timebased_body

a floating, sparkling chunk moves toward the camera and briefly fills the picture with a fleeting flash of light. the strange object seems to be stranded before the viewer´s eyes, and in the following shot the camera approaches the amorphous sculpture in a circling motion, which then flits out of view to find form in its own movements. the outline of a human figure is briefly visible, though long enough to form a trail for the viewer´s gaze, which somewhat unsteadily probes the wavering lump. this trail leads to the inspiration for einar´s computer animation: an image of the human body. einar, an ensemble of animation artists, uses live footage of a human body to extract, a single image at a time, the outline of an animated two-dimensional image. the visual grammar of the live footage, i.e. the alteration of the focal length, the camera angle and editing techniques, give the virtual bodies their shape. the bodies are used to translate temporal length into spatial depth. though the cartesian conception of the body, according to which it occupies a certain amount of threedimensional space, is applied, this presence is exclusively temporal in timebased_body. in the flow of time, the (twodimensional) contours of the human body fade and take on fascinatingly irritating forms in a fictitious space.

(robert buchschwenter)


A floating, sparkling chunk moves toward the camera and briefly fills the picture with a fleeting flash of light.
The strange object seems to be stranded before the viewer’s eyes. The outline of a human figure is briefly visible.

(einar)