yes, horses, they fly!
Lil Nas X At An Uber + Sallie Gardiner At a Gallop
TL;DR: movement moments
In 1878 Eadward Muybridge proved that horses fly. With an array of twelve cameras (and tripwires) he captured the complicated leg movements of a galloping horse. The photographs revealed a surprise: the horse suspended in the air. (All hooves up at once, unknown at the time).
Muybridge did many more motion studies: he photographed nude professors, athletes, students, neurological patients, and various animals. Amazing kinetic details were revealed as the subjects played tennis, jumped leapfrog, danced ballet, or simply did everyday things. Like being naked while having a cup of tea or feeding a dog. (Some models were lightly clothed, but the animals were always nude).
Muybridge’s “electro-photographic investigations” eventually led to motion pictures. Silent movies had a frame rate of 16 per second. Movies are now 24 frames per second (which give them a certain amount of motion blur that feels “natural”). New cameras have up to a 90,000 per second frame rate — so two seconds of real time at this rate, projected at the normal 24fps rate, would last for the length of an average movie. Discrete slices of time reveal unnoticed phenomena — and time is being mechanically sliced into shorter and shorter moments.
As a Zeno paradox goes: if a rabbit jumps halfway to the wall every jump, how many jumps till he touches the wall? Answer — never; he’s jumping shorter and shorter halfways, for all time. Maybe that’s where infinity is, for us humans: going recursively inwards, like a fractal, forever, being cognizant of the moment, however minute, instead of going for bigger and better and beyonder, always attempting to God.
If shutter speeds were infinitely fast, the black and white photo array of the man (who might be Lil Nas X waiting for an Uber)* framed and placed in space would continue to the infinite distance. He’d be dancing, slowly, into eternity. As could we all, if we paid more attention to our own small moments, however short, or insignificant… and we maybe just s l o w e d d o w n.
NOTES:
-*Proof of X; according to too much googlesleuthing: the above dancer’s fingernails were all painted gold, just as Lil Nas X’s were in a Met Gala photo; he has on what appears to be a Roger Dupuis watch (with whom X has a sponsorship deal), and Kanye’s Yeezy Boost 350 sneakers. A couple weeks after the photos, X announced that his autobiographical film would premiere here at the film festival. This man is clearly a professional dancer. Also, IRL, he looks like the unmediated Montero Lamar Hill (X). A smarter person will perhaps identify the dance moves (from a music video, or a named dance.)
-Works & their smaller constituent bits: A film: 158,000 frames. A book: 100,000 words. A symphony: 30,000 notes. A life: 28,835 days. The Window, this very project: 2500 images (from there, see 10+ other Window pages, from the Menu; every shot candid, unstaged, spontaneously captured.)
-Zeno paradox painting: my 60x60” work on paper, which I periodically slice in half. (Destroy to create and all that). Each cut part gets newly matted and framed, so the smaller the bits of the work get, the larger the overall work grows. By the time the painting is in (framed) postage-stamp slices it will take up a massive museum wall. By the time its bits are millimetres in size, it could cover Hoover Dam.
-“Bullet time” (most famous from “The Matrix” movies, Keanu bending backwards as the cameras revolve, but also Japanese anime and music videos by Michel Gondry) came directly from Muybridge: an array of cameras capturing the subject simultaneously from many perspectives. (Again, polyperspectives being a theme of The Window.)
-Shit!. Seems there is a finite amount of shortest-measurable time. Planck time is the length of time at which no smaller meaningful length can be validly measured due to the indeterminacy expressed in Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Yeah, whatever. Planck time is roughly 10−43 seconds. That’s 43 zeros after the decimal. Damn. Slice this, Heisenberg!
-This post’s poem (haiku):
Waitingmandances.
Watching, God sees more wonders:
T h e h o r s e s, t h e y f l y !
PREVIOUS POSTS:
How beauteous mankind is
K.I.A. art site: weatherworks, spliced paintings, motion poems etc LINK
BONUS PHOTO (a different array):
