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DIVIDED IMAGES
James Seo, whose Lossless Blog covers music, film, and, generally, all things Wong Kar-Wai, has created a new blog, Split Screen. It’s “dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images.”
Along with various art pieces, music videos (like ones from the Pixies and the B-52s), and links to clips from TV’s primary split-screen narrative, 24, the site highlights makers and projects like artist and designer Brendan Dawes and his Cinema Redux.
Some quotes from Dawes’s site:
“Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the Processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time… The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process.”
Pictured above: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Large format versions of Dawes’s work can be purchased via The Art Surgery.
Dawes’s work is reminiscent of the “Frozen Film Frames” of filmmaker Paul Sharits, wherein the entire footage of a film is cut into strips and aligned serially between sheets of clear plexiglas (as seen in the image, right). Sharits’s films were designed in advance with this mode of display in mind, as evidenced by his “Study for Frozen Film Frame for Temporal Diagonality” (1975, colored ink on paper). His studies for “Frozen Film Frames” are essentially scripts for 16mm color “flicker films,” which Sharits projected as single screen films or multi-screen installations. Prints of these films were also struck specifically to be cut into strips, which were then mounted in plexiglas for exhibition in galleries. (One of these “Frozen Film Frames” is on permanent display in the upper lobby of Anthology Film Archives in NYC.)
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