TheSwingBetweenTimeAndSpace

ThoughtStorms Wiki

One of TheSwingBetween

This page undergoing brand-extension, and has now spawned a blog. Why? I'm not sure, doesn't replace this page exactly ... it's more a kind of remix. http://betweentimeandspace.blogspot.com/

I recently saw and was very impressed by the movie Russian Ark (/http://us.imdb.com/Plot?0318034 http://us.imdb.com/Title?0318034 /http://us.imdb.com/Plot?0318034 ).

More than impressed, I was transfixed, hypnotized.

The camera (in one continuous take?) swims around the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg,

taking in characters from different points in history, but relevant to the place .

Phil: Russian Ark is shot in one continuous take, using a specially modified digital camera. It's an extraordinary artistic and technical achievement which took two years to set up. Interestingly, given your reaction, Sokurov claims to despises modernity: http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,922893,00.htmlAdamBurke

It's relativity made explicit. From the perspective of the film, time is stopped, anihilated. Only movement relative to space remains.

Except at one point, after the lavish, grand ball, for a moment it seems that the camera will stop moving, will stay in one place, and time will restart, as the guests start to leave the room. They start to move in time relative to the location of the camera. But it's only a temporary delay, a gear change, before the camera is again swept up in the flow of space, and carried with the crowd to the exit and the film's end.

This trading of, this translation between time and space, between narrative and cartography, is what interests us here.

  • it's like the films of Richard Linklater (Slacker : Waking http://us.imdb.com/Title?0102943, Waking Life : which http://us.imdb.com/Title?0243017) which) play the same trick.
  • weblogs are history, wiki is geography : WeblogsAndWiki.
  • except relativity again ... weblogs are points in flux (TheFlowInternet) and a space forms between them. There must therefore be time displaced somewhere in wiki (Maybe rediscovered in HistoryFlow)
  • and in SmallPiecesLooselyJoined, DavidWeinberger shows neither is quite as we're used on the internet
  • pinball is a machine, a mechanism, a playfield, a space. But often derived from a narrative film. How do designers translate from the flow of time to space? : PinWorlds
  • a similar trick is pulled off by ThemeParks : DisneyLand comes from the mind of a film director
  • when I was a teenager I played role playing games and computer games. But the best part was reading the "modules" describing the adventure. Showing the layout of the environment to be explored and the monsters and characters met there. The backstory of the game would be splintered among the rooms and artifacts. Books organized as maps. Stories flattened into cartography. : CategoryGames
  • another way of looking at it is that d+g utilise geography in a similar way to theorists using history : GillesDeleuze
  • Music is an art in time, but I'm increasingly interested in a territorialization view : MusicalGeography
  • DesignPatterns are both patterns of activity (time) and space (ChristopherAlexander), and architecture is space which is in motion (HowBuildingsLearn)
  • gardening is painting in time and space : GardenImagologies** oh, right. Borges : Labyrinths : "TheGardenOfForkingPaths" : no-one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same
  • as a computer programmer I must decide to optimize for time or space all the time, I can speed things up by expending more data, making new indexes and temporary caches, or I can save space by compressing, recalculating

See also :

  • SpaceVsInformationFlows discusses a semi-related problem of perceiving information flows when blinded by spatial characteristics. Occurs everywhere from web-design to town planning.
  • Should really look into the history of GeometryAndAlgebra
  • I guess it's all down to Newton and Leibniz, Heraclitus and Democritus

** On http://www.spaceandmotion.com/ On Truth and Reality by Geoff Haselhurst (Hello. Thanks for the link / reference!)