FOLDED TIME

Folded Time.

I am working with photographs I created during my 00.16 am night-walk from Täljö train station to home in Näsviken on March 9 2018.
The walk is a 1.9 km distance. Takes about 20 minutes. During that time I made 597 images.
Throughout my walk I shoot continuously holding my iPhone camera  to my chest shooting the dimly lit country road in front of me, without looking trough viewfinder. It becomes rhythmical and quite random, my finger following my steps: sometimes in synch, sometimes not.
I was moving taking stills.
Most of the images are longer in exposures due the darkness. They are all random. Sources of light from houses along the road stretch into elongated forms of abstraction.

It’s the camera seeing, not me.

As I started to think about what to do with the sequential photographs it seemed obvious to see how they would work as a film. But film can be enormously time consuming and I decided, simply, to let the process and flow and possible mistakes lead me.
An automated output of all the 597 images to a video file ended up having built in dissolves by mistake. Decided to use that very video file as a departure point rather than to remake. Perhaps the dissolves could be interesting? A dissolve, after all, is time.

Start layering the video file on top if itself.  4 layers in all, some with changed speeds, and some with reversed speeds. Different blends to make the dissolves become a new abstraction of time. Still, the collaged film seemed too big of a response – first the outputting and then finding an interesting way to present (a small projection? on screen?). I wanted something more quiet, akin to the sense of timelessness and almost floating-in-the-near-darkness feeling I had during the walk.
I started liking the very abstracted landscapes that appeared on screen as I was clicking my way through the timeline.
Started making screengrabs.
Remembered a printed foldout piece I had seen and felt the need to distill the length of the walk – or a portion of it -  into a printed piece.

But with an included action (the foldout) and juxtapositions that - to me – create a non-linearity and a break in the flow of  filmic time (the walk).  

I like how the digital material starts to break down and how the contours of the collaged dissolves and long exposures almost become like an afterimage. (The dark road in front of me is now barely decipherable.)

Its about the still image becoming a film becoming a still image again.
And it was about the creative process and the amount of time one has available at any given time. I had 2 days in the studio. 10-3.30..
It felt more important to finish the exploration of this idea -- good or bad and to be ok with failing.

Ultimately it was an experiment in compressing, abstracting, and folding fragments of a 20 min walk into a new experience of time and movement (the viewing and the carrying of the printed matter). 

Its folded time.