Philosophy department

On: 07 February 2005

Gesture and Photo

As you look at an image, your eye moves from one point of attention to another. Although in the digital world a pixel is just a pixel, and all methods of creating that pixel are lost in its 24 bit color specification, your mind reacts to the image by organizing the shapes into paths that your eyes must take. Thus, even in a photograph, which usually records light simultaneously on a plane, there is an implicit gesture that is the gesture of your attention.

There are many straightforward analytical ways to fill a picture plane with color using analytical geometry and mathematical functions. This is analogous to the photograph in that no one pixel needs any other pixel to be rendered first. But a Vapor Paint image is built up with gestures, even though they may be specifying an area to be filled in. This quality makes it possible to make layers of gestures that can still be distinguished. Since the gestures occur in an order, there is more of a sense of time in a Vapor Paint image.
If the gestures are moving, as they must in an animation, Vapor Paint can move the "clock" very slowly and merge a slice of time into a single plane, much like a time exposure does for a photograph. Vapor Paint can work with external frames and frame series as a texture for its gestures. It can manipulate the order in which the external frames may be used and can dynamically mask off parts of those images, so that a single frame created by Vapor Paint can show discontinuous time all over the frame.

posted at 19:38:00 on 02/07/05 2005 by jhhlnet - Category: General

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