Image Compression Revisited

 Have you ever driven somewhere, only to arrive at your destination and wonder, "how did I even get here" in some sense or another. Most drivers have experienced something of the sort, The left spatially aware side of the brain takes over and the right brain which perceives time is subdued; there is more information about it here. In response to this I have filmed various car journeys with a camera attached to my rear-view mirror. Then I have collected all the frames and converted them into a mean of the thousands of stills. Two examples can be seen directly below:

Idris Khan's piece below uses a similar process only starting with stills instead of video, though the considerations for temporarily are less obvious the aesthetic of the image relates very clearly.   

Every…William Turner Postcard From Tate Britain, 2004

Now Continuing my interest with time and the ever present now, I began to reconsider the relvenace of the Ouroboros and my readings in the concerned post.

Considering the visual composition of the mythological creature, I warped the car journeys compressed images into a similar formation.

I decided to try using the same process with the portrait video image compression, here is how it went:

I tried using another process of image warping involving rotation and here is the result.

Now instead of using an mean of all the images I decided to use a process which adds the value of all of them together, a summation. Now in theory I had every image being visible at once.

After warping the image i wanted to experiment further with the image. The sum of all these images was now being represented in this single plane of pixels. I began to consider the entropy of memory that I have been considering through the video work. and if like thermal dynamic entropy i could disperse the image into an all encompassing vessel of these pixels,; as if everything of the image was there, had been absorbed, and yet like the car journey, it is hazy in memory. You know you got from point A to point B, but what happened to everything in between? or what does it matter? I used a prcoess which rpeatedly disperses each pixel in a random direction to create a dispersion.

 this version is blurred to exaggerate the sense of dissolve through dispersion.

Here are more images that speak to this line of thought: