in-residence at the Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. 8 00:00:41.540 --> 00:00:47.660 Lawrence, who's known to his friends as Wren, is in Adelaide as a jurist for the Adelaide Film Festival, 9 00:00:47.820 --> 00:00:55.500 and tomorrow he's going to be a keynote speaker at the Festival of Ideas at 1.30 here at the Freemasons. 10 00:00:56.060 --> 00:00:58.140 So before coming to Adelaide, 11 00:00:58.140 --> 00:01:03.920 Lawrence actually engaged in a very long and probing conversation with Daniel about his work, 12 00:01:04.060 --> 00:01:10.400 and that conversation was recorded and has been published in a richly illustrated e-catalogue 13 00:01:10.400 --> 00:01:16.720 that will accompany the exhibition, and will be published free online on the Samstag Museum website. 14 00:01:17.060 --> 00:01:18.420 So if you go there, you can see it. 15 00:01:18.540 --> 00:01:25.220 Ladies and gentlemen, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Lawrence Weschler here to Adelaide and to the session. 16 00:01:25.340 --> 00:01:26.000 Thank you, Lawrence. 17 00:01:29.840 --> 00:01:32.540 So look, thank you all, and welcome. 18 00:01:32.640 --> 00:01:38.300 And ladies and gentlemen, I give you Daniel Crooks in conversation with Lawrence Weschler. 19 00:01:38.340 --> 00:01:38.820 Thank you. 20 00:01:41.060 --> 00:01:45.160 So before you get to hear from Daniel and see some of his films, which are truly amazing, 21 00:01:45.400 --> 00:01:51.540 I prepared a very short little PowerPoint presentation called Trains, Time and Crooks. 22 00:01:52.900 --> 00:01:57.860 We are supposed to be talking about time, but it turns out that if you're talking about time, 23 00:01:57.860 --> 00:01:58.940 you're really talking about trains. 24 00:02:00.660 --> 00:02:14.300 Which is to say that in 1830, Edward Muybridge, the great photographer and developer of photo sequences, was born. 25 00:02:15.160 --> 00:02:18.940 Within ten years of that, three major... 26 00:02:18.940 --> 00:02:23.020 I'm now referring to Rebecca Solnit, who wrote an incredible book, 27 00:02:23.120 --> 00:02:26.200 which if you haven't read it, you really should, called River of Shadows. 28 00:02:26.540 --> 00:02:27.760 Edward Muybridge. 29 00:02:27.860 --> 00:02:29.720 And the technological wild west. 30 00:02:30.400 --> 00:02:34.640 But she points out, and she's not the first, that within ten years of the birth of Muybridge, 31 00:02:34.880 --> 00:02:39.100 three discoveries, three inventions come online, one after another. 32 00:02:41.660 --> 00:02:46.400 Trains, telegraphs, which happen with trains and are necessary for trains and go along with the train tracks, 33 00:02:47.860 --> 00:02:49.380 and chemical photography. 34 00:02:49.840 --> 00:02:52.420 They all happen within a few years of each other. 35 00:02:52.660 --> 00:02:57.700 And with that, basically, modernity is invented. 36 00:02:57.860 --> 00:02:59.020 And everything else has been commentary. 37 00:03:00.100 --> 00:03:03.700 You basically have the annihilation of time and space that takes place. 38 00:03:04.260 --> 00:03:06.220 Because now you can have photographs going anywhere. 39 00:03:06.340 --> 00:03:07.700 You can have them sent over telegraphs. 40 00:03:07.700 --> 00:03:08.600 You can have trains and so forth. 41 00:03:09.400 --> 00:03:12.540 But, the key moment, and now I'll just show a few quick slides. 42 00:03:15.200 --> 00:03:19.400 One of the key moments is in 1869 in the United States, 43 00:03:19.580 --> 00:03:23.360 and you would have had the equivalent of things happening here in Australia probably around the same time. 44 00:03:24.060 --> 00:03:27.140 You have the first transcontinental train. 45 00:03:27.860 --> 00:03:31.540 With the golden spike, famously, in the United States. 46 00:03:31.560 --> 00:03:35.580 It was somewhere around Utah, where the two sides of the trains came together. 47 00:03:36.220 --> 00:03:41.420 And what you may not know is that that was the first continental wide happening. 48 00:03:41.540 --> 00:03:47.380 Because as they hit the spike into the train track, it hit the telegraph cord. 49 00:03:47.600 --> 00:03:54.100 And people in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, all over the country knew simultaneously, 50 00:03:54.860 --> 00:03:57.420 and celebrated simultaneously in throngs, 51 00:03:57.860 --> 00:04:04.160 that suddenly it no longer took six weeks or three or four months to get from New York to San Francisco. 52 00:04:04.320 --> 00:04:09.500 It was only going to take six days at that point, is how fast they were able to tighten it up. 53 00:04:10.040 --> 00:04:15.320 Now the man who actually hit the, who hammered the spike, 54 00:04:15.820 --> 00:04:20.160 and who in turn was the big robber baron who had masterminded the whole thing, 55 00:04:20.180 --> 00:04:21.380 was a man named Leland Stanford. 56 00:04:23.420 --> 00:04:27.840 And after Stanford did that, he retired to his mansion in Palo Alto, 57 00:04:29.240 --> 00:04:31.260 in the south of San Francisco. 58 00:04:31.900 --> 00:04:34.360 And did what often happens in these situations, 59 00:04:34.600 --> 00:04:37.100 in much the way that in the United States, the minute you get rid of the Indians, 60 00:04:37.220 --> 00:04:38.160 you put them on your coins. 61 00:04:38.780 --> 00:04:41.820 In his case, the minute he had superannuated horses, 62 00:04:41.960 --> 00:04:44.060 that you no longer needed horses, he started, he became, 63 00:04:44.260 --> 00:04:46.320 he started raising horses for horse racing. 64 00:04:47.840 --> 00:04:52.400 And, the story goes, at one point he and his cohort were getting together 65 00:04:52.400 --> 00:04:56.100 and having a conversation about whether an actual horse running 66 00:04:56.840 --> 00:04:57.840 had all the power. 67 00:04:57.860 --> 00:05:00.160 And, he was able to get all four feet off the ground at the same time, or not. 68 00:05:00.400 --> 00:05:03.760 And this was a big issue for art too, because artists had always tried to figure this out. 69 00:05:03.900 --> 00:05:07.840 Whenever you have images of art of horses, it was never quite clear whether 70 00:05:07.840 --> 00:05:09.320 the paintings were correct or not. 71 00:05:09.760 --> 00:05:12.720 And, so, now we pick up with Muybridge again. 72 00:05:13.920 --> 00:05:17.760 Muybridge has in the meantime moved from Britain to San Francisco. 73 00:05:19.380 --> 00:05:22.880 And, Stanford hires Muybridge to solve this problem. 74 00:05:25.220 --> 00:05:27.740 Famously with the animal motion picture. 75 00:05:27.740 --> 00:05:30.620 He figures out a way that you can show that in fact, 76 00:05:31.480 --> 00:05:36.500 all four, in frame number three, all four feet are off the ground at the same time. 77 00:05:36.700 --> 00:05:38.000 But, that was the least of it. 78 00:05:38.060 --> 00:05:39.340 And, Muybridge didn't care about that. 79 00:05:39.480 --> 00:05:43.880 What he was interested in was figuring out a way to start doing these sorts of things. 80 00:05:44.500 --> 00:05:46.180 That, by the way, is Muybridge down there. 81 00:05:48.740 --> 00:05:54.380 And, he was basically, we're now in the 1860s into the 1870s, 82 00:05:54.380 --> 00:05:57.180 doing all sorts of animal studies. 83 00:05:57.180 --> 00:05:59.560 And, motion studies and time studies. 84 00:05:59.800 --> 00:06:03.000 The great thing that Rebecca Solnit points out in her book is that 85 00:06:03.000 --> 00:06:08.140 from these experiments on the Palo Alto ranch of Leland Stanford, 86 00:06:08.440 --> 00:06:10.200 which will presently become Stanford University, 87 00:06:10.560 --> 00:06:12.860 there are two streams that come out of that. 88 00:06:13.180 --> 00:06:14.080 One is cinema. 89 00:06:15.060 --> 00:06:16.640 And, the other is Silicon Valley. 90 00:06:17.220 --> 00:06:25.220 When you divide motion into bits, you get, and in fact, it happens at the same place. 91 00:06:25.960 --> 00:06:27.160 Silicon Valley is the same place. 92 00:06:27.180 --> 00:06:28.760 It is the environs of Stanford University. 93 00:06:29.500 --> 00:06:35.180 Again, that is why Rebecca calls her book, Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. 94 00:06:35.720 --> 00:06:41.340 She's making a very strong case, and a correct case, that modernity is invented there 95 00:06:41.340 --> 00:06:45.220 and not at Harvard University, which is a bunch of crazy people think that's what happened. 96 00:06:45.380 --> 00:06:48.520 But, anyway, if you've come from California, you know they're all mad. 97 00:06:49.660 --> 00:06:52.660 Meanwhile, though, you could also make a case that it was being invented in France. 98 00:06:52.960 --> 00:06:56.740 Because, at the very same time, you have Étienne Jules Marais, 99 00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:02.140 who is also inventing a different kind of motion studies, 100 00:07:03.560 --> 00:07:04.660 these sorts of things. 101 00:07:05.500 --> 00:07:08.700 But, what's interesting about him is that at the same time that he is doing that, 102 00:07:09.920 --> 00:07:15.420 he comes up with one of the greatest graphs in the history of visual information, 103 00:07:15.660 --> 00:07:18.540 according to Edward Tufte, who's the great god of this sort of thing. 104 00:07:18.780 --> 00:07:20.260 He says this is one of the great graphs. 105 00:07:20.400 --> 00:07:25.540 This is Étienne Marais' graph of trains moving between Paris and Lyon. 106 00:07:26.120 --> 00:07:27.160 This is Étienne Marais' graph of trains moving between Paris and Lyon. 107 00:07:27.180 --> 00:07:31.040 And you can see that the local trains take longer. 108 00:07:32.600 --> 00:07:36.040 The express trains don't stop, go faster. 109 00:07:36.300 --> 00:07:39.800 You can see, according to this chart, you understand how the chart's working, right? 110 00:07:39.840 --> 00:07:43.160 It's space and time are graphed into each other. 111 00:07:43.400 --> 00:07:45.480 And at the same time that he's doing that, he's doing this. 112 00:07:47.180 --> 00:07:48.220 That makes sense. 113 00:07:48.340 --> 00:07:50.680 Now, the other thing that's happening at almost the same time, 114 00:07:50.740 --> 00:07:54.240 and it happens precisely because of transcontinental train travel, 115 00:07:54.240 --> 00:07:56.380 is that you're suddenly hitting a problem, 116 00:07:57.000 --> 00:07:59.760 which is that it used to be that time was real, 117 00:07:59.920 --> 00:08:03.100 which was to say that in every town in the world, every village, 118 00:08:03.240 --> 00:08:07.040 noon happened on the solstice, highest moment, 119 00:08:08.300 --> 00:08:12.060 when the sun was at the zenith and so forth. 120 00:08:12.800 --> 00:08:18.020 But that meant that every few dozen miles, people were on different times. 121 00:08:18.140 --> 00:08:21.700 You could be 12 minutes apart, 15 minutes apart, 13 minutes apart. 122 00:08:22.920 --> 00:08:26.760 And this was becoming a problem once you had transcontinental train travel. 123 00:08:26.840 --> 00:08:28.220 That was the first time it becomes a problem. 124 00:08:28.400 --> 00:08:29.200 Otherwise, it didn't matter. 125 00:08:29.300 --> 00:08:32.120 You would just kind of take your horse, and by the time you got to the next town, 126 00:08:32.200 --> 00:08:34.120 you'd readjust your watch or your clock and so forth. 127 00:08:34.480 --> 00:08:35.700 But now you had a real problem. 128 00:08:37.500 --> 00:08:39.940 And here you can see, by the way, the comparative times 129 00:08:39.940 --> 00:08:41.780 of just a bunch of towns in the United States. 130 00:08:42.120 --> 00:08:46.460 If you were taking a train in 1880 from New York to Chicago, 131 00:08:47.520 --> 00:08:49.920 you would have gone through 17 different towns, 132 00:08:50.040 --> 00:08:51.680 and you would have had 17 clocks in the clock. 133 00:08:51.700 --> 00:08:54.820 And so people are saying, this is impossible. 134 00:08:54.960 --> 00:08:55.960 We really got to solve this problem. 135 00:08:56.140 --> 00:08:59.980 And they convene a conference in 1884 in Washington, 136 00:09:00.240 --> 00:09:03.340 and the Treaty of Washington establishes time zones. 137 00:09:04.020 --> 00:09:08.700 But more importantly, it establishes that Greenwich will be zero. 138 00:09:09.300 --> 00:09:10.200 Greenwich mean time. 139 00:09:10.600 --> 00:09:13.480 It's interesting, by the way, one of the advantages of Greenwich being zero 140 00:09:13.480 --> 00:09:16.520 is that at 180 degrees, you get the international date line. 141 00:09:16.780 --> 00:09:20.140 But people often wonder why the date line has that zigzag, 142 00:09:20.360 --> 00:09:21.680 and that is completely our fault. 143 00:09:21.700 --> 00:09:21.800 It's arbitrary. 144 00:09:22.240 --> 00:09:25.820 That is based on which way they were being colonized from. 145 00:09:25.980 --> 00:09:28.800 If an island was colonized from the east, it was one day, 146 00:09:28.840 --> 00:09:30.900 and if it was colonized from the west, it was the other way. 147 00:09:31.060 --> 00:09:36.140 And that chart, that little zigzag, tells you how the colonization took place. 148 00:09:36.500 --> 00:09:40.740 But in any case, the major problem was that, or it wasn't a problem, 149 00:09:40.840 --> 00:09:44.740 it was just a fact, that the vote at the Treaty of Washington was 42 to 1. 150 00:09:46.480 --> 00:09:48.040 Does anybody know who the one was? 151 00:09:49.780 --> 00:09:51.440 Almost the same thing. 152 00:09:51.440 --> 00:09:52.580 Almost the same thing. 153 00:09:52.940 --> 00:09:53.560 France. 154 00:09:54.440 --> 00:09:55.060 France. 155 00:09:55.480 --> 00:09:59.440 France insisted that zero degrees had to go through Paris. 156 00:10:00.420 --> 00:10:06.120 Which is why, years later, you get this famous painting of Man Ray 157 00:10:06.120 --> 00:10:10.560 when Lee Miller left him, and he was in complete misery. 158 00:10:11.300 --> 00:10:13.160 He was at degree zero. 159 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:16.720 And this painting, which is her lips in the sky, 160 00:10:17.060 --> 00:10:19.760 is called the Hour of the Observatory. 161 00:10:19.760 --> 00:10:23.720 The observatory down there in the bottom is what the French insisted was zero degrees. 162 00:10:25.400 --> 00:10:28.680 Now this created problems because you had trains going at different... 163 00:10:29.640 --> 00:10:31.240 I'm convinced that that's why that happened. 164 00:10:31.340 --> 00:10:35.260 That's a famous event in the Gare de Midi. 165 00:10:35.880 --> 00:10:37.180 No, it was the Gare du Nord. 166 00:10:37.400 --> 00:10:40.120 A train completely overshoots the train station. 167 00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:45.540 And I'm always convinced because I didn't know where zero degrees was, 168 00:10:45.640 --> 00:10:47.180 and it just kind of kept on going. 169 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:49.480 But in any case, years later, 170 00:10:49.480 --> 00:10:52.580 Magritte does that painting there, 171 00:10:52.800 --> 00:10:55.040 which is clearly a reference to what had happened. 172 00:10:55.280 --> 00:10:57.980 But he calls that le temps duré. 173 00:10:58.400 --> 00:11:03.060 And the reason he calls it that is he's making references to Einstein. 174 00:11:05.260 --> 00:11:10.600 Now it's worth thinking about Einstein, who is born in 1878, I believe, 175 00:11:10.960 --> 00:11:13.880 and who is since six years old in 1884, 176 00:11:14.040 --> 00:11:16.460 when everybody is having conversations about, 177 00:11:16.660 --> 00:11:19.060 well, wait, what time is it in Paris if it's... 178 00:11:19.480 --> 00:11:21.300 this time in New York, and it's... 179 00:11:21.300 --> 00:11:22.780 wait, how is... 180 00:11:22.780 --> 00:11:24.300 what do we mean by simultaneous? 181 00:11:24.720 --> 00:11:27.300 I mean, if two... and so forth. 182 00:11:27.540 --> 00:11:31.000 And you can perhaps imagine why a genius born in 1876 183 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:35.160 would become the kind of guy who years later would invent a theory of relativity, 184 00:11:35.780 --> 00:11:37.960 which is entirely based on trains. 185 00:11:39.000 --> 00:11:41.300 In this theory of relativity, over and over again, he says, 186 00:11:41.420 --> 00:11:44.440 if lightning hits the track simultaneously at two different spots, 187 00:11:45.260 --> 00:11:46.280 what does it mean? 188 00:11:46.440 --> 00:11:48.760 And he invokes a train and so forth and so forth. 189 00:11:49.480 --> 00:11:52.480 So the point is, basically, that trains have long been 190 00:11:52.480 --> 00:11:56.200 one of the main ways that people have been thinking about time, 191 00:11:56.260 --> 00:11:57.780 certainly for the last 150 years. 192 00:11:58.720 --> 00:12:02.080 Which brings us to our most recent time traveler, 193 00:12:04.940 --> 00:12:06.220 Mr. Crooks over here, 194 00:12:07.160 --> 00:12:11.260 who, it's no surprise, keeps on coming back to trains 195 00:12:11.840 --> 00:12:13.100 when he does his work. 196 00:12:13.480 --> 00:12:17.800 And it will be a good way to think about what the main subject of this is. 197 00:12:17.840 --> 00:12:19.460 We're going to try to figure out how to visualize it. 198 00:12:19.480 --> 00:12:19.820 And we're going to try to visualize time. 199 00:12:20.240 --> 00:12:21.980 And for that, I give you Mr. Crooks. 200 00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:29.280 Okay. 201 00:12:31.040 --> 00:12:32.220 Thanks, everyone, for coming. 202 00:12:33.140 --> 00:12:37.740 Thanks for that little brief introduction to trains and time, Wren. 203 00:12:37.840 --> 00:12:42.480 And, yeah, it's funny because when I first started doing kind of my experiments, 204 00:12:42.720 --> 00:12:49.420 I wasn't particularly aware of those links between time zones and trains. 205 00:12:49.480 --> 00:12:55.240 But I was sort of quite aware of the history of the train in early cinema. 206 00:12:55.440 --> 00:12:57.420 You know, obviously, from the Lumiere brothers and their, 207 00:12:58.620 --> 00:13:04.940 the train entering Ciudad Station and, you know, people running from the movie theater screaming. 208 00:13:05.420 --> 00:13:07.960 And also the way that the train tracks are like frames. 209 00:13:08.420 --> 00:13:09.180 Yeah, absolutely. 210 00:13:09.580 --> 00:13:09.840 The train. 211 00:13:11.620 --> 00:13:14.280 But, and I was very aware of Muybridge as well. 212 00:13:14.380 --> 00:13:18.700 I mean, he was sort of pretty ever-present, you know, 213 00:13:18.700 --> 00:13:19.620 in the early studies. 214 00:13:19.920 --> 00:13:21.360 But I'd never really come across Murray. 215 00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:27.920 And it wasn't until, I don't know, probably sort of two or three years into the sort of work that I was doing 216 00:13:27.920 --> 00:13:29.020 that I actually came across Murray. 217 00:13:29.160 --> 00:13:30.560 He's sort of largely invisible. 218 00:13:30.800 --> 00:13:34.880 Muybridge was the real superstar of that sort of stuff. 219 00:13:35.260 --> 00:13:37.920 And Murray, who was actually the real scientist, you know, 220 00:13:37.920 --> 00:13:41.100 Muybridge was just a bit of a showman and a murderer. 221 00:13:42.480 --> 00:13:43.080 True fact. 222 00:13:43.300 --> 00:13:43.500 Yeah. 223 00:13:43.920 --> 00:13:46.180 The first successful insanity defense. 224 00:13:47.160 --> 00:13:47.560 Yeah. 225 00:13:48.040 --> 00:13:48.460 Muybridge. 226 00:13:48.620 --> 00:13:50.500 He shot his wife's lover. 227 00:13:50.620 --> 00:13:53.820 He shot his wife's lover and got away with an insanity defense. 228 00:13:54.360 --> 00:13:54.520 Yeah. 229 00:13:54.960 --> 00:13:56.380 Got away and then ran away. 230 00:13:56.700 --> 00:13:58.180 So that also is an example. 231 00:13:58.180 --> 00:13:59.560 I hope that doesn't have anything to do with it. 232 00:13:59.560 --> 00:14:00.260 Okay, keep going. 233 00:14:00.580 --> 00:14:02.560 Yeah, but, yeah, Muybridge is a classic guy. 234 00:14:02.700 --> 00:14:05.740 But Murray was the, you know, Murray was the real scientist. 235 00:14:06.300 --> 00:14:07.140 But it's crazy. 236 00:14:07.200 --> 00:14:09.760 They do, they actually share exactly the same initials. 237 00:14:09.760 --> 00:14:11.720 And they were born and died in the same year. 238 00:14:12.300 --> 00:14:13.480 A fascinating couple. 239 00:14:14.140 --> 00:14:17.480 And, yeah, Muybridge actually went to Paris. 240 00:14:17.480 --> 00:14:18.480 To meet up with Murray. 241 00:14:18.660 --> 00:14:20.720 And Murray was really fascinated to meet him. 242 00:14:20.780 --> 00:14:22.380 Because he'd, you know, he'd seen his horse studies. 243 00:14:22.560 --> 00:14:27.220 But then when they met up, he kind of realized that Muybridge wasn't actually a scientist at all. 244 00:14:27.340 --> 00:14:30.360 And, you know, there's very little kind of scientific data in his images. 245 00:14:30.560 --> 00:14:33.680 They're actually much more about narrative and aesthetics. 246 00:14:33.680 --> 00:14:37.100 And, by the way, if you study in France, nobody talks about Muybridge. 247 00:14:37.200 --> 00:14:37.340 Yeah. 248 00:14:37.820 --> 00:14:38.580 It's all Murray. 249 00:14:38.720 --> 00:14:40.160 It's all zero degrees Paris. 250 00:14:40.380 --> 00:14:40.560 Anyway. 251 00:14:40.640 --> 00:14:41.440 Murray is God. 252 00:14:41.980 --> 00:14:46.920 Anyway, but so, I mean, I found it really fascinating when I came, when I finally sort of discovered Murray. 253 00:14:46.920 --> 00:14:48.760 And was looking at these images of his. 254 00:14:49.260 --> 00:14:52.480 And if I got my sequences a little bit better, I'd be able to show them to you. 255 00:14:52.560 --> 00:14:54.000 I think they'll probably be coming up in a sec. 256 00:14:55.580 --> 00:14:58.820 And there's these kind of crazy similarities between the two of them. 257 00:14:59.080 --> 00:15:02.600 Yet he was coming from, you know, so we sort of arrived at the same place. 258 00:15:02.720 --> 00:15:06.100 It's a bit like the intercontinental meetup. 259 00:15:06.120 --> 00:15:06.800 It's the golden spike. 260 00:15:08.560 --> 00:15:10.760 Is I'm coming, you know, I studied animation. 261 00:15:11.420 --> 00:15:15.440 And it was all about deconstructing motion and trying to build it back up again. 262 00:15:15.560 --> 00:15:16.900 But with this very, you know, 263 00:15:16.900 --> 00:15:21.160 kind of intimate knowledge of what a moving image was and how it's constructed. 264 00:15:21.420 --> 00:15:26.340 Whereas Murray was trying to break down motion having never seen a movie. 265 00:15:26.560 --> 00:15:30.520 You know, he's more or less inventing most of the constituent parts of the movie camera. 266 00:15:31.500 --> 00:15:33.720 And, yeah, I find it fascinating. 267 00:15:33.800 --> 00:15:35.080 We came to the same sort of place. 268 00:15:35.720 --> 00:15:37.900 But from almost exactly opposite directions. 269 00:15:38.820 --> 00:15:42.780 And, yeah, to bring it back to the train, I love these images. 270 00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:46.180 This is one of Murray's camera trains. 271 00:15:46.900 --> 00:15:52.440 And, you know, the cameras were so massive back then that just to move them was a real pain in the ass. 272 00:15:52.520 --> 00:15:59.300 And so he actually constructed these moving kind of camera, these mobile cameras, which were on train tracks. 273 00:15:59.480 --> 00:16:04.600 And moved up and down very similar to a train, which, you know, I was about to see on the left. 274 00:16:04.660 --> 00:16:12.980 The little track and his stage with the black box that he used to shoot everybody against. 275 00:16:13.100 --> 00:16:13.740 And here you are. 276 00:16:13.980 --> 00:16:16.440 And he's inventing motion capture there, basically. 277 00:16:16.440 --> 00:16:20.380 This is how they do it in Avatar and so forth. 278 00:16:20.520 --> 00:16:23.600 They put dots on people and they're able to make. 279 00:16:24.020 --> 00:16:24.420 Absolutely. 280 00:16:24.720 --> 00:16:26.360 He invents it back then, right at the very beginning. 281 00:16:26.640 --> 00:16:27.560 Yeah, no, absolutely. 282 00:16:27.840 --> 00:16:32.740 And there are some, yeah, there are some fantastic photos of people in these crazy suits with dots on them. 283 00:16:32.940 --> 00:16:40.840 It reminds me, by the way, Gorky in 1886 sees in St. Petersburg one of the first Lumiere brother films. 284 00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:45.440 And in 1886 writes. 285 00:16:45.440 --> 00:16:50.280 This is cool, but it's going to be really great when they start putting sex and violence in it. 286 00:16:53.340 --> 00:16:55.720 I mean, everybody gets it right away. 287 00:16:55.840 --> 00:16:58.420 Everybody gets everything about film from the very beginning. 288 00:16:58.700 --> 00:16:59.900 Yeah, true story. 289 00:17:01.740 --> 00:17:03.700 So, yeah, so these are some of those. 290 00:17:03.820 --> 00:17:11.780 And here we have that famous graph, which is very kind of similar to. 291 00:17:12.180 --> 00:17:13.340 That's one of your pieces. 292 00:17:13.520 --> 00:17:13.700 Yeah. 293 00:17:13.700 --> 00:17:16.080 Oh, of course, that's not going to show up there, is it? 294 00:17:17.600 --> 00:17:18.260 That's disappointing. 295 00:17:18.600 --> 00:17:19.200 Maybe I'll see if. 296 00:17:20.600 --> 00:17:21.300 Oh, there we go. 297 00:17:21.940 --> 00:17:24.500 This is showing me old stuff up here. 298 00:17:24.640 --> 00:17:24.860 Yeah. 299 00:17:25.240 --> 00:17:25.600 Okay. 300 00:17:25.660 --> 00:17:27.280 So let's bring it back to the train. 301 00:17:27.820 --> 00:17:29.620 And we have Lumiere brothers. 302 00:17:30.640 --> 00:17:31.320 This is. 303 00:17:33.080 --> 00:17:35.660 Yeah, this terrible slide, isn't it? 304 00:17:35.960 --> 00:17:38.000 Are you going to be able to show the actual video? 305 00:17:38.220 --> 00:17:39.560 Yeah, maybe I'll do that first. 306 00:17:39.840 --> 00:17:40.540 There you go. 307 00:17:40.540 --> 00:17:44.940 So this is one of the very, very first experiments I did. 308 00:17:44.940 --> 00:17:46.000 Let's turn off the lights, maybe. 309 00:17:46.200 --> 00:17:46.900 Is that puzzled? 310 00:17:50.340 --> 00:17:52.500 So this is train number one. 311 00:17:52.600 --> 00:18:01.040 This was originally shot in 2001, 2002. 312 00:18:03.520 --> 00:18:04.060 So what was that? 313 00:18:04.240 --> 00:18:04.980 I don't know. 314 00:18:05.700 --> 00:18:06.640 I don't know. 315 00:18:06.680 --> 00:18:07.180 I don't know. 316 00:18:09.320 --> 00:18:31.680 But it was, you know, it was a herself 317 00:18:38.640 --> 00:18:44.320 So the camera is looking out perpendicular from the direction of the travel of the train. 318 00:18:45.280 --> 00:18:52.800 And what I've done is taken a very thin slice out of the center of the video and then offset 319 00:18:54.900 --> 00:18:59.340 those from each other a little bit in time. So in this case I think it's four or five 320 00:18:59.340 --> 00:19:06.320 frames in time and then spread those across the frame of the video. This is actually a 321 00:19:06.320 --> 00:19:18.000 three channel video, so there are three video channels here. And what... yeah, I mean there's 322 00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:22.780 a whole lot of things going on here, but one of the things that you're doing that is happening 323 00:19:22.780 --> 00:19:29.140 is you're sort of collapsing that idea of perspective that was developed in the Renaissance 324 00:19:29.340 --> 00:19:36.140 idea of a single viewpoint that looks wide, and you're collapsing it down, so you've just 325 00:19:36.140 --> 00:19:40.740 got this single, almost like laser vision, but then, because you're multiplying it out, 326 00:19:41.260 --> 00:19:49.820 you get this weird, kind of, almost like a poliocular vision, and it has a couple of 327 00:19:49.820 --> 00:19:55.420 kind of odd properties. First, it's almost like a kind of, um, almost like a kind of 328 00:19:55.420 --> 00:19:59.320 temporal depth of field, and so what you have is this, is a perfect view, but then, as you're 329 00:19:59.340 --> 00:20:04.860 plane out from the camera where everything actually draws itself as it should be. I call 330 00:20:04.860 --> 00:20:10.460 it the plane of cohesion. And then everything that's in front of that point becomes very 331 00:20:11.300 --> 00:20:14.980 truncated and cut up, and everything that's behind that becomes very sort of smeared out. 332 00:20:15.060 --> 00:20:15.540 You see the... 333 00:20:15.540 --> 00:20:19.740 The plane of cohesion is that trap back there that basically looks like a trap. 334 00:20:19.940 --> 00:20:23.340 Yeah, you can sort of see some of the poles look like they're moving actually pretty much 335 00:20:23.340 --> 00:20:23.980 as they should be. 336 00:20:24.220 --> 00:20:27.160 But everything that's closer or anything that's farther gets broken up. 337 00:20:27.300 --> 00:20:27.440 Yeah. 338 00:20:27.440 --> 00:20:33.940 And one of the ways you've talked about this is that ordinarily we think of three coordinates 339 00:20:33.940 --> 00:20:41.520 x, y, and z for three-dimensional space, but if you collapse them into two and then add 340 00:20:41.520 --> 00:20:48.440 a third coordinate of time, you in fact are beginning to get things that are going to 341 00:20:48.440 --> 00:20:51.220 be like this even more so if you move further down. 342 00:20:51.240 --> 00:20:55.640 Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I'm pretty... I mean, effectively what's happening is you're 343 00:20:55.640 --> 00:20:57.420 actually swapping out one dimension of space. 344 00:20:57.440 --> 00:21:00.900 And swapping in time for that dimension of space. 345 00:21:02.300 --> 00:21:03.600 And, yeah, which... 346 00:21:04.440 --> 00:21:06.380 Yeah, we've already talked about that, I see. 347 00:21:06.520 --> 00:21:09.300 So, let's show some other examples. 348 00:21:09.680 --> 00:21:15.140 I'm showing it at the SAMstag now, and we've done it as a nine-channel piece, which is 349 00:21:15.140 --> 00:21:16.020 quite amazing. 350 00:21:16.300 --> 00:21:17.280 I think I worked it out once. 351 00:21:17.360 --> 00:21:21.100 You could do it as a 240-channel, and it would last for one second. 352 00:21:21.660 --> 00:21:24.640 The whole thing would just come up, and then it would fade down, because you'd see everything 353 00:21:24.640 --> 00:21:25.060 at once. 354 00:21:25.560 --> 00:21:26.980 Do we have any volunteers? 355 00:21:28.920 --> 00:21:30.720 We're accepting everybody for that project. 356 00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:32.000 Okay, I'll show this. 357 00:21:32.020 --> 00:21:32.760 This is really cool. 358 00:21:33.420 --> 00:21:36.020 And so, yeah, so, I mean, this really... 359 00:21:36.020 --> 00:21:41.960 I sort of found I was kind of onto something at this point, and so I really started just 360 00:21:41.960 --> 00:21:49.480 exploring this idea of trying to slice up the video frame and do this dimensional swapping 361 00:21:49.480 --> 00:21:49.840 thing. 362 00:21:50.280 --> 00:21:54.120 And so I ran out and was filming everything. 363 00:21:54.200 --> 00:21:57.180 I was filming trans and glass elevated. 364 00:21:57.440 --> 00:21:58.200 There's an escalator. 365 00:21:58.200 --> 00:22:00.520 There's anything I could get which had linear motion in it. 366 00:22:01.840 --> 00:22:06.560 And during one of those, I was shooting this footage of trams, and I noticed that there 367 00:22:06.560 --> 00:22:10.120 was kind of these helix kind of squiggles coming off the tram. 368 00:22:10.660 --> 00:22:13.140 It took me a long time to work out what the hell they were. 369 00:22:13.340 --> 00:22:14.940 And I was like, of course, it's people's legs. 370 00:22:15.400 --> 00:22:20.600 As they walk, if you do that little horizontal slice, you get these kind of helix patterns. 371 00:22:20.920 --> 00:22:22.940 And so then I went out in search of those. 372 00:22:23.080 --> 00:22:27.100 This was actually shot in London in 2000. 373 00:22:27.440 --> 00:22:32.100 And five, it's actually just around the corner from the Tower of London, and they had this... 374 00:22:32.100 --> 00:22:36.260 It was one of the few areas in London that actually has an open kind of area and had 375 00:22:36.260 --> 00:22:38.500 this beautiful sort of Cartesian grid on the ground. 376 00:22:39.300 --> 00:22:43.600 And it's shot at about sort of calf height, and so I'm just taking this little tiny thin 377 00:22:43.600 --> 00:22:47.260 slice out of people's legs in pedestrian traffic. 378 00:22:49.200 --> 00:22:52.100 And, yeah, I mean, I do... 379 00:22:52.100 --> 00:22:55.640 I mean, everyone, you know, the first thing that anybody says when they see this is like, 380 00:22:55.740 --> 00:22:56.580 oh, it's a helix. 381 00:22:56.580 --> 00:22:57.040 It's DNA. 382 00:22:58.200 --> 00:23:03.880 And I do kind of like that idea that you're sort of, you know, representing your inner 383 00:23:05.520 --> 00:23:06.520 form externally. 384 00:23:07.940 --> 00:23:15.020 And also, I was very kind of obsessed with evolutionary complexity theory at this point 385 00:23:15.020 --> 00:23:15.420 as well. 386 00:23:15.520 --> 00:23:24.380 And I was very kind of into the idea of communities and hive minds and, you know, the greater 387 00:23:24.380 --> 00:23:26.460 meta-organism that's made up of the units. 388 00:23:26.460 --> 00:23:32.160 And so I do love the idea that this is some kind of snapshot of the meta-organism that 389 00:23:32.160 --> 00:23:34.520 is human society. 390 00:23:35.080 --> 00:23:37.860 These are kind of like little tendrils of that thing. 391 00:23:38.080 --> 00:23:42.280 One of the things that's interesting about you is that you insist, maybe not so much 392 00:23:42.280 --> 00:23:45.680 at this particular one, but later on, that this is actually what's going on. 393 00:23:46.220 --> 00:23:51.980 This is not a representation or a variation of what's going on, that if we had eyes to 394 00:23:51.980 --> 00:23:56.440 see, if our eyes were trained to see, we would be able to see. 395 00:23:56.440 --> 00:23:59.680 The world would actually look like this, in some sense. 396 00:24:00.100 --> 00:24:00.580 Absolutely. 397 00:24:01.240 --> 00:24:03.140 I mean, I, you know, it looks very cut. 398 00:24:03.300 --> 00:24:09.940 I mean, obviously I'm slicing it up, but there's no editing in a filmic sense. 399 00:24:10.160 --> 00:24:17.220 There's no cutting or slicing of the actual reality of what was there. 400 00:24:17.400 --> 00:24:22.560 I mean, they are very much these kind of Lumiere moments of just a slice of time, no pun intended. 401 00:24:23.900 --> 00:24:26.420