Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Flashback to January/2012: Melt/ Crystalize

During the only significant snowfall of this past winter, I made a snowball with a red/pink center, then used a heat gun to slowly melt it.

I recorded the process.  Sadly, the camera's battery ran out and the sun went down before I could completely melt the snowball, but I used the footage I got to make a video.  I sped up the footage to four times its original rate and reversed it so that it ends up as a fully formed snowball again.  Here's a low-res version of that video:


Here are some process stills I pulled from the video recording (note how much clearer they are...stupid video file size limits...): 














And here are some images I took during the act itself: 
















It was a pretty spontaneous thing--when I did it, I was thinking about using heat to carve out an architectural interior space in the snow over time, without ever touching the snow.  The color was a playful element--I thought it would be more exciting if there was a reveal involved in the process.  It also made it sort of bodily, like the snow was bleeding, or growing orifices.  When I showed it to my class, the professor suggested that there was some sexual tension between the heat gun and the responsive snow.  I honestly hadn't been thinking consciously about that dynamic when I made this, but I can definitely see how he got there.  This is an important piece for me to look back on because it was my first concrete experiment with video as a medium, and because it involved me performing an action.

No comments:

Post a Comment