Time: Perpetual Shift

This workshop led by Darren was probably the most fascinating workshop of the whole term. It was about exploring time through changing your point of view and perspective, speeding up or slowing down recordings or audio or using a different sense. It explored that by altering how you experience a situation you take in and experience the incoming information in new and unusual ways. 


Time as a concept is interesting for the graphic design industry as graphic design, as soon as its produced its almost already out dated. but also the study into people, their habits the way they move etc. over time is vital in creating effective graphic design. However this can be so helpful to designers, studying things such as colours, where people move, their cycles, the busiest train station, people follow and walk in natural lines and so you could disturb these lines of follow them.
Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance

This is a 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalised narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explains the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live."

The film changes from being fast motion to slow motion. When the camera is fixed in slow motion the position of the camera is interesting as its a head and shoulder shot and you can really study and investigate the movement of peoples clothes, facial expressions, their walk and personality but without them even talking, it highlights peoples differences in a non conventional way. However in fast motion the escalators spit out people, not one at a time as if it were first one person up and over then onto the next, but as a continuous stream, time dissolving people into a single organic mass. Outside even at night time the camera changes moving cars into red streaks of headlights, changing the modern technology and their movements into objects of the same biology as those escalator spitting out people, part of a contiguous whole. This fast-motion stream is infinite without beginning or end, no offer of rest, but only life, connected, systematic and obscene.

It made me feel really crap! It made it seem that even though we live in our highly modern life the way that each of us individuals live our lives when studied and explored at distance we just move in an animalistic manner, like ants, following a pattern. It makes each individual seem insignificant and strips away all humanity, like robots programmed to move like cogs in a machine. Its depressing as it makes you part of a number of race not an individual.