Space of Time

1977 Alfons Schilling created a didactic seeing experience with cameraman Andrej Zdravič called Zeitraum (Space of Time), a 16 mm film shot in his studio in Manhatten. The camera looks over the deep suite of rooms and shows the workshop nature of his laboratory. Seeing machines, projectors and stands can be seen, as well as documents, drawings and canvases. The lens, directed towards the window, looks out onto the building façade on the other side of Broadway, with the backlit artist moving around freely. In the following nine minutes the camera begins to swing, first gently and then with increasing vigour. It surveys the room like a pendulum, gaining speed and height. This tracking shot throws the room structure out of gear as the film stutters increasingly and in varying distances. The apparatus is designed so that, at a certain point, the edges of the picture follow the horizontal lines of the room like a swing. The amplitude of the camera movement is accompanied solely by the rhythmic creaking of the oscillating structure.

Zeitraum refers not only to the duration of the visible film scanning the room in an oscillating movement, but also to the unseen beginning, in which the camera was moving but which the viewer realises only in retrospect.

From: Roland Fischer-Briand “When the Body Rests and the Eye Accelerates”, in: „Beyond Photography“, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna 2017