Time After Time #009: It’s About Time

The last couple of entries from Time After Time have got a bit heavy and involved, so perhaps we should lighten things up a bit. Also, we’re about to go all out promoting It’s About Time very soon now, so here’s something to maybe help you remember the name:

It’s About Time (the 1966 version above, that is) was created by Sherwood Schwarz as the follow up to his previous hit, Gilligan’s Island. If you watch some of the clips from the show available online, you can probably tell why it only ever ran for one season. Still, it’s got a pretty jaunty theme tune, no?

Time After Time #008: Sergey Larenkov

Stunning images by Sergey Larenkov, blending contemporary photographs of cities in Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic with shots taken in exactly the same spots during the Second World War. Fascinating and chilling, looking at them is like walking over someone’s grave, while somebody else walks over yours.

There’s a few more images after the jump, but make sure to check out Larenkov’s livejournal, which has lots.

Time After Time #007: Grant Morrison and the Hyperentity

We’ve already seen why it’s impossible for us to travel backwards (or sideways, or diagonally) in time. Here, Grant Morrison (one of British comics’ two great eccentric wizards) tries to explain to a slightly out of his depth interviewer what life on earth would look like if you were able to stand outside of time and view all of it at once.

(unless you’re particularly interested in very geeky and out of date comics news, start the video seven minutes in to skip straight to the relevant part)

Time has been a recurring theme in Morrison’s work. The Invisibles would be the key text here, but he did (amongst other things) also once write a story about a young Adolf Hitler living in Liverpool and being haunted by the future ghosts of John Lennon and Morrissey.

Time After Time #006: Zimbardo’s Secret Powers of Time

A charming (and charmingly illustrated) talk given by Phillip Zimbardo (he of the infamous Stanford prison experiment) explaining how the way that you think about time can have huge effects on your life. He’s old, so he ends up blaming everything on video games, but don’t hold that against him. There’s still an awful  lot of interesting stuff here which helps explain why you might do things that you know, in the long-term, will be bad for you. Also why Protestant countries have higher GNP than Catholic countries and why there’s no future tense verb in Sicillian dialect.

This is a ten minute animated highlights package. If you’ve got the time, his full length live-action talk is embedded after the jump.

Time After Time #005: World’s Longest Photograph

A photograph is a record of a moment captured, frozen in time. But exactly how long is ‘a moment’? When you take a photo, the camera’s shutter opens for a fraction of a second to expose the film (or the digital cell) inside. Usually this fraction will be somewhere between 1/250 and 1/60 of a second – and generally speaking, the smaller the aperture of your shutter, the longer you you need to expose the film. Using a pinhole camera it’s possible to keep the shutter open for longer than a second without over-exposing the picture. Much, much longer in some cases.

This image by Michael Wesely, of the destruction and subsequent rebuilding of MoMA in New York, was taken continuously over a period of thirty four months and is thought to be one of the longest single-exposure photographs ever taken.

(via itchyi.co.uk, which has more pictures and a very interesting interview with the photographer)

Time After Time #004: The Wilderness Downtown

A very interesting, ‘personalised’ video made by Chris Milk for the Arcade Fire song We Used To Wait. The video mixes Google Maps and Street View images of your childhood home with pre-recorded elements.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com

This is billed as ‘A Chrome experiment’ and there are all sorts of fascinating, geekily technical, Web 3.0 things going on I’m sure, but from our point of view the key aspect here is the slightly jarring disconnect between what these images are supposed to represent and what they are actually of. Although the song’s lyrics and the setup for the video seem to make it quite clear that this is all to do with the place where you grew up, Google’s images of that place will be, at most, only a couple of years old. What you’re seeing is your childhood home now, not the memory of what your home and neighbourhood were like when you were a child.

This isn’t supposed to be a criticism, by the way. The way the images are used still gave me the visceral feeling I think I was supposed to get, and there’s all sorts of weird things happening with the contemporary, publicly accessible images crashing into your own very personal memories and then Milk’s virtual world literally bursting through both of those. I doubt of any of it is accidental either – “Now our lives are changing fast”, indeed.

(N.B. The site claims it will only work properly in Google Chrome but apparently it will also run, though maybe not quite so well, in Firefox, Safari or other HTML5-capable browsers)

Time After Time #003: Professor Brian Cox

The first thing everyone knows about the space/time contiuum is that time is the fourth dimension after the three dimensions of space. So if we can move backwards and forwards and left and right and up and down in space, we ought to have the same freedom in time, right? If we could just somehow stop these stupid human bodies from moving inexorably forward in the same direction at a constant rate of one second per second, the posibilities could be (literally!) endless.

Here (if you can wrap your head around the maths) TV’s sexiest scientist, Brian Cox, explains simply and clearly why Einstien says that’s never going to happen.

Time After Time #002: Blade Runner

Spoiler Warning! (For a 28 year old fim, but still) This is from the very end of Blade Runner, so if you’ve never seen it before then for god’s sake, look away now and go and buy the DVD, you’ve been missing out.

When I originally thought of this, it was because of the line “time to die”, echoed from earlier in the film and taken as a title and a sample by Pop Will Eat Itself (as well as other, lesser bands). The really key line though is the one before that, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” There are parallels you could make about the ephemeral nature of live performance (especially performances scheduled to take place outside during the British autumn?) but the main thing is it’s a beautiful speech about humanity, human experience and the value of a life lived, no matter how short.

In fact, it’s probably the second greatest speech infamously written on set by a supporting actor. This would be the first (which also makes reference to time, by the way).

Time After Time #001: Cyndi Lauper

Time After Time is an ephemeral collection of virtual objects relating to, commenting on, or hopefully inspirational for those taking part in our current project, It’s About Time. Which is a fancy way of saying it’ll be a whole bunch of videos, pictures and links that are tangentially about time in some form or another.

It’s probably worth saying at the outset that many of those will be pop songs with the word ‘Time’ in the title. So it seems appropriate to start with this.

Really this is just a sweet love song with a cute (but sad!) video that doesn’t have an awful lot to say about the structure or perception of time,  but it does give this mini-project its name, so it deserves to be first. And what’s wrong with sweet love songs and cute/sad videos anyway?