THEN
«2»
Loose Time
For the second word in the declarative, I matched an experiment I’d wanted to try for a while. I’d seen evidence of an interesting analog glitch present when people made scans of watches. The phenomena first presented itself in the early days of Ebay type online sales sites, back before digital cameras were as common as they are now. Sellers would take scans of their products to display them for sale, and when capturing watch
faces, since the second hand still moved it would create a bent aberration. The capture of the second hand in flux would mess with the chromacapture of the scanner, flinging off shreds of cyan, magenta, and yellow while the hand bent, seemingly stuck by time.
The imagined execution of this experiment sat in my mind a while before I aimed to make it real. I was lucky enough that a friend of mine was giving away a scanner that was being retired by the school, so my means of capture came to me just in time. A high resolution scanner suitable for film capture, its range of DPI was perfect to experiment with speeds for capture. Though it was missing its backing and photo negative tray, a likely reason for its retirement, it still functioned perfectly as a scanner, albeit with a few scratches, just to add character.
a series of kitschy upright clocks with floral print around them and thought it perfect. The visual aesthetic of the clock was in just the perfect sweet spot of tacky but devoid of too much meaning, so when another layer of meaning was layered on it could accommodate it well.
The process existed only in theory for me until I journeyed to the thrift store to seach for suitable clocks. I found a Mickey Mouse clock where the seconds hand was the propeller on a prop plane, a fun purchase but not quite for this. Then I found
I wanted to recreate this effect, and I thought no better a word to apply but ‘then.’ Most of my
Bringing the clock home, I tested it pre-type on the scanner to see if the effect worked outside of theory, and viola it did! I observed how the hands of the clock would render differently by when the scanner caught them in movement. Too close to 8-9 o’clock and the hands would simply look layered over each other. Too close to noon or one and they would split between the upper and lower parts of the clock in the final image, confusing the effect. The sweet spot was two to four, just enough time that the hand could wrap around with
words have little evocative meaning, an aspect I liked about the phrase. Because of this, I could choose either to disregard any meaning for the sake of novel creative exploration, or seek out nuance in meaning through that exploration. For ‘then,’ the latter became true. Bent by the time exposure of the scanner slowly moving past to capture high resolution, the text was rendered into its place of reference; Then shown stuck in then,
and also then, and then, and then, all in warped order. Thus the final piece becomes much more evocate of the word itself, showing a visual simulacrum of time itself, stuck along its seconds axis, trying to keep up.
the movement of the scanner progressing down, captured piecemeal in all its bent wonder.
losing its meaning. I chose the one I had most thought would work in digital, with just enough stroke thickness to maintain its comprehension in the bend, but enough elegance of thin crossbars and serifs to blend nicely with the nicely keyed numbers and Quartz logo. To place the text in, I carefully pried off the plastic cover with a screw driver, and adhered the text to the second hand with just enough double sided tape to keep it in place.
However, even this could only be divined with test upon test upon test of scanner resolution. The key trick to tricking the scanner was that the speed at which it scanned predicted the degree of effect of the aberration. Too fast, and it only cut in two or three; Too slow and it blurred our the hand entirely. After keying in the right speed, I took numerous scans to get a good cross section of second hand positions one the text was on the clock. For the text, I aligned and printed a number of faces to see in physicality what would work best. I wanted to broker the best relationship between the pre-existing type on the clock, and a face that was strong enough to bare the warp without
Upon capturing the still that best warped the text, I felt it ran the best balance of abstraction of form with the thinnest remainder of legibility. Possibly not even readable outside of the context, but with just enough knowledge left in the letters’ connections to be understood within the broader phrase. With this too, just enough to complete the subtle
meaning of the word trapped in time, making for an esoteric final production, a clock trapped in space with a hand trapped through time. During the scan process, for the sake of speed of capture, the scan bed was pointed only at the clock face, so when it came time to complete the image, I composited the successful bent textual clock face with another image of the surrounding clock form to pull together a whole image. In the end, I felt the kitschy clock form plied well to the whole of the image. The esoteric nature of the abstracted text through a warped clock hand gave a bit of mystery to the brocade of the clock, culminating in a timeless timepiece.