2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings
Graeme Taylor
Artists
Statement
I have long had an interest in how the camera can be used to capture behaviour that our eyes cannot, particularly through manipulation of time. My work has covered both extremes, from compressing extended periods into a single image through long exposure photography, to examining tiny fragments of an activity via slow motion video. Recently, I have pushed these investigations further by bringing software manipulation - and, of course, mathematics - into my work.
Artworks
We may think of a video as a 3 dimensional array V(x,y,t) of pixel data, conventionally presented as a rapid sequence of x-by-y frames, one for each time step t. However, other projections of this data structure are possible. If we instead iterate through planes of the form X=k, then the video V'(x,y,t)=V(t,y,x) is comprised of a series of 'slit-scan' or 'strip' images. Individual frames such as these therefore capture all temporal information, but only for a single spatial location, with some surprising effects. The resulting video V' likewise exhibits often unexpected behaviour as properties like direction, speed and size are transformed in different ways; it can be viewed at http://youtu.be/ZDN2c6s6b-8 .