Time is one of the most basic principles that artists deal with when crafting a film or video project, and aside from the actual length of the work, how time is presented to the audience is also a considerable factor. Editors sequence footage together to create stories through time, but how can time be manipulated visually?Interactive designer Forrest Oliphant's new project, an "alternative dance documentation," has approached this subject through a customized program and documentation dubbed Slithering. Built upon the slit-scan still photography technique and other image distortion methods, his post-video processing program Redimensionator takes the captured footage—in this case, of dancers—and reorganizes the data output into a truly surreal occurrence.The dancers’ bodies and limbs cascade, elongate, recede, merge, and seemingly fold into one another in serene slow motion—like Salvador Dalí’s painting Spider of the Evening coming to life. Ambient electronic music accompanies the images, increasing the otherworldly nature of the performance.According to Forrest's notes, the group didn’t know how the finished product would turn out, as only a still image of the manipulated footage was available for preview on set and the pixel altering software, Redimensionator, wasn't finished or applied until after the dancers were filmed. He explains how the program takes one column of pixels from each frame of video and shuffles them to create a new image. Run this process on each frame of video in sequence and you have something like what we're seeing in the Slithering video (watch a solo dancer here).The dark background and simple lighting focus your attention to the human subjects and their equally interesting shadows. This absence of background distraction creates an overall clean aesthetic, which really sets this project apart from other recent slit-scan videos that we love for different reasons.Although the video is primarily an experiment in computational photography, Forrest also conveys an interest in the actual dance routine and the artistic challenges dancers face when interacting with the software. This is no longer a document of an event, but a re-imagined distortion of the truth. According to Timo Wright, Forrest's collaborator on the project, "the dancer has to find a completely new kind of movement if she wants to control the visual end result."Through software and coding, time is now more maleable than the limits a video camera or editing would normally allow. Images or ideas that were once deemed impossible can now manifest in the digital age through a multitude of post-processing techniques. The results are unmistakably unique and further push the boundaries of our accepted perception. See more of Forrest’s work on his YouTube and Vimeo channels.
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