InterArts Visual Narrative/Time to Space

1 Time to Space (spatial narrative)

Visual narratives and the representation of time passing

Also, narrative created with passing through space

2 Altamira caves

• Sometimes looked at for their graphical content as single images more than for their placement in space by traditional art historians, but the arrangement of images is distributed throughout caves – suggesting that the underground location and passage from one cave to another was important.

• Although we can only guess, perhaps they were connected with ritual, and in particular with progressive rituals

• Sound would also have been an important element, and we can only guess whether the reverberant qualities of the space and the necessity for artificial lighting played a role in the choice of location.

3 Egyptian papyrus

• Egyptian papyrus scrolls and bas reliefs. Mentioned in Scott McCloud.
• Start lower L., read bottom row to R., move up a row, read from R to L, move up, read from L to R.
• Direction of read determined by direction images are facing
• Combination of words and images that tell a story

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4,5. Scenes from the life of Buddha, temple of Borobodur, Java, 9th C

• Required circumnavigation - going up inclined ramp around central core to temple
• Circularity of time?

This pyramid-like structure is built on and around a natural hill. Construction was started sometime around the beginning of the 8th century. In plan, it resembles a tantric mandala with six square terraces supporting three circular ones. Its been called a three dimensional rendering of the Buddhist conception of the cosmos. The square terraces are covered with carved relief's that can be read as an "instruction manual" for attaining enlightenment.

6 Images from the life of St. Francis of Assissi, 1444

SASSETTA 1392? - 1450

• "These seven panels come from the back of a large two-sided polyptych made for the high altar of San Francesco, Borgo Sansepolcro and depict the life of Saint Francis, founder of the Franciscan Order, who died in 1226. The altarpiece was commissioned in 1437 and was installed in 1444. The front, showing the Virgin and Child with saints, would have been seen by the congregation, while the back, with Saint Francis in Glory, would have been seen by the friars in the choir. The eight panels of the Life of Saint Francis which accompanied this image would also only have been seen by the friars."

7 Emakimono – Japanese hand scrolls

• Scrolls themselves move - unroll from l hand roll up with r hand
• Chinese/Japanese (originally from India)
• depicting battles, romance, religion, folktales, and even stories of the supernatural world.
• scenes illustrating narrative tales
• viewed from right to left; the left hand unrolling and the right re-rolling the scroll.

8. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road [[3]]

• On the Road has been described as the defining novel of the so-called Beat Generation.

9. Duccio, 1310

• Jesus opens the eyes of a man born blind
• Man on R is same as man behind him, at 2 different times
• blind man is shown twice: first having his eyes touched, and then at the moment his sight is miraculously restored. *The two episodes are linked visually by the blind man's stick.

10. Altar triptich

• Frames not sequential but co-existing but -
• Open/closability gives it a temporal dimension - it can be on or off, playing or not, it has a beginning and an end
• people from the present (esp. donors, patrons) were frequently included, mixing times in each frame and between frames

11 French toile

• series of tableaux from the harvest
• time not sequential but co-existing

12 1440 illuminated manuscript

• image plays as large a part as text,
• comes in a sequence of pages

13 Nurnberg, 17th C. A Well-tested and hallowed recipe for the evil disease of disobedient wives.

• from 1460’s onward - religious broadsheets
• Cautionary tale, method of reinforcing the social order through wide distribution of instruction manuals.
• Stories about the place of women esp. popular in Germany in 17th C.
• lots of material on politics, religion (many critiques of the Catholic church’s attempts to subvert Protestant governments)
• From The Comic Strip by David Kunzle, in Narrative Art, ed. Hess, Ashbery

14 John Bull’s Progress, James Gilray 1793

• Early political cartoon - social commentary
• Invention of etching - creating lines on a copper plate with acid - allowed much greater detail than the previous woodcuts, and political satire flourished, esp. in England.
• Political satire, ironic juxtaposition of words and pictures, exaggeration - still part of the vocabulary of comics today.
• From Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels, A history of Comic Art, Roger Sabin

15 William Blake 1757 - 1827 [[4]]

• He wrote, illustrated, printed and distributed his own work
• like internet, wanted to make widely accessible
• Echoes contemporary goals - to make people self sufficient artist/technologists

16 Chronophotographs Etienne-Jules Marey 1830 - 1904

• Moving from broad distribution to the study and depiction of motion in still images,
• Physician who studied the body inside and out, first to understand circulation of blood, then muscles;
• invented electromyography

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17 Chronophotograph of dog running, Marey, 1893, 100 photos per sec.

18 Eadweard Muybridge 1830-1904

• In Scott McCloud’s categories of panel to panel transitions, these would be

Moment to moment

19 comic strip

• Portraying multiple times on same page, using gutters to indicate separate times
• Polyptych, but also moment to moment

20 City of Light, City of Dark Drawings: Brian Floca, Story by Avi

• Also polyptych, gutters meant exclusively for showing sucessive moments, otherwise consistent space as BG
• Followed by (relative) CU of people in upper R on rim of torch whose view this is

21 Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

• Passage of time in which BGs are different, each different time gets a different frame.
• Size/shape of frame changes to accommodate bed and keep it approx. same size in each “shot”.
• McCloud would call these action to action transitions, more separation in time than moment to moment but same basic idea - next thing in the sequence

22 Christophe, “Histoire sansparoles - Un Arroseur Public”, Le Petit Francais Illustre, 8/3/89

• Lumiere film - Arroseur et arrose, 1895
• Influence of theater - respecting the proscenium that defines the playing area
• Also action to action

23 L’Arroseur arrose, 1895 (The sprinkler sprinkled)

• "Ever seeking to innovate, the Lumières took some of the first steps toward narrative film with L'Arroseur Arrosé."

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24 Edwin S. Porter

• A day in the life of an American fireman 1903 (paper print?)
• Like Griffith in the post-1908 period, Porter was interested in exploring ways of depicting simultaneous actions in different shots, in different locations and/or from different perspectives. [magic/narrative/porter.html]

25 movie theater

• An etching of a c.1895 vaudeville house converted into a make-shift "movie" theatre

26 City of Light, City of Dark Drawings: Brian Floca, Story by Avi

• Shots that emulate establishing shot, POV shot (following up stairs), LS from different angle
• cinematic techniques
• But used spatially on the same page rather than sequentially

27 City of Light, City of Dark Drawings: Brian Floca, Story by Avi

• Arrows leave no doubt about order of images (although would it really matter if we read them differently?)

28 Amy’s Double Life “in between” space can represent various things – inner life of feelings, simultaneous events & experiences, etc: Interesting spatial representation of action, place, and consciousness. From website Modern Tales

29 Lorna Simpson 31 [[7]]

*Lorna Simpson, 31, 2002. 31 short films transferred to 31 DVDs played simultaneously on 31 15 inch flat screen televisions, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

"Using already clearly understood and accepted representation for the passage of time as a way to talk about the rhythms of daily life. Simpson's unknown woman is not always where we expect her to be. In undermining the viewer's received expectations, Simpson exposes the regulated structures and controlled parameters of social space by which all our lives are governed."

30 Richard Valentin Waking Hours [[8]]

31 Andrea Polli Fly’s Eye [[9]]

• Position of image not dependent on sequence in time, but rather spatial distribution reflects formal properties of the constituent images such as contrast, color, composition.
• Another kind of logic for arranging images.
• From Andrea Polli: 'The Fly's Eye' was actually a series of projects, analyzing the

video in different ways.

• The main ones were:

• 1] Tracking the position of the lightest point in the frame and

placing a copy of the frame in a relative position in a larger field.

• 2] Tracking the position of a particular color and placing a

copy of the frame in a relative position in a larger field. For example, tracking the color 'red' in the film 'Moulin Rouge'

• 3] Detecting movement in an area of the frame and copying

only the area of movement in that position on the frame. Since this was taking only a portion of the video rather than the whole frame, the size of the image field was kept the same as the video.

32 Barbara Kossy

• “I assemble bits of the ordinary to create an extraordinarily detailed sweep of space,” says Kossy, “ending up with fun and voyeuristic images of an artist’s work-a-day world.”
• Multiple perspectives are reminiscent of Rashomon, multiple times - memento

33 Dianne Hagaman Howie Feeds Me [[10]]

• Not strictly sequential, but associative.
• Scott McC calls these Non sequiturs, no logical relationship, but there is a formal, or thematic, or some other kind of relationship.

34 VR/interactive narrative

• Home – fragmented narrative experienced differently each time the environment is navigated
• 6 different character voices in each room [[11]]

35 Josephine Anstey/Dave Pape

• The Thing Growing

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• In 1972, [Paul] Kos {conceptual artist from California} mocks militant nationalism by presenting on a video screen a typewriter that repeatedly taps out mar-mar-march in a military rat-a-tat-tat cadence. To see the piece, visitors must walk across wooden planks that compel them to adopt a high step—a kind of forced march to art.

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