Kodak’s first digital camera was made by the Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory in 1975. The subsequent image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set. Wonderful.
Orson Welles on Citizen Kane and Rosebud
Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Untitled (steps of The Art Institute of Chicago), 1950s, Gelatin silver print, 7 x 10.25 in
Eadweard Muybridge, City Hall Under Construction, 1873, Valley of the Yosemite, from Mariposa Trail, No. 3, 1872, and Pigeon Point Lighthouse, 1873.
Look at the cloud in the top center of each picture. Muybridge was known for altering the skies of pictures he printed.
Excerpt from the Italian documentary La Donna Nel Mundo, circa 1962. Narrated in English by Peter Ustinov, its aim is to explore how different life is for women in the many cultures of the world.
Rumours: A Conversation between Francis Alÿs and James Lingwood, 2005
JL: Walking has its own history – it means very different things in different cultures. Is the British tradition of walking in the landscape – Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the romantic idea of freeing the mind by moving through untamed nature – of interest, or are you more connected to the idea of Surrealist wanderings in the city?
FA: I’m aware that I’m stepping within a tradition of romantic walking, British in particular. In my case, the walking is mainly within the context of the city.
JL: In the 1960s another generation of artists emerged for whom walking was important. Stanley Brouwn and Richard Long and Hamish Fulton in Europe, or someone like Vito Acconci in New York.
FA: One of the London pieces is a kind of homage to Richard Long, but it’s inverting the mechanics of his work. I respect very much his attitude to the medium (Francis – you used the word ‘limpide here’ – please clarify?)
JL: How do you invert his work?
FA: With Richard Long there is often a voluntary act of removing something, or reconfiguring a certain form in the landscape, drawing a line. Making a circle.…In the postcard piece I made in Hyde Park, I walked and there was an involuntary consequence of my walking, which was that some pebbles entered into my shoe.
JL: Does this interest in the involuntary link you to the Surrealists, and their celebration of chance as a counter to rationalism?
FA: Chance yes, but not the kind of chance encounters the Surrealists were interested in.
JL: But you are reacting to what you discover as well as to the proposals you have in your mind? The photographs of different groups of people in London parks – pale skins seeking out the sun, other groups with darker skins staying in the shade, would be an example.
FA: There are photographic pieces which are more to do with observing a phenomenon. The sunny/shady piece followed on from the work I had made of people standing in the line of the shadow of the large flagpole in the middle of the Zocalo in Mexico City. But I play with chance more when it comes to collective actions.
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