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Hypertemporality Animations US based digital artist Peter Baldes repeats a basic animated GIF image over and over again on a web page in his Hypertemporality Animations. But while his base elements are simple, the series title highlights the unstable terrain of the digital landscape. Shifting factors like processor speed, bandwidth, and whether or not the page has been viewed before mean the work plays out differently for every user. Red hues stutter hesitantly down the screen on initial view, then cascade quickly on a page refresh. Baldes dissects and deconstructs easily available imagery for his montages: a scroll through the New York Times website, some Lindsay Lohan portraits, a quick pan around a Google Earth city block. Revealing the System: An Interview with Peter Baldes Almost all of my digital work deals with time in some way, compressing it, expanding it, experiencing it, but there are also some sort of silly reasons that brought me to this work. My first web piece (it's gone now) was a collage generator. Some perl scripts picked images randomly and plopped them in a page, a reload got you a new collage, a unique experience for the viewer... but my main interface with that piece was through my webcounter and stats info. I realized that this reload thing was great if you're into stats (and I am totally fascinated with webstats) People would just reload over and over and over! So a lot of my web pieces have been about this unique page/experience for each viewer. The hypertemps (ed. Peters website/blog) are another way to create a unique experience. And get people to reload! The source material you use seems to be common web imagery - lohan montages, lo-res video stills, google maps pans, did you choose it for any particular reason? Some of the imagery I start with has some pop culture currency, the Lohan image is from a YTMND page, it has been viewed millions of times and thousands of other pieces have been made as responses to it, so with that particular one I knew it would resonate with people, maybe not as a new idea, but a new way to see something familiar. The other thing I am really aware of is anything on the web that changes over time, sometimes it is just other people's gifs, sometimes it is my interaction with software, scrolling, panning etc, I am more interested in using my own interactions with the machine than finding other people's imagery though. However, the blog does allow for me to react quickly when something out there strikes me. The staggered, hesitant nature of the work as it unfolds is an unusual experience for users who are used to fluid interfaces and seamless video environments. Are you interested in working against the current digital environment, or revealing it's limitations? Remember when jpegs loaded top down, it was some sort of weird compression thing that has either disappeared or I have too much bandwidth to notice these days, well anyways, I loved that. It was another level of information, you become aware of the state of your machine, or that a server was really busy, or that the internet was really busy. I guess I want people to feel that layer of information about this system (the internet) that we take for granted. I also love pushing the limits of machines, some of the gif sets take hours to render, if you open up too many windows of the hypertemps you can bog down your computer. This will change as technology changes, someday my animations won't work anymore - they will load in an instant and look exactly like the original. Thats okay though. Am I working against something? Maybe just people's awareness, that we are using a system, and it's a pretty interesting, elegant system. Your blog contains a year or so of experimentation and progression using this overall structure. Do you feel the work has evolved or been refined during this time? What's next for you? The work has changed, but I still look at the first ones I made with fascination. I just want to keep on making them and see where It takes me. The google maps and scrolling websites were pretty exciting discoveries to me. Hopefully there are more out there. |
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