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Time-lapse photography dramatically speeds up our perception of natural and human processes - plants growing, clouds traversing the sky, day turning into night - the weaving of cloth. To capture the weaving process, film producer and editor Dirk Fischer set a DV camera over and behind the loom, a hand-operated AVL. After each thread was cast , the weaver bounded off the bench, and clicked one frame. The process took days - and the dog bumped the camera at least once. When the piece was finally complete, Dirk edited the frames into a time-lapse sequence. To this, I added a musical sound track created by Matt Fry, and a short dialogue created with Apple-generated voices. The first voice quotes Logan saying: "All art can be reduced to a sequence of binary bits . . . zeros and ones in endless succession." The second voice asks: "And time? What of time?"; to which the first voice responds: "Kurzweil has said: ' Time exponentially speeds up.' " There was a time when cloth was a major textual media, but this was supplanted by manuscripts laboriously created in isolated monasteries. The invention of the printing press speeded the process still further. Now, with digital technology, we can type a letter and send it around the world in minutes. Text has been reduced to binary bits, as has art, and the process by which it can be created and transmitted continues to speed up exponentially. W. Logan Fry
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