in potentia: an mfa thesis

Introduction

In Potentia is a project about creating a photograph, using a sum of frames from an early, digitized motion picture, and synthesizing them through digital processing. By using computer programming to leverage the data- base architecture of the pixel, I am attempting to create a computerized, synchronic vision of a mechanical diachronic process, as image frames are re-spliced into one, totalized, synthetic image.

The pixel represents the volatility of the moment within the continuum of the screen. In any “given moment’s scenarios”, it is responsive, interactive; time-in-the- screen exists as a negation of the fixed, an infinite present reified as data. Data that is subject to change at any time.

The print becomes the mortal registration of this data through time; a body. By deliberately inserting my images into the body of a photographic print, I return them to a place of timefulness, abandoning the timelessness inherent within the screen space.

The images reveal another way of looking at the mediums of early film-based cinema (essentially motion-capture experiments) and photography through a (fatal) digital interrogation, and by exploring the role of its recording as an archive of time and space. Rendered as prints, they record the collapse of every moment as an implosion, collaborating in the mortality of a motion picture. Fixed and still, they become a momento mori.

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