singing eye > Dark Blue Horizon

Dark Blue Horizon 2003

made for Faces'03 Festival
concept, image Mendel Hardeman
music Seung-Ah Oh
duration 8'44
original format video, variable (DV-PAL, 4:3 or 16:9)

Seung-Ah asked me to make a video for a trio piece she was writing. On the moment she told me what the title of the piece was - "Dark Blue Horizon" - I immediately knew what I wanted to do.
I had been working a lot inventing different ways to mix up time and space in video - some other video's that came out of that are "Kyrie Eleison" and "ta Volonté soit faite". I decided to make a scan-diagram of the sea, in such a way that the motion of the waves is horizontally plotted against a time axis.
I filmed the sea on a stormy day, for about 10 minutes. What you see in the video that came out after I processed it, is a flat image which shows the movement, through time, of one single vertical video line - as a diagram where the X-axis represents time, and the Y-axis represents the shape of the sea surface on that particular moment.
The video starts with an extremely broad time-axis - the first image shows the development of the sea (from left to right) in a very short period of 0,04 seconds - as you can see in the first picture of the slideshow, the variation of the sea surface is minimal. But slowly the time-axis becomes more and more compressed, and you start seeing more motion, until it finishes in a kind of frozen storm of very tall icy waves silently passing by.
If this sounds hard to imagine, just have a look at the pictures and you will understand what I mean.