Scrubbing Timelines
Along horizons
Is this a moment
to draw a breath or hold it
as deadlines lie close?
Amidst tight deadlines we decided to spend a day at Botany Bay in Kent with a waterproof 360 camera.
Dead on the inside we wondered what it would be like to be a dead fish on the beach.
We each individually maintained a time log throughout the day, noting moments when we became aware of the time.
3:15 am-I slept with the blinds drawn in hopes that the morning light will awake me
7:15 am-I woke up to the blue sky
9:15 am-I couldn’t find the 9:40 in orange pixels until in an obscure corner it revealed itself.
9:33 am-a phone call on the platform-sevenminutes left.
10:15 am- white flowers dot the green, a blur that’s faster the closer it is. I can see clearly only when it fades away.
10:30 am-where did they come from? Had the train stopped? Ting Tong- we will shortly be arriving at Rainham.
10:42 am-“TheSplit” — the same train heads to different places — make sure you are in the right place. Am I?
11:03 am-my fingers are frozen
12:07 pm-we see the seagulls as we head towards the sea
1:39 pm-Im hungry. I need to pee. I suppose all these peeps on the beach are peeing in the sea.
2:42 pm-The tide has receded, the sun is beating down my back, the crab hunters have come and gone, what is taking them so long?
3:07 pm-I think she’s burying the fish. How long will this ceremony last. I think time passes weirdly when you need to pee.
3:09 pm-move it!
3:33 pm-trudging against the sands of time
5:24 pm-train’s almost here
5:56 pm-I’m hungry again. Dinner at 6 anyone?
7:01 pm- Are we even moving? We sit in an icebox like frozen peas.
7:30 pm-hopped onto the circle back home
Being wrapped in horizon lines and time lines got me thinking-
Drawing from my previous project ‘Samsara’ where we worked with cyclical narrative structures, I thought about Martin Percy’s feedback about cyclical timelines. It made me think about how timelines would look like in VR. Would it wrap around you? Could you scrub through time whilst being within it? Imagine if you could by turning your head move forward or backward in time — faster, slower.
We built little sets on the beach, knowing that they will scale up in 360. It might just look like an elephant graveyard.
It even called for an emergency actor-
During low tide a stream of people came out of nowhere with nets and pails on a hunt for little crabs. 🦀 (Eep! Can we go home now?!)
Ultimately we returned with some 3D scans, a bunch of 360 videos, and a tan. And like analog cameras — no way of knowing what the videos will look like.
Something interesting happened to Olivia’s camera on this trip. It seemed to be on its own timeline for some reason. Here is the resulting ‘Alternative Process Video’.
