http://www.serenakuo.com/video/bikecamera.flv
Double-8mm film, 14 min
April 2007 - Oct 2007
Construction of the bicycle camera
To examine the communicative nature and intricate balance between realistic portrayal and emotive interpretation of action in space, my work, The Bicycle Camera, borrows the spectator’s preexisting visual impression of the road as viewed from a moving bicycle as a basis for contrast to a manipulated film that depicts the action (we all have a fixed impression of how quickly our surroundings pass us by as we bike down a street).
To briefly describe the conceived technical construction of the central mechanism, a gear is positioned next to the front wheel of the bicycle as well as a 16mm film camera mounted directly on top of the wheel. As the wheel rotates, its spokes drive the gear forward, which in turn flicks the shutter of the camera, one frame at a time. The faster the wheel rotates, the more frames per second is exposed onto the film. Playback of this footage reverses the speed of travel during filming - as portions where the bicycle moves at a faster pace are slowed down by the higher number frames exposed, and slow portions quickened by the lack of frames. The relationship between the speed and action of biking is inverted. In a sense, the physical continuum of the path traveled becomes the only constant in dictating film’s visual component. No matter how fast or slow the bicycle moves, the same amount of imagery is recorded. Additionally, only surrounding actions can reveal this distortion of time and space, since otherwise it only seems that the revolution per second remains unchanged.
When we enter an environment, we cut into it with momentum and force. While we do not make direct contact with the objects around us, a frictional impulse emerges between our surrounding objects (and life forms) and ourselves. I wish to document a variety of urban and rural landscapes with this mechanism, and as a result both accentuate and mediate this universally physical and psychological response. As film originates as a contemporary to and a product of industrialization and mobility, it is the most effective format for generating discussion the two topics.
The material chosen to create this work is celluloid film for two main reasons. One, I want to emphasis the direct linkage between the motion that characterizes the film medium and the application of transportation. The two technologies exist hand in hand, and it is most appropriate to have one quite literally drive the other. Two, the filmstrip, too, is a path, an unbroken continuum that maps out a space
The film belongs in the genre of a “city symphony,” and like films by Dziga Vertov, René Clair, Walter Ruttman, Sheeler and Strand, simulates our experience within a physical space by mimicking the visual transformation of the city landscape during travel. Perhaps more significantly, like Russian Constructivist and Propaganda films, this work approaches the documentary of reality with the attitude to emote and challenge. My perpetration is enabled by a change of the camera motor technology as opposed to a scripted narrative. The narrative takes place in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, where a diverse group of cityscapes are lumped together into close proximity. Within the span of twenty minutes, a bicyclist is likely to encounter rich suburbs, universities, local town stores, grand hotels, shopping malls, boutiques, bridges and waterways, an abandoned downtown, and industrial developments. Such anthropological variance offers opportunities for a dramatic arch, with furthers my endeavor to embed emotional meaning into the activity of travel through the film medium.
Obviously, the reality of the work is loyally representational of its counterpart reality outside of film. As a result, the spectator is invited to project her understanding of that physical reality back at the film in order to comprehend its narrative. The spectator’s projection ultimately leads to my attempt to reinstate physical significance into the transient film medium. The distance between architectural organization of space and cinematic organization of space can be removed through this return from projected form to physical form. If the spectator is able to project significance of physical space onto film’s ephemeral space, what level of physical detail is retained or added? In regards to both the architecturally or geographically defined and the more abstract, what is the difference between spectatorial spatial reality – which exists solely in the mind – and the spatial reality represented by the film in selected bits and parts as images?