Attn.

WATCH THIS SPACE, DEAR READER

for it will soon be occupied

by NEW and POSSIBLY INSIGHTFUL

CONTENT

courtesy of the SPLENDID VAGABOND.

Of slow motion and modern perception

This blog is still officially on hiatus (for more current updates continue to check my PIA blog), but I had a thought I wanted to put down here, and damn the torpedoes if I can't write here when I want.

Anyway, to get to the point: I've been seeing commercials for this new show called Time Warp on the Discovery Channel. And basically the conceit is, "Let's film cool stuff happening with high speed cameras and then show it in super slow motion." That's it.

It's a simple, beautiful concept. In essence, it's no different from the animal locomotion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, except jacked up to accommodate modern modes of perception. On their forums for suggesting new projects, people still ask for slow motion shots of racehorses. It's like they were watching mythbusters, and trying to figure out what made it successful (besides the engaging hosts and frequent use of high explosives), and realized the following deep truth about humans:

It is fascinating to observe phenomena that exist beyond normal human vision.

...slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride.

--Walter Benjamin

[It should be mentioned that this not only works for slowing things down, but the converse as well. Even though speeding up a process has become commonplace with time-lapse photography, we are still delighted to see the results a man photographing himself daily for six years.]

...in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.

--Walter Benjamin

Oddly enough, considering that I am vagabonding...

I made the decision this summer when I started this blog, that I'd keep it separate from my travel experiences, mostly for the sake of people who wanted to hear about cambodia, and not about media theory or the cultural codes of postwar Men's Adventure magazines. The official princeton-in-asia blog would be for experiences and reflections on my nascent year in Cambodia, and this would be for speculations of a more esoteric sort. Plenty of PiA friends are doing blogs on Blogger, though, so I'm going to be commenting on them with this account. This blog, however, is in semi-hibernation until my return to more regular climes.




Should someone track back here, I'd like to point you, Dear Reader, to my PiA travel blog, which will sate all your desires for anecdotes from the edge, and moreover, will make you a NEW MAN, as indicated in the illustration on the right:

Call for Syncretism at Monochrom

I contributed to Monochrom's International Year of Polytheism recently with a call for more syncretism. You can read it at here:

As civilizations bumped into one another in antiquity, they tended to discover that they had many different gods. But since most pantheons break down gods into somewhat similar areas of expertise, the greeks just figured that the barbarians had funny names for their gods, and combined the two. This eventually got to the point where you could slam almost any two gods with similar areas of expertise together to get something subtly new. Some of my favorite gods, like Mithras and Hermes Trismegistus, come from the intercultural mashups (Persio-Roman and Greco-Egyptian, respectively) that were going on at this time.

[...]

So I propose that the international year of Polytheism, in the interest of kick-starting the spread of polytheism, hold an open call for syncretism and de-euhemerism. Combine your favorite gods with modern saints or legendary figures of our times. Let a thousand syncretic gods bloom. Say, for instance, one of those sainted old nuns like Mother Teresa or Mother Cabrini...they might make a good match with a hearth goddess like Demeter, or if you want to push a little farther, with Cybele, mother goddess of the wild earth. Or perhaps Saint Stephen (Istvan) of Hungary, the badass magyar warrior king whose severed hand is a national relic, might well be identified with Labraid Lámh Dhearg (Labraid of the Red Hand), the Celtic sun god whose legecy lives on in the red hand of Ulster.