INHABIT THE INTERVAL
Cinematic technology captures time passing as a series of discontinuous instances. Film exploits the limitations of the human eye, which cannot perceive discrete images beyond a certain rate of view. Slow down projected film and eventually the individuated stills will show visible. Between each frame, the black gap of the interval. Film watched is thus an experience half spent in the unknowable dark. Yet human movement can be captured at a frame frequency beyond that of standard film. Against intuition, filming in slow motion requires shooting at high speed, increasing the frame rate within each passing second. Here, the density of detail accumulates over time, rather than through the spatial saturation of a single image-frame. Invisible to the eye, data can be secreted in the micro-creases and pleats of filmic time. A means of resistance emerges from within conditions of capture, arising in the midst. Turn then from utopian futurity, often only the passive hope of better times to come. For transformation is activated in and through the present moment rendered open, by seizing the kairos immanent to here-and-now.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)