Timeslip

-

 

More fragments of frozen time unearthed today: a box of 35mm slides that have been buried in the spare bedroom for I don't know how long. Judging by the image content, either this was one film that had been in the camera from 1992-1997 or my slides need a good sorting out!

This is kind of a three-part time-out-of-time post: the slide featured in the picture is of comet Hale Bopp seen over the roof of the house we used to live in at Brynbella, taken on time-lapse sometime just after it reached its last perihelion: the film was processed in June 1997, so it can't be far past its closest point, on April 1st that year. By August 7th 2012, it was 33.2 Astronomical Units from the Sun, a distance of over three billion miles. By now it will be indistinguishable against the cosmic background.

The transparency is photographed in my Dad's old handheld slide viewer, a Paterson from the early 1960s, which still sports a crude repair Dad made in the late sixties, when the catch on the lid broke: it's still held together with the same bit of old wire. The lamp in this thing hasn't been changed since that time, and I've just put a fresh set of batteries into it, the previous pair having lasted since the 1970s. I know this thing doesn't exactly get daily use, but I think it's probably paid for itself by now, both personally and environmentally: throwaway culture? We didn't know the meaning of the phrase then.

Slices of time, personal and cosmological; held together in my hand and now recreated as a completely new digital artefact in the image above: I find this circularity, and the connections it makes, fascinating and humbling in equal measure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Sister Ray

-
Image
Ray Keats - aka Ann Key - local artist & family friend, died this morning. She'd been ill for some years, but never let it get in the way of her work or of tending to the massive network of friends, colleagues and fans she had accumulated over the decades. Her house on the High Street of Rachub, just below where we live - a former cockle factory(!) - bought many years ago when she and her late husband Ronald moved here from Manchester to set up home in Yr Achub, is currently still home to her paintings and drawings, and the front window displays her work, including the last drawing she made in hospital, just days before she died. Her good friend Colin has been a diamond in her latter years, looking out for her and just being there when she needed him. She will be much missed by this tiny community of ageing bohemians up here in the hills, but suffice it to say, George, her cat, will be well looked after now she's gone.
Read more