Shifting the timeframe as a creative practise to tell a different story
Whenever we talk about climate change or planetary boundaries being overshot, discussions are held on a very abstract and hypothetical level based mostly on the predictions by scientists and researchers. It involves an immense amount of cognitive effort of any regular person to imagine these processes stretching out over time and into our future. These are not events which can be perceived with our human eyes and experienced directly with our bodies.
The emerging field of high quality but low-budget time lapse photography has a lot of potential to be our technological prosthesis, our third eye which enables us to look into the past and observe slow occurring events more easily. By changing the timeframe, any video editor with decent skills can tell a different story, a story of our existence on this planet. Through time-lapse videos we can observe the actual rotation of our planet, gaze at the rise of Milky Way, see how the weather evolves and perceive the complexity and rhythms of our modern civilisations. Even the most convinced advocates of reason must have to admit that these images have something mythical and are extremely strong.
In their movies (Qatsi Trilogy, Baraka) time-lapse pioneers Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke first performed the task of taking the viewer on a journey through time (and not only that!). Meanwhile, 2 decades later every hobby photographer with decent equipment can do the same and present a mythical and sublime experience of mother earth in universe on a computer screen. Whereas in most of the footages of the time-lapse communities on Vimeo or Youtube you can gaze for hours at the beauty of earth, the full communicative potential of this creative method hasn’t been harnessed so far. Good examples, which set the direction we should be heading with the time-lapse fun is Greenpeace’s short clip “breath in, breath out” or James Balog's "extreme ice survey".
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