This is a black-white military film that transferred to video by Bruce Conner. The video films the explosion from different angles at different height and from fast to slow motion. The scale of the work is large which fills a side of the room like in the movie theatre. The moments is a linear sequence. It is a military film of the U.S government’s underwater test explosion of an atomic bomb at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands in July 1946. I am attracted by the immersive spectacle of the sudden, the moment is terrifying and the power of the bomb is enormous. This work catches my eye and enables me to experience a sense of nervousness. The work’s extended repetition of the event stretches time to a a standstill, suspending me between dread and contemplation. This work reconstructs the sense of arrested time that caused a witness to observe that “in that moment hung eternity. When I was watching the video in slow motion, I somehow feel a sense of beauty to see the explosion with a large amount of smokes that was surrounding and drifting around. The video explores the pollution that caused by human is enormous which worth our attention and maybe explores the idea of finding incomplete beauty because the imperfections and poignance that happened in an incident. This video repeats the moment of explosion at different speeds and from different angles and heights. When the moment it explores, air, cloud and turbulence are effected by the explosion at the same moment, they were pushed outward by the power. The explosion taken from different position is always in the center of the frame and the clouds scattered around somehow evenly. Time used as a material in the work because the video filmed the explosion in a linear sequence but it repeats the same explosion several time from a different position from fast motion to slow motion. It allows viewers to better understand the motion and a deeper experience of the explosion. These are techniques we are learn for our course.
artist:Katy Grannan title:Sunnydale Avenue(II)
I think the artist wanted to save for all time is motion/time because of the effect of overlapping. There are two of her and one is paused by time. It is a linear sequence and she wanted to record the moment to be perpetual.
The experience of looking at a still image and a moving image is different because a moving image delivers a time line story through multiple clips and a still image needs me to think behind the picture and look at the deeper part within a image. A still image inhabits us to see the motion happened in the moment and the moving image is more alive.
