My BFA thesis project, 12 hours; 24 frames is an infrastructure that houses a mechanical flipbook with a perpetual animation depicting a deconstructing image of a phone booth from Hong Kong, as well as a sound installation of the corresponding harmonic notation extracted from the image turned into a composition. The 24 frames of animation present in my piece refers to the 24 frames per second standard within cinema, and also serves as a metaphor for these fragmented perceptions of time difference — each frame a discrete moment in time, collectively forming a narrative that seeks to transcend the spatial and temporal divide.

Schema
In thinking about the nature of photography I am concerned with the fundamental questioning of what constitutes an image. There are many routes one can take when thinking of the ways an image grounds itself, though, I am more interested in what happens to an image after the fact it has been taken. An image’s life does not stop there. Contemporary conventions in image making regards the image to undergo correction, manipulation, reconstruction, and deconstruction to reach its final stage. Does this final image retain the fundamental qualities of the original image? Does it capture the same technical essence and sublimity that struck the photographer? This brings to mind the philosophical thought experiment the Ship Of Theseus (abbreviated as SOT). The paradox contains a tale of Greek mythology: Imagine a ship, belonging to the Greek hero and founder of Athens, Theseus, preserved as a museum piece. Over time, its wooden parts decay and are replaced by new identical parts until, eventually, every part of the ship has been replaced. The question then arises: is the fully restored ship still the original ship of Theseus?

The thought experiment raises fundamental questions about the persistence of identity over time and through change. 12 hours; 24 frames seeks to enter this discourse by way of image disintegration and temporal distortion. The animation of my piece entails the image of the phone booth in its starting position. As seconds elapse, the image [Fig. 1] starts to disintegrate beyond nominal image likeness, resembling a data mosh; the process of manipulating the data of media files in order to achieve visual effects. At the other end of the animation loop is another image [Fig. 2] of the same phone booth, demarcated by the position of the man in the foreground. The vertically disintegrative data mosh is my response to the SOT question. It distills to a certain degree the composition and colors of the image, and the rate of the mosh was controlled by the image’s authentic translation into sound as a parameter. Expanding on this latter point, I strove to work in the ethos of the SOT, where I utilized components of the original image to render a new, albeit abstracted, image.

[Fig. 1]

[Fig. 2]

Within 12 hours; 24 frames, therein lies also inquiry into temporal distortion and the relationship of photography to time. A primary ideological reference for this piece is Giles Deleuze’s theory within Cinema 2 of the Time-Image. In his book, he outlines a form of cinema that breaks away from conventional linear and action-driven narrative structure of movement-images (concept from Cinema 1). These can be distilled into three main points

Unlike conventional cinema, where time is rendered through movement, the time-image involves a direct representation of time itself, often leading into a disjointed or non-linear narrative.
Narratives become more ambiguous, and the connections between scenes and sequences are not always logically clear, reflecting the complexities of time and memory.
The metaphorical term Crystals Of Time to describe moments or sequences in film that blur the distinction between the actual and the virtual, the past and the present, creating a complex temporal experience for the viewer.

This image sequence was selected in particular because it questions whether or not one could convey temporal duration with still images— but rather than providing the frames of movement, it only provides a disjointed sense of before and after. Furthermore, when one seeks to hold a grasp of what the image is, it rapidly disintegrates into the other, then loops back into the original, attempting to blur the distinction between past and present.

The narrative precedence for this image is also influenced by Italian photographer and theorist Luigi Ghirri, who, in interpreting sequential images, writes:

Cinema has moments of greater overall intensity with more narrative moments or with pauses, which are nonetheless necessary for the comprehension of the film. Translated to photography, it can be a sequence, or shots of different distance, or different moments of approach. (Typewritten Manuscript, 1991)

Rather than adopting a conventional establishing-to-closeup shot approach with each shot conveying narrative detail, Ghirri posits a more rhythmic measure to conceive of a photographic presentation which emphasizes the shots in-between. In this sentiment, 12 hours; 24 frames depicts a transitional image; the phone booth is a commonly overlooked infrastructure within a city, yet absolutely vital to communicative bridging and experiencing time synchronicity. The communicative infrastructure of the phone booth was used heavily as a visual motif in metropolitan films from the early aughts, used to signify social and economic progressions towards modernism, and to contextualize the urban milieu within nostalgic narratives. In a similar vein, I see the phone booth (and largely, communication) as a symbolic enabler of time synchronicity, therefore my fixation reflects a strong desire to bypass this barrier. The image seeks to place the phone booth as a central character in this condensed narrative.

Special thanks to Vivian Tran for all the technical support, and all my peers in the thesis cohort for emotional and intellectual encouragement.

© Adrian Wong 2024

© Adrian Wong ²⁰²⁴