Seeing TIME through music and photography
Key topics
Latest developments in technology and their impacts on culture
As with photography, and radio, and now AI, technology alters how we perceive time.
How technology helps us "see" time.
- Microscopically, such as the extreme slow motion of a 156 trillion FPS camera
- Slowly, as with the decades-spanning timelapses of glaciers by James Balog
- Imaginatively, as we have been, using our mind's eye to see the size and age of the universe.
Unexplored topics
P versus NP Problem
Questions from professor
Will AI “photography” and video become ubiquitous? Will it affect your memory of the past? Your imagination of the future? What’s your favorite AI slop?
Readings
Sontag, On Photography (link), 1977
1839 is the year that marks the birth of photography as a medium. Now, “There are a great many more images around, claiming our attention.”
Everything and anything has been photographed.
Photography as a depiction
In what context does photography exist?
- “Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.”
- Photography in a book is an image of an image (reproducibility). It guarantees them longevity but not immortality.
- Photography as evidence. “Camera record incriminates” - tool of surveillance.
- One can just buy a body cam?
- Photography as a fast form of note taking.
“Photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.” Photography as a means to document and anchor an experience in time - time keeping (then there’s faster cameras, longer exposure times, more or less light).
“Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.”
Photography has a more innocent and accurate relation to visible reality. Changing with AI.
Paintings in this reading are described as having biases because of the freedom through which the author can change anything about reality. Photography is about to become the ‘new’ paintings.
If photography is no longer a tool to anchor an event in time or even reality, what is the next tool? In a globalized world, how do we share what happened in NYC yesterday to someone living in London/India or anywhere else where shouting is not an option.
🤔 Photos aren’t a useful medium to communicate reality anymore. 🤔
Even voice isn't safe anymore as a means to communicate reality. What will be a reliable tool to keep time and reality? 🤔
The violence of photography
- “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” Holding the photographed subject accountable for that moment in time.
- Tool of surveillance: Photography as evidence. “Camera record incriminates” -
- Sets a dangerous or irrealistic precendent: Photos inherihently aggressive when they idealize, because they are (were) supposed to depict reality. Yet they might not - especially with photoshop retouching, intentional lighting, etc. Which is vastly different from “the promise of camera technology industrialization was to democratize all experiences by translating them into images”.
- Flash / large controls / large cameras feel agressive because it cherry picks a version of you that you might not
- Incentives to capture and document extreme behavior?
Sonntag says in a different text that “the camera is a gun”.
🤔 As a culture, are we held hostage less by expectations because the aggression of Photography decreases if no image can be assumed to be real? (as opposed to really curated imagery, in fashion and beauty, that caused all of us to aspire to those aesthetics)?
Does taking pictures influence your memory of what has happened and create a mental timeline in a meaningful way?
What should today’s artists and even regular folks do? Have (artist) social media or not? Should we take more photos or less?
🤔 With AI generated imagery and video, more and more output, more and more possibilities, does that change how we view ourselves in time?
🤔 When you record your day to day with photographs are you losing it or eternalizing it?
There have been several studies with, at times, conflicting results, so Binghamton University, State University of New York did one to rule them all in 2021.
“Taking photos can impair your memory of events”
Sources - Paper, “Photo-Taking Impairs Memory on Perceptual and Conceptual Memory Tests,” published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition and article.
525 participants, lab controlled. The participants saw a set of artwork and were instructed to take a photo of some pieces using a camera on a tablet and to only look at the other pieces. Later, the researchers tested the participants’ memory of all of the artwork. They were not allowed to look back at the photos. It was asked 20 mins later and 2 days later.
In all five experiments, photographed art was remembered more poorly than art that was merely viewed. People who photographed art remembered it less than those who just looked at it. We can now take photos of anything and everything - Is that screwing up our memory and therefore how we anchor ourselves in time?
How does reproducibility influence one’s experiences of the art?
Two points of view: art maker and art witness.
Paintings had to be seen in a specific place - the situation was frozen in time.
Definition of timeline: Can you trace back your steps? Do you feel like more time or less has passed by?
The art or life witness perspective
The extreme: Film Photography, trend of going back to analog - about aesthetics only or is there something about the constraints that shapes how we remember that moment?
If you can access everything and anything, how does that affect how you remember your own timeline?
🤓 If you were to spend 1 week in a VR headset, would you experience it as more time or less?
If your whole reality is replaced with a digital one - What activities would a life lived through VR need to exist for you to experience 1 week in VR as same as 1 week through your own eyes and no support?
If you use your Meta Mixed Reality Glasses, is there a difference in how much you can tell time has passed and your brains records the experiences?
Albums and photography collections as a document
Albums can feel scattered today because we have access to all tools imaginable as opposed to constraints. They’re not anchored in a time period anymore.
Studio version of a music vs live, in concert.
Prior to streaming, musicians allowed themselves to have flaws. The recording was simply a version - not a standard to be met during live performance.
Live was the real version to which fans ascribe meaning to.
50s / 60s examples: Music for the joy of playing between musicians - improvisation
The Coltrane Example: Recordings “bootleg” had stomping and the crowd’s energy thus being an effective tool in recording time.
We have technologize-d our way out of flaws.
The art maker perspective
Albums were analog - there is some fetish in how it sounds. Same with photography - analog ways have become trendy.
🤔 Because of the amount of tools and ways to record and reproduce one’s work, as a society are we more scared of creating because now there’s a perfection to aspire to? Do you feel allowed to make mistakes?
🤔 Should we strive to make timeless art? As individuals, yes there’s such a desire. But as a society, we almost should want art and music to feel dated to be able to draw a timeline and contextualize it.
🤔 If an ITP student produced the same work as Andy Warhol, would they find the same success?
Valéry, The Conquest of Ubiquity (link)
Ubiquity: being present everywhere or seeming to be everywhere at once.
Reproducibility, transmission; Picture of a sunset is always going to be a crappier experience than being there for the real thing. Author says we’ll get there someday. The whole
In-class notes
Director of Timelapse Photography, whose job description is to bring natural movements into a more comprehensible timescale. Person who makes rigs for timelapse or extreme shots. One can do bullet time with 1 camera (Super Fast Robotic Camera, Bolt Cinebot).
Book: Your Brain is a Time Machine, 2017. 
Your Brain Is a Time Machine | Summary, Quotes, FAQ, Audio
Maranasati - Buddhist practice.
Meditations on; impermanence.
“Inviting the mind to leave this moment and contemplate the future.”
History of photography
Solenoids, stepper motors.
Maker's Muse The Geneva Mechanism
https://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/#:~:text=Fastest electronic sensors have exposure,an average of many pulses