Yesterday I was showing Napoleon, one of our Kinder/Garden computer donors, the soon-to-be-released music video done to document the K/G project. I am using Napoleon’s old computer (and Frank’s and Cecilia’s) to control web cameras to capture timelapse footage in the greenhouse – a low res, low cost technique to compress time to make plant growth/movement visible.
Napoleon, showed me this “making of” video from the Plant episode of the BBC series Life.
While I cannot deny the beauty of this documentary and the technical achievement of those who created it, I feel a bit ambivalent the timelapse work. It seems to me that these shots hide as much about unobserved plant growth as they reveal. The technology of the camera is presented as an external neutral observer and time is not so much compressed as it is removed, with the denial of night and weather through the (obscured) substitution of outdoor space with a studio and artificial lighting.
While our timelapse may have been quick and dirty, movements of shadow, sunrises and sunsets restore an understanding of time that the timelapse takes away. We can see the effects of cloudy days, how some blossoms open just before dawn and close at midday and plants’ continued growth after dark. And then there is the technology.
Our web cameras are embedded in the ecology of the greenhouse. They often sit among the plants like insects, sentinels who tell us when to pollinate, when to visit more often and as they fall and shift with plant growth, wind, and waterings, they and the plants modify shots and edits. Power outages happen, vines disconnect cables, and well, stuff happens. Today a camera had flipped over, one workstation had stopped shooting, another kept beeping at me. That seems a lot more like nature to me than a one minute re-enactment of one year when the sun never moves, weather never changes and plants filmed in 96 different shots are presented as if they are all growing together.
Here’s some raw footage taken last week (May 4th-7th) on Napoleon’s workstation in the greenhouse.
Filed under: Digital imaging
