Senefelderplatz
A collection of work from Berlin, “Senefelderplatz” presents a series of still images made from moving images. Each image begins with a video of the subject and computational techniques are used to derive a single picture from thousands of video frames. The outcome is something between a photograph and a film, a compressed filmic experience.
This approach originated with the work Senefelderplatz, in which a single color value of the sky was recorded every second over the course of one winter day and night. Rendered as a spectrum, the data constructed a landscape of light.
In Landwehrkanal, the changes in pixel values between frames reveal the dynamics of water in the city’s canal during a storm. A single line of pixels is pulled from each frame of a night drive through a city district for Wedding, and in Waldsieversdorf the image was created by scanning vertically across the video, revealing the influence of wind on a stand of trees.
These techniques act as proxies for natural perception. A stream of light, similar to what the eye collects, is interpreted by a subjective post-process, similar to what the mind does with visual input. While the resulting images are impressions of real light, they are not photography in a traditional sense; they are always an artifact of their particular inquiry into the recorded information. They are attempts to grasp the flow of life, collapsing temporal experience into a single frame.