TIME, TRAINS, and TRUTH

We see time’s wounds, we sense its passage but its shadow doesn’t so much as cool our skin. Time is not perceived directly, we have no specific sense devoted to the perception of time. Multiple data streams are processed by several spongy bits of brain: the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, basal ganglia, suprachiasmatic nucleus, the occipital lobe (the image processing center for all that we see). The great trick is that all that information arrives and is processed at different speeds, a disparity reconciled by the brain in about one-tenth of a second. In 1882 E.R. Clay called this moment the “specious present.”[1] The specious present is fabricated by our minds—a parsing of the past that has ceased to exist and future that does not yet exist—the present is a fiction approximating a dimensionless slice of time. But what if we could watch time like an inexorable slouching beast, or give form to the passing of the present, not in memory or shadowy afterimages but by capturing the present?

Daniel Crooks is an artist. He’s from New Zealand but lives in Melbourne, Australia. He works from his shed, mostly. He meddles with time as if it could be manipulated, mined, shaped, and sculpted. As if it were not predestined, or forever radiating away from us. Crooks slices time, revealing an intricate and beautiful anatomy. Crooks is a ‘new media’ artist: he instrumentalizes technology and the moving image to orchestrate ways of seeing time.

Of Trains, their Timetables, and Pedestrians

Trains and the moving image appeared at almost the same moment in history. Movement at speed altered human perception of space and time, an assault so great that people fainted and vomited – though presumably not in that order. Similarly, one of the Lumiere brothers’ earliest films The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896), caused panic in the cinema as a full-sized train rushed toward the audience.

This might be the birth of cinema and, in its infancy, it had yet to develop a cinematic language. It is a 50-second, unedited, unmoving, continuous shot of everyday life. So, too, is Crooks’ work Train No. 1 (2002-13), in which a train arrives at the station accompanied by the almost familiar clickety-clack. The vision, too, seems to clatter with staccato repetition. The unblinking footage is sliced and displaced as if to offset the present long enough for us to contemplate its passing. Objects and urban detritus are repeated in adjacency, we see their relative positions in time, each staccato beat a present now past. The film recalls the famous chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge, and Etienne-Jules Marey who coined the term and used the process, overlapping the images, to study the phases of movement. (Etienne-Jules Marey also invented a train timetable, La méthode graphique (1885), a milestone in data visualization in which the stations are listed vertically, spaced according to their relative distance, and the hours of the day are arrayed horizontally such that the angle of each line reflects the speed of a train.)

In Crooks’ Static No. 9 (a small selection of something larger) (2012) we see horizontal slices through the video frame. Temporal strands saunter past, some twisting like DNA, others like creeping millipedes, or strange temporal tendrils blooming. At times, we feel as though we are panning ever upward, then still, this strange world passing. The soundtrack of urban bleeps, sonar scuffling, and human voices provides an uncanny metropolitan hustle; perhaps it’s then that we notice the legs, hands, and feet – we are people-watching. Their paths are like those of Marey’s trains tracked in temporal space, their movements seemingly predestined by some complex underlying geometry.

Marey’s timetable reveals a temporal geography long before Swedish geographer Torsten H?gerstrand defined the ontology of time-space geography. In his paper What About People in Regional Science (1970) H?gerstrand writes, "In time-space the individual describes a path, starting at the point of birth and ending at the point of death…the life paths become captured within a net of constraints, some of which are imposed by physiological and physical necessities and some are imposed by private and common decisions…An individual can never free himself from such constraints"[2] Crooks’ contemporary work captures the inexorable quality both of Marey’s trains steaming from Paris to Lyon and the captured freedom we describe on our paths between life and death. We are seeing just a small selection of something larger. What paths might we be on, and to what end do we carry ourselves?

The Illusion of Choice

In Garden of Parallel Paths (2012) we pan across these possible trajectories in the form of parallel laneways. Melbourne is a grid city; the Central Business District and inner suburbs are run through with service lanes and back alleys. The first thing we notice is that there is a dimensionless boundary between one lane and the next. Shadows fall from unique suns; each lane is discrete. Beyond each slice are worlds we can’t reach, parallel universes subject to their own net of constraints, in which we made different choices. We travel across these parallel paths, the pavement changing in front of us with each slice. Pedestrians appear in the frame, some walking away or toward us in one lane or another. Others travel with us. They appear briefly, only to disappear beyond the narrow frame. We must be like them, only passing through each of these worlds. There is a man who stands at the corner, not entering, nor moving. He watches us as we pass and as we watch him, he wanders away, just as we slip into another parallel path. ?

But in An Embroidery of Voids (2013) we are sailing down a laneway. This lane has been sliced and spliced with another lane hanging incongruously within the first. We float through the portal into the next and then another, and another, and another all fitting with monocular precision within its predecessor; a bizarre labyrinth of nested worlds. In previous works Crooks has been slicing space-time vertically, revealing in thin slices of vision a strange unseen choreography. This work, however, cuts thick slices of space as we travel into it.

It is both an affirmation and a disassembly of monocular vision: the perspectival construction forced by the medium and by the laneways themselves is undermined. The camera is set close to eye level, a horizon line and vanishing point clearly defined by the fence-lines, these orthogonal armatures leading to a vanishing point we can never approach. Each frame offers an alternative universe, as if in our sailing we might travel with each alternative self, as if each portal were a missed opportunity or a catastrophe avoided. Like the earlier train tracks, the laneways offer few opportunities for diversion, few chances to truly change our trajectory. In the final frames, two chefs perch like figures from Rodin’s Gates of Hell. The laneway(s) turn back on a dead end, a black fence consumes our vision and I felt a little pang of grief.

The Tenth Principle of Tai Chi

If the steady pace and unblinking footage of the Voids provides little solace, it creates the desire to hold time still, if only to perceive more vividly. The tenth principle of Tai Chi is to “seek stillness in movement,” as if to recognise the human desire for a peace lost in Eden. And to acknowledge that we cannot halt time, but that through seeking, seeing, looking, we might apprehend something in the baroque crevices of our own movements.

In Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2010) Crooks accommodates the minute and ceaseless catastrophes of existence and manufactures a method to look, see, and seek stillness. A man performs Tai Chi in a small courtyard, his movements slower than even his discipline demands, while birds call via electronic ambience. His figure begins to contort, to double and treble as his body moves through space, as if he dances on some unseen temporal line. That slice is just one pixel wide, captured and displaced, apprehended in time before it is lost but still moving as another pixel slice is captured and both are displaced again, and again, and again. The displaced pixels create a portal in the footage, forcing it open. As each slice is preserved, corresponding information at the edge is lost, and eventually in capturing this terribly thin slice of the world, the rest is lost. By the end, even the man moves beyond this thin contour of time and we are left with a precise but unintelligible blur that once was the world. Crooks accepts the ever-shifting nature of his subject and by extension our world; in seeking stillness he makes concrete the rococco geometries, friction points, folds, and fugitive sculptures in our movements. Crooks’ ‘time slice’ is an almost complete description of a single contour of time but, being just one pixel, it can only exist ‘in camera.’ It remains inaccessible to us, intangible, and so still dimensionless.

Truth

Crooks has been refining a method to transport the temporal forms he creates on screen into realized three-dimensional objects. The screen images do already suggest forms in space, perhaps none more than his Imaginary Objects, which shows a sinuous wisp turning in a void. Its nature and genesis are not clear, nor perhaps does it matter. Rather, the point is its allusions to corporeal possibilities. It appears simultaneously ephemeral and concrete like smoke and marble, or liquid drapery. In truth, it’s a scrunched up bit of paper, rotating lazily on a turntable, almost a parody of artless drollery. Yet the truth of the object is not in its subject but in the qualities it reveals through observation. It’s like René Descartes’ ball of wax, taken freshly from the hive, still sweet with honey, still smelling of flowers, its colour, size, and even resonance apparent. Yet when brought close to the fire, all these distinct qualities are destroyed even while its puddle remains. What did we know of Descartes’ bit of wax if everything we saw, smelled, tasted is gone? Not what our senses brought, not even our imaginations but our reason, the perceptions of our mind. Descartes asked us to abstract from all that does not belong to the wax and see what remains—nothing—except a certain extended thing which is flexible and moveable,[3] res extensa. So too, with Crooks’ droll paper ball, now stretched and twisted in time, all that we might have observed of its existence has been displaced and replaced by this imaginary object.

How, then, to extend the imaginary into the world, or perhaps to translate, transpose, or transport it? The monocular view of the camera creates a projection of form, like perspective, an approximation we accept as approaching truth. An approximation that fails under the strain of capturing time-space figures as they port into the specious present. Crooks’ work depends on technology to find the work he makes, to see the things he sees. The technologies and contraptions he deploys are intrinsic to the qualities and insights of the work. For this next portal to open he had to find the right technologies or sacrifice the fidelity of his earlier discoveries. Crooks researched LIDAR scanning, corner pinning, RED cameras, laser levels, and brute trigonometry, but after presenting his research during a Futurelab Residency in Linz he was told, "You’ve got to talk to Otto." Otto, it turns out, was developing a system deploying laser trackers to trace figures in space. Abandoning his earlier research, Crooks began with SICK laser trackers, Kinect cameras, and polygon point-clouds. The resultant series Truths Unveiled by Time are works comprising 2D contours of figures as they moves through space, stacked where the third-dimension is a unit of time. They no longer represent data-visualization in the tradition of Marey but are now fully realized, as Crooks says, like "beings from another dimension sliding into the gallery and sliding out again."[4]

These works, like their parents—the Static and Imaginary Objects series—reveal the geometries of an ephemeral world. They recall, too, baroque and rococo marble sculpture and one in particular: Antonio Corradini’s Veiled Truth (1751), which stands in the Sansevero Chapel in Naples. Veiled Truth is a marble woman draped in the sheerest of fabrics (disconcertingly sexy for a tomb monument), her veil a marble conceit; she conceals very little. Crooks’ Truths might be unveiled by time but the once legible figure is lost, transfigured into this new version of itself. We are yet able to recognize this being from another dimension. I’m reminded of that other virtuosic work facing Veiled Truth: Francesco Queirolo’s Release from Deception (1752–59). The deceived figure is still tangled in that net, struggling against the finite limitations of his body.

Looking at these works, from trains to truth, as I have over many months and even years, I am disappointed. I sense that I’ve failed. From the first, I had the sense that soon and very soon a revelation was at hand, that soon and very soon I would understand. Crooks sees intently the indignant business of contemporary life, the morning commute, city pavements, the back alleys and service lanes, lonely figures and paper waste. Crooks makes them figures of contemplation, opening grottos in the spatio-temporal plane to make time for stillness. Yet, for me, the work remains opaque while the feeling that even now all might be revealed lingers frustratingly out of reach; a perceptual leap beyond my meagre senses.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been measured and found wanting.

Originally published in LA+ 08 TIME, Department of Landscape Architecture University of Pennsylvania, 2018

[1] Anonymous (E. Robert Kelly),?The Alternative: A Study in Psychology. London: Macmillan and Co., 1882[2] Torsten H?gerstrand, “What About People in Regional Science” in Papers of the Regional Science Association? 24,?no. 1 (1970): 6–21.[3] René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1911), trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane.[4] In conversation with the artist, Canberra 19th October, 2016

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