Time-Lapse
I pass at least a couple of building sites on the journey at the moment. Each time we drive past some small change has taken place, the buildings growing slowly up from the ground like, you know, things that grow...plants and things.
And it occurs to me that seeing a snapshot of the progress, as we chug past each day, is rather like watching one of those time-lapse videos, except, of course, that I have to wait a while between each frame.
There is something fascinating about the illusion of time-lapse photography. We see a process take place at a speed that matches the speed of our lives more closely, and it becomes a whole new process. I think that we're just not very good at understanding things that happen too quickly, or too slowly, in the same way that we struggle with thinking about things on the wrong scale, too massive, too tiny. The world that we know, it seems, is only a small subset of what is out there.
posted by Geoff at 11:17 am
2 Comments:
Quite freaky you should write that. I was musing only a couple of days ago on what I decided might be called one's Responsive Attention Frequency Range: From the fastest change in one's environment that one can detect and respond to (related to the more commonly known Reaction Time, e.g. a fast bowler's delivery, or a falling plate of pasta) all the way up to the slowest change one notices: the tide coming in, days getting shorter, a government becoming more confused and corrupt, how long it's been since Take That had a hit...
Timelapse enthusiasts will probably already be aware of Peter Greenaway's film "Zed and two noughts", in which the effect plays a prominent role. As does death, so if you like that as well, you're all set.
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