Thinking about aspect ratio

[David Mullen ASC]

What does?

[Dennis Couzin]

... In my opinion, the farther the frame gets from a perfect square, the more negative space you can put to one side of the subject. If you put a close-up of an actor all the way to one side of the 1.37 Academy frame, there won't be a lot of excess space on the other side compared to doing it in 2.40.

 

Obviously that would be true as well for elongated vertical frames but that's not much of an option for cinema. ..

 

This seems to have missed the point of my example which says that the engraving is in vertical format while its imbalance is left-right.

Edited February 17, 2015 by Dennis Couzin

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm not saying you can't create lateral imbalance in a less wide frame but you can create even more in a very wide frame. But I'm not sure why I even have to make this argument, it's so obvious.

[David Mullen ASC]

Dennis, if you were shooting a typical movie of actors moving around interiors and you wanted an unusual amount of lateral negative space, don't you think that would be easier to do on average in 2.40 than in 1.85?

 

Going back to the original article the writer complained about the excessive negative space of 2.40 -- my point is that this can be an advantage, not a problem.

[Dennis Couzin]

David, we seem to have different understandings of "visual imbalance" and probably of "negative space". These were hot ideas in the 1950's when Arnheim's "Art and visual perception" came out. Google your "lateral negative space" today and it is an orthodontic term: "The art and science of the smile". Has the terminology had yet another life in Hollywood?

 

For me a picture with vertical format can be more prone to left-right visual imbalance than one with wide horizontal format. A tall picture that's dark on the right half and light on the left half looks less stable than a wide picture similarly half and half. Maybe it's because tall things tip easier. But if the lateral imbalance is of a progression-recession kind, the wide picture is the stronger example. The Dürer engraving exhibits a profound lateral imbalance confected of many elements.

 

If you and the writer of the original article (which I haven't read) mean the same thing by "negative space" then you have a real disagreement, which might best be settled by looking at examples.

[Bill DiPietra]

If you and the writer of the original article (which I haven't read) mean the same thing by "negative space" then you have a real disagreement, which might best be settled by looking at examples.

 

Dennis, perhaps you should read it in order for your arguments to fit into the context of this discussion.

 

Visual imbalance can be created using a plethora of different visual elements...not just aspect ratio. The aspect ratio - whatever it may be - sets the frame. And although you make an interesting point about the vertical frame being able to create more of a sense of visual imbalance in paintings, that simply isn't the way the technology of the cinema works. Even action in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio has always been side-to-side, not top-to-bottom. Most cultures read from side-to-side. So it is was most likely a natural human progression to maintain that when we moved from literary texts to visual ones. After all, when we watch a film we are reading the landscape of the frame - whatever the aspect ratio may be.

 

Move your eyes from side-to-side. Now move them from top-to-bottom. Which feels more natural?

 

Humans do locomote horizontally, and our heads do rotate better than they tilt, but that's exactly why the cinematic image field doesn't need to be wide. Watch "Spacy" by Takashi Ito. It would be less dynamic (and spatial) were it shot in a wider format than its 1.33:1. "The Ideal City", one of the widest paintings of the Renaissance, is 3.54:1 and perfectly still, anti-cinematic.

 

Hence the point. It all depends on the visual story that is being told. I completely disagree with anyone who says that all films should be shot in a single, universal aspect ratio. Stanley Kubrick skillfully utilized negative space in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, 2.20:1.) Yet, he also played with graphic weight within the 2.20:1 frame just as effectively in the film:

 

This is probably my favorite scene in the history of cinema because of its technical and aesthetic synthesis. Here, with the help of the monolith, Moon-Watcher has his epiphany. Just look at the beauty of the frame. Kubrick balances the graphic weight with the skulls of water buffaloes and the clouds almost seem to be closing in on Moon-Watcher as if he is the precursor to the Star Child. Look at how Moon-Watcher's right-arm his raised with bone in hand...

Kubrick arranges the canvas like a master painter, drawing a perfect triangle (one of the more complex shapes) with Moon-Watcher centered in-between the two skulls. Although everyone has always considered this scene a representation of mankind learning to kill, I've always felt that was a bit too narrow-minded considering the gravity of the scene. It is quite obviously implied, with the inter-cutting of the water buffaloes falling to the ground, but Kubrick was never one to hand the audience the meaning of the scene. For me, this scene has always represented mankind's first human thought. A step forward - albeit a primal one - which is emphasized with the use of slow-motion and Strauss' triumphant "Also Spracht Zarathustra." It is the beginning of a birth, hence the triangle implying the vaginal opening. This is the conception stage.

Fast-forward four-billion years and we see a good example of negative space, but balanced with chairs throughout the frame so that it is evident, but not visually distracting. Indeed, that vacuous feeling is present throughout the majority of the second act as we watch Heywood Floyd, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole carry on their respective duties with virtually no spirit. As characters, they are quite dispassionate, even empty. The negative space reflects this. Mankind has been stagnating all these years with no evolutionary progress. Considering how close we are to the birth (the end of the film,) this could be considered the third-trimester of the conception that began with Moon-Watcher.

Here, Kubrick utilizes line and shape in its most fundamental ways as Dave Bowman walks out of one of the corridors of the Discovery to dismantle HAL. It is to be the beginning of his and mankind's rebirth so the corridor could be considered a visual metaphor for the birth canal. This same concept and - very similar frame - inspired one of the last shots in the film, Gattaca (1997, 2.35:1)

In keeping with Gattaca's themes, the corridor looks a bit more organic - like a fallopian tube. And a fetus that develops in a fallopian tube often results in an ectopic pregnancy. And Vincent was never meant to make it this far. He is the miscarriage that refused to be such and the subtlety of the production design & cinematography speaks to the power of this concept.

The end scene of 2001 as the Star Child arrives at Earth. This is the birth or rebirth. Notice the shape that is created with the two orbs is the lower-part of an hour-glass implying a sense of time. As with so much of this film, Kubrick's true of meaning of this shot is open to interpretation. If you look at it with a glass-half-full perspective, it could be taken to mean that mankind's time for the next step in its evolution has finally come. But what Kubrick most likely had in mind for this shot (considering the rather bleak view he is said to have had of humanity) is that the shape of the hour-glass suggests just how long it has taken mankind to take another step forward in its own evolution. The last was Moon-Watcher's epiphany/evolutionary conception four-billion years ago.

Of course, these are my own interpretations of these scenes. My point in illustrating all this is that these powerful ideas and concepts would never have been as effective had they been framed on a small or vertical canvas. These are examples where the wide canvas was necessary to convey the subtext - a critical part of visual storytelling.

[Dennis Couzin]

Bill,
Thank you for taking up my suggestion to shift the disagreements of this strand to the domain of examples. I have always been left cold by the cinematography in Kubrick's "2001". There's a consistency in his use of the 2.20:1 frame: it's always forced. You write:

• Kubrick arranges the canvas like a master painter, drawing a perfect triangle (one of the more complex shapes) with Moon-Watcher centered in-between the two skulls.

Then why is there not one painting in the whole history of pre-Kubrickian art which shares that composition? Is it so clever that Kubrick had to invent it? Are you so enthralled with that film frame that a mere 45°-90°-45° triangle becomes a "perfect triangle". Normally the 60°-60°-60° triangle is the exemplary triangle. Yours is just half a square, rather shameful for a triangle to be. And glancing back and forth between the picture without your triangle and with it, I find the triangle forced.

Perhaps there is no painting sharing that composition because paintings are static while the film frame evolves. But you can't have it both ways: that it's an artist's canvas and not subject to the principles of composition; that you see a certain triangle there but it might be changed or gone the next frame.

 

Tarkovsky's "Solaris" made four years later, and 2.35:1, does show compositional inventiveness.

 

 

Watching this the viewer is thrown to the side -- a dynamic image requiring the frame's width.

 

I'm completely baffled why you say your frame from "2001" showing Bowman in the corridor is a "very similar frame" to your "fallopian tube" frame from Niccol's "Gattaca". The first has symmetry, while the second curls, or tries to, like the frame from "Solaris".

 

I didn't argue against the very wide frame, only that cinema being limited to any small range of shapes is a disadvantage and that limitation to a range of very wide shapes increases that disadvantage.

Edited February 17, 2015 by Dennis Couzin

[Bill DiPietra]

Bill,

Thank you for taking up my suggestion to shift the disagreements of this strand to the domain of examples. I have always been left cold by the cinematography in Kubrick's "2001". There's a consistency in his use of the 2.20:1 frame: it's always forced. You write:

• Kubrick arranges the canvas like a master painter, drawing a perfect triangle (one of the more complex shapes) with Moon-Watcher centered in-between the two skulls.

Then why is there not one painting in the whole history of pre-Kubrickian art which shares that composition? Is it so clever that Kubrick had to invent it? Are you so enthralled with that film frame that a mere 45°-90°-45° triangle becomes a "perfect triangle". Normally the 60°-60°-60° triangle is the exemplary triangle. Yours is just half a square, rather shameful for a triangle to be. And glancing back and forth between the picture without your triangle and with it, I find the triangle forced.

 

Perhaps there is no painting sharing that composition because paintings are static while the film frame evolves. But you can't have it both ways: that it's an artist's canvas and not subject to the principles of composition; that you see a certain triangle there but it might be changed or gone the next frame.

 

Tarkovsky's "Solaris" made four years later, and 2.35:1, does show compositional inventiveness.

Watching this the viewer is thrown to the side -- a dynamic image requiring the frame's width.

 

I'm completely baffled why you say your frame from "2001" showing Bowman in the corridor is a "very similar frame" to your "fallopian tube" frame from Niccol's "Gattaca". The first has symmetry, while the second curls, or tries to, like the frame from "Solaris".

 

I didn't argue against the very wide frame, only that cinema being limited to any small range of shapes is a disadvantage and that limitation to a range of very wide shapes increases that disadvantage.

 

Dennis,

 

You seem to have a very rigid view of the aesthetics of cinema. Why does the frame have to track back to the composition of a painting? Why can't Kubrick have invented the shot based on his own subconscious inspirations, be they previous films, paintings or still photographs? In that sense, it would be more of a collage.

 

Are you so enthralled with that film frame that a mere 45°-90°-45° triangle becomes a "perfect triangle". Normally the 60°-60°-60° triangle is the exemplary triangle. Yours is just half a square, rather shameful for a triangle to be. And glancing back and forth between the picture without your triangle and with it, I find the triangle forced.

 

So, geometrically, it's not a perfect triangle. What of it? Are you that fixated on the exactness of each and every shape in every film you watch? Cinema is a fluid visual language. When you get as bogged down in the math & geometry of it, you will miss the point of the shot or scene - which is what seems to have happened.

 

I'm completely baffled why you say your frame from "2001" showing Bowman in the corridor is a "very similar frame" to your "fallopian tube" frame from Niccol's "Gattaca". The first has symmetry, while the second curls, or tries to, like the frame from "Solaris".

 

If you are going to pay homage to another film or director as Niccol clearly did in that shot, you are not going to replicate the shot line for line, structure for structure. Then it simply looks like a bad copy. As I said, it is much more organic, but the themes of a pending rebirth are present in both films. Again...when you look for the level of exactness that you seem to looking for in one film or another, you will miss the point entirely.

 

Cinema is not a math problem.

[Alex Birrell]

As Bill said cinema is not a math problem and nor is it a simple off shoot of painting or still photography. It is its own medium and in narrative cinema the visuals have to be linked to the requirements of story and character point of view not "merely" compositional value to be examined as captured stills. Also I think it is very useful that cinema now has 2 main aspect ratios. 1.85 or 2.39 - great. I couldn't tell you about the amount of film students I have known who want to spend hours debating different shapes and cut offs and weird things with frame shape and size but don't seem to have any idea what they want to make a film about.

[Leon Liang]

As Bill said cinema is not a math problem and nor is it a simple off shoot of painting or still photography. It is its own medium and in narrative cinema the visuals have to be linked to the requirements of story and character point of view not "merely" compositional value to be examined as captured stills. Also I think it is very useful that cinema now has 2 main aspect ratios. 1.85 or 2.39 - great. I couldn't tell you about the amount of film students I have known who want to spend hours debating different shapes and cut offs and weird things with frame shape and size but don't seem to have any idea what they want to make a film about.

I agree completely. Also, in my opinion comparing aspect ratios in film to aspect ratios of paintings and still photographs would imply that films should be able to change aspect ratios for every shot simply for different compositions, would it not? Edited February 17, 2015 by Leon Liang

[John E Clark]

I agree completely. Also, in my opinion comparing aspect ratios in film to aspect ratios of paintings and still photographs would imply that films should be able to change aspect ratios for every shot simply for different compositions, would it not?

 

Wes Anderson had 3 different aspect ratios, Academy, 1.85, and 2.35. The 'present' day was 1.85, the 60's shots, 2.35, and the 30's, in Academy...

 

There may be other similar experiments in changing aspect ratios during the film, but that is a very recent example.

[Leon Liang]

Wes Anderson had 3 different aspect ratios, Academy, 1.85, and 2.35. The 'present' day was 1.85, the 60's shots, 2.35, and the 30's, in Academy...

 

There may be other similar experiments in changing aspect ratios during the film, but that is a very recent example.

But 'The a Grand Budapest Hotel' used different aspect ratios for different time periods. I'm talking about switching between aspect ratios very frequently simply for composition reasons.

[Dennis Couzin]

Cinema is not a math problem.

 

As Bill said cinema is not a math problem ...

 

With deep sympathy for math-phobic cinematographers, this is a discussion about frame shapes, with several posters throwing in the "golden ratio" 1.61803... and Carl Looper getting heavy into numerology. Bill DiPietra declared that Kubrick drew "a perfect triangle" around the ape in "2001" and now ...

 

So, geometrically, it's not a perfect triangle. What of it?

 

Please, if the triangle isn't perfect geometrically how is it perfect? Are we having logical discussion or banging bones in here?

 

I now suspect that Bill meant "perfectly symmetrical triangle" when he wrote "perfect triangle". That's normal imprecision for a chat room, especially one that doesn't allow edits 5 minutes after we post. If so his meaning was mathematical, sorry to say.

Edited February 17, 2015 by Dennis Couzin

[Bill DiPietra]

 

 

With deep sympathy for math-phobic cinematographers, this is a discussion about frame shapes, with several posters throwing in the "golden ratio" 1.61803... and Carl Looper getting heavy into numerology. Bill DiPietra declared that Kubrick drew "a perfect triangle" around the ape in "2001" and now ...

 

 

Please, if the triangle isn't perfect geometrically how is it perfect? Are we having logical discussion or banging bones in here?

 

I now suspect that Bill meant "perfectly symmetrical triangle" when he wrote "perfect triangle". That's normal imprecision for a chat room, especially one that doesn't allow edits 5 minutes after we post. If so his meaning was mathematical, sorry to say.

 

Dennis...you are getting too wrapped up with semantics. And just as you seem to have missed the points of the aforementioned shots, you are completely missing the points of what people are saying in this thread.

[Carl Looper]

Another famous wide painting is Picasso's "Guernica", 2.23:1. This is not a case of wide subject fitting wide format. It's in the genre of multi-action panoramas, where the different parts, while comprising a whole, are meant to be examined separately. Only the bravest experimental cinema allows multiple actions across a screen, with each action demanding our attention, and then it's one short step to multiple screens, the breaking up of wide screen cinema.

 

[...]

 

Alternatively, cinema can ditch the movie theaters and TV screens for newer, happier and more flexible display modes. Then cinema can finally be pictures with freedom of shape.

 

I work in the area of "artist film" (with it's roots in "experimental cinema"). In this domain, it's the art gallery, as much as the cinema (and perhaps more so) in which such work is exhibited. Within the art gallery all sorts of unusual screening setups are done and there is no limit on aspect ratios or anything else for that matter.

 

But an interesting thing about art galleries, as distinct from the cinema, is that an audience is able to rearrange the time they give to any part of a work. A work could have separate things happening in space, where the audience could engage those separate parts at a time of their own choosing. Such work shares something in common with painting.

 

The downside is that a work made for an art gallery will tend to privalage space over time. Art galleries are much more about space than time. If time is addressed it is time encoded in terms of space, rather than in terms of time. So a narrative painting, for example, requires one to move one's eyes around in space in order to reconstruct any narrative time encoded in such. Much like a comic book requires one to move ones eyes in space, from one composition to another, in order to come back into contact with an experience of time.

 

The cinema does away with this imposition on the audience. The cinema is able to express both space and time, in terms of both space and time - not just space.

 

But as a result, not all the techniques of painting translate to the cinema. Or if translated, such a 'cinema' must be moved back into the art gallery, in order to be fully appreciated. The web is another appropriate venue/context for such 'cinema', for it allows the audience to interact with a work - to go back over a 'shot' for example, and re-examine another part of the image not seen the first time.

 

An art gallery or similar, can be understood as time-deficient contexts, generating a certain "timelessness", if only temporarily. But what such work loses in terms of time, they do make up for in terms of a more thorough exploration of space.

 

Back in the cinema we can say that if space is compromised, the cinema makes up for that in terms of what it can do in terms of exploring the nature of time.

 

C

[David Mullen ASC]

I recall that Ophul's "Lola Montes" plays with different aspects in the sense that he blocks up part of the CinemaScope frame at times to reduce the width of the visible action area. But it's been 30 years since I last watched that movie.

[John E Clark]

 

Back in the cinema we can say that if space is compromised, the cinema makes up for that in terms of what it can do in terms of exploring the nature of time.

 

C

 

Installation art/mixed media is one avenue to over come the 'gallery' bias towards 2-d art on walls. One of the problems I have with the current 3-d presentations, is they are not really '3-d', but 2-d and use a featurette of the human perception system to effect a '3-d' interpretation by that perception system.

 

Even with 2-d displays, and then using a large number one could have more of a '3-d' effect, or have the displays mounted on free standing 'robots' which move according to some choreographed sequence...

 

And since we have touched on 2001... there's always (or at least should always) be the parody...

 

[Carl Looper]

 

Installation art/mixed media is one avenue to over come the 'gallery' bias towards 2-d art on walls. One of the problems I have with the current 3-d presentations, is they are not really '3-d', but 2-d and use a featurette of the human perception system to effect a '3-d' interpretation by that perception system.

 

Even with 2-d displays, and then using a large number one could have more of a '3-d' effect, or have the displays mounted on free standing 'robots' which move according to some choreographed sequence...

 

Art galleries include more than just 2D works on walls. Think sculptures. Performance art. Installations. Kinetic art (which do involve robots) Art galleries embrace space-based work in all of it's dimensions.

 

The problem with an art gallery is that it's 'biased' towards space-based work, be it 2D, 3D or 4D.

 

As a result it's impossible to exhibit a time-based work in a gallery, without compromising some aspect of such a work. The result is that works made for the art gallery will tend to minimise questions of time. They will tend to focus more on space than time. Or worse, they'll promote a concept of time as some fourth dimension of space. Or time as an illusion. The universe as time-less.

 

Against such a propensity in art gallery work, are those which do work with time, and do not use such as a surrogate for timelessness. Those works which do explore time in more than just a minimalist way.

 

And these works are much more workable in cinema. Or in theatre. Or in music.

 

C

[Dennis Couzin]

Carl: all good points, but you must clarify how "time-based art" differs from other time-incorporating arts. Your example of 4D art, a mobile, is as much in time as in space. There's no more reason to call it "space-based" than "time-based". It occupies its small space and rolls on in time for hours or years. Its observers approach it from different angles and stay with it for different whiles. If it's a robotic mobile it might wander about town and find its observers as much as they find it. It's as temporal as we are.

I think your concept "time-based art" means durational art, in which there's a temporal lock between the observer and the work. The work is some kind of performance or event that has a definite duration. The observer is expected to observe it through that duration. That's supposed to be a requirement for understanding or appreciating it. Sitting in the darkened movie theater for the duration of the movie is an example, called "watching the movie". The precursors are drama and music. They all require that you experience 10 seconds of this, 10 seconds of that, in the correct order. The observer's time must flow with the works.

I think this is an extreme idealization which seldom occurs. One might not leave the seat but who doesn't space out during a movie or a play or a musical performance? Who in here doesn't puzzle over how certain shots were made? Who doesn't analyze the work, and think about other works, while absorbing it? This besides thinking about your dog, your stomach, or whatnot. Many, or most, qualities of the work pass through these lapses, but the durational qualities must suffer. The temporal simplicity or complexity of the work gets through without the time itself.

I think durational art is overrated. Long-form cinema and short-form cinema will differ in how they fill their time, not the observer's, because the observer's time is always his own. They differ the way novels and short stories, which are not durational arts, differ. The original movies were quickies, viewed not very differently from the 4D mobiles. The evolution from amusing peep-shows to the durational art of cinema was not from aesthetic predestination. The practical/commercial wish to show movies to many people at once required projection. Projection required dark rooms. Dark rooms required people sitting and staying seated. Comes duration, if observers can really do it.

Movies' growth to lengths where they could tell complex stories was a wonderful development, because many stories can only be told pictorially. Movies extended literature. But how much of this ability of movies relies on its being durational art? Wouldn't it work as well without the dark room and with each observer's finger on his own media control keys. That is, can't movies which seek to extend literature just behave like pictorial literature: no temporal lock between observer and work. Indeed, you should go to the dictionary occasionally while reading. The purpose of watching the movie is to take it in, in your time, not to have it piped into you.

 

The temporal qualities of a movie -- the kinds of movement, the texture of the time flow -- are separate from duration. They correspond to the temporal qualities of the mobile, but are different because the medium is different. This does not make the 30 second movie, or the movie broken into small episodes by rude viewing manners a space-based art. Non-durational art may be primarily temporal. It may even be completely temporal with no spatial aspects.

 

With further evolution, cinema will finally achieve freedom of shape with no real loss to its temporal qualities. The nice part of the pictorial aesthetic that rests on viewing being in darkened spaces will unfortunately perish.

Edited February 18, 2015 by Dennis Couzin

[Carl Looper]

Thanks Dennis - a great response.

 

By time-based work is to suggest those works that express time or transform time, in terms of time, rather than in terms of space.

 

For example, an exhibition of Muybridge snapshots on a gallery wall might arguably express time (the duration of a horse stride for example), but if it expresses time, it expresses such in terms of space: the 2 dimensions of each snapshot (height and width), and the length of the wall (a 3rd dimension) across which each snapshot is arranged. Or if printed in a book the same thing occurs.

 

The genius of cinema is to introduce a fundamental difference in the arrangement of photographs. Instead of arranging photographs in space (as Muybridge did), it will instead arrange those same 'photographs' in time. It is able to express and transform time, as much as space.

 

The important point here is that the cinematic apparatus (ie. the projector) does this. It does not require the audience to do it. The audience's job is to give time to the work. And the cinema gives back a transformation of that time. And if a work expresses anything about time, it is able to do so in terms of time. It is liberated from having to do so in terms of space.

 

Of course, many works, given time with which to play, may not use it to express or transform time. Many works will use time as just another way of expressing or transforming space. In these circumstances time is left relatively untransformed. The time given to such work comes back as an expression or transformation of space. A side effect of which is a sense of time being absent.

 

This is not necessarily a bad thing either. But this sort of work is better expressed in an art gallery. Indeed part of the great thing about art galleries is the way it can facilitate a kind of "time out" from time.

 

But for those works which seek to express or transform time, in terms of time, the art gallery is quite inadequate.

 

Re. the mobile. All work occupies time. This is not the issue. It's whether the work expresses or transforms time in any substantial way. A mobile doesn't do much with the time it occupies. It expresses or transforms space more than time. As such it has a much easier time working in an art gallery.

 

Literature is another art that transforms time. But like the cinema it would have a hard time working in an art gallery. A library, or reading room, would be more appropriate for such.

 

C

Edited February 18, 2015 by Carl Looper

[Carl Looper]

By time should be understood firstly, a duration. An interval. Within this interval (within time) emerges concepts such as tempo amongst others. The attributes of time.

 

Whether the duration selected is short or long depends on the artist. It depends on how time is to be transformed. A micro film, a short film or a feature film. Or a one second shot or a one minute shot. What is important is what is done with the attributes of time - including where nothing is happening. The waiting room. For waiting is a powerful expression of time. Suspense is a powerful expression of time. Cage's work of silence is an expression of time.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

 

The cinema provides for an exploration of time, in terms of time. And it also provides for an exploration of space in terms of time.

 

C

[Dennis Couzin]

Carl, the mobile, by its very name, is moving sculpture. It changes spatial form through time. Indeed the gallery only thinks: "how much space does the mobile occupy?", since the gallery could put other works in its place. The whole gallery, over the course of a year, is a big mobile with its spatial things moving from place to place. But this doesn't make the mobile a spatial more than a temporal thing. Even if you could figure out from a hologram -- a purely spatial image -- of a mobile how it moves, you can't experience its motion as necessary for grasping the mobile.The higher count of its spatial dimensions (3) vs. its temporal (1) doesn't gives the spatial more weight than the temporal for the mobile. The mobile is exhibited motion.

 

Motion is just one kind of change: spatial change. Music is changing sound. Music, at least music made for one ear, is a non-spatial temporal medium. Sound, physically, is temporal without any changing. But I'd argue that a single constant sound, for a duration, isn't music. We really must make a distinction between duration and time. A temporal art involves changes of form/color/sound/pressure/etc. in time. The null change -- the empty gate projection or Cage's silence -- is a silly singularity where temporal art meets durational art. Durational art concerns the observer and the work. If a movie is playing on a gallery wall as people come and go it is not functioning as durational art. Interactive video, a tricky case, is probably not durational art. In durational art, the durations, not just the changes, are the objects of contemplation. The durations can only be experienced when the observer's time is locked to the work's time.

 

Although a physicist can easily derive one from the other, temporality and duration are psychologically and aesthetically distinct. The mind experiences temporality by means of change. The mind can't just add a lot of changes to experience a duration. Duration is experienced its own way.

 

Literature is neither a temporal art nor a durational art. Nor comic books, nor Guernica.

 

The interesting question is whether durational art is a subset of temporal art. I don't think so.

[Dennis Couzin]

Re. the mobile. All work occupies time. This is not the issue. It's whether the work expresses or transforms time in any substantial way. A mobile doesn't do much with the time it occupies. It expresses or transforms space more than time.

 

Sorry my earlier response omitted to comment on your idea of artistic work that "expresses or transforms time". I myself am wrestling with explicating "representing time" for a paper I'm supposed to write. Expressing and transforming time are yet more complicated ideas.

 

When the mobile moves it is not just occupying time. This simple use of time, without representation (or expression or transformation) of time, is what makes the mobile temporal art. The ground-level distinction between moving art and static art is not trivial. Time isn't just another dimension. Work that uses time then has access to the higher-level themes "about time" that interest you (and me), but be careful because those themes might be illusory.

[Carl Looper]

The early cinema will be preoccupied with an orgy of movement.

 

So we might represent (say) a pendulum in terms of the arc it traces out in space. One dimension of our representation identifies the position of the pendulum at any given moment, and the other dimension composes a representation of changes in that position, ie. changes in space.

 

In this we obtain a spatial representation of movement.

 

Einstein-Minkowski space-time is a framework for the representation of space and time in terms of space (in terms of dimensions).

 

A strip of movie film is the same. Encoded in terms of space (the length of the film), is both space and time.

 

But the cinema is not to be fully comprehended in terms of this encoding. For it is indistinguishable from photography in this state. We could exhibit a strip of film in an art gallery, but it would not be cinema we were exhibiting.

 

The film strip must be decoded. The film projector decodes the film strip. It is during projection that the cinema distinguishes itself from photography. And from a spatial encoding of time.

 

The work occupies space (the space of the screen) but it now also occupies time. But more than this it uses time. It uses time to separate out the frames otherwise distributed in space.

 

But movement doesn't yet express time. Movement expresses changes in position - a spatial concept. The early cinema is still very much pre-occupied with space, and with movement within such space.

 

And this early cinema, pre-occupied with changes in space (movement), would easily be at home in an art gallery.

 

C

[Carl Looper]

Carl, the mobile, by its very name, is moving sculpture. It changes spatial form through time. Indeed the gallery only thinks: "how much space does the mobile occupy?", since the gallery could put other works in its place. The whole gallery, over the course of a year, is a big mobile with its spatial things moving from place to place. But this doesn't make the mobile a spatial more than a temporal thing. Even if you could figure out from a hologram -- a purely spatial image -- of a mobile how it moves, you can't experience its motion as necessary for grasping the mobile.The higher count of its spatial dimensions (3) vs. its temporal (1) doesn't gives the spatial more weight than the temporal for the mobile. The mobile is exhibited motion.

 

Motion is just one kind of change: spatial change. Music is changing sound. Music, at least music made for one ear, is a non-spatial temporal medium. Sound, physically, is temporal without any changing. But I'd argue that a single constant sound, for a duration, isn't music. We really must make a distinction between duration and time. A temporal art involves changes of form/color/sound/pressure/etc. in time. The null change -- the empty gate projection or Cage's silence -- is a silly singularity where temporal art meets durational art. Durational art concerns the observer and the work. If a movie is playing on a gallery wall as people come and go it is not functioning as durational art. Interactive video, a tricky case, is probably not durational art. In durational art, the durations, not just the changes, are the objects of contemplation. The durations can only be experienced when the observer's time is locked to the work's time.

 

Although a physicist can easily derive one from the other, temporality and duration are psychologically and aesthetically distinct. The mind experiences temporality by means of change. The mind can't just add a lot of changes to experience a duration. Duration is experienced its own way.

 

Literature is neither a temporal art nor a durational art. Nor comic books, nor Guernica.

 

The interesting question is whether durational art is a subset of temporal art. I don't think so.

 

I'm not yet sure I fully understand the difference between temporal art and durational art. Or rather I'm not yet sure what "temporal art" would mean.

 

By the word "time" I mean duration. An interval. For example, a few seconds, or a few minutes. The art of playing with that, with changes in duration. By way of a crude example: the play off one might create between a fast paced action sequence, and an otherwise slow paced moment of contemplation. Between a young boy dodging bullets in battle, and a mother sitting by the window looking out to sea.

 

One speaks of "timing".

 

Music (or even sound for that matter) provides for a similar conception of time. In poetry such is also explored. Even literature exploits the play off between words in terms of time (duration).

 

It's not necessary to involve a present observer in this elaboration of durational art. A virtual one will suffice. The film that plays to an empty auditorium, can be understood in terms of a virtual observer - a pretend observer. A ghost of some description. For it is otherwise difficult to consider the work proper. We can easily fall back into reading the film as it exists on a reel (or in computer memory) - as if, in that state, it defined the film's objective existence.

 

But we need to treat the work as if seen (heard etc) by an observer - be it human, machine, or ghost. The work occupies this domain. The film strip on a film reel, in an archive, or under one's bed, or on a rubbish tip, is not the film proper.

 

Even in physics, an observer, if only in principle, is required to make sense of the physical world. Not just because we, as observers, are somehow limited to only understanding the world in this way, but by all accounts it is because the world, in itself, is this way so. To put it another way, a fiction of sorts is created when one prises apart the observer/observed.

 

But putting that aside we can limit ourselves to the way in which art is understood, where the concept of an observer is taken for granted. That's not to say it is ignored, but to say it is understood.

 

However the reverse problem can occur - where art is treated as entirely about observers.

 

In many ways there is no fundamental or given difference between art and science. But a difference between these terms can be created. And creativity is to be encouraged anywhere and everywhere it occurs. If we create a difference between art and science it is because there are many benefits to doing so.

 

C