I’ve written about Jared S. Stratodrive many times, and once reminisced about the time -long ago- when we knew one another rather well. True to form, he modified the hardware of the Olympus D-395 to take the images above and below.
They seem like miniatures, or stills from US Army footage of nuclear blast tests: model towns constructed by GIs in the New Mexican desert to evaluate the effects of ever-more-powerful atomic explosions on ordinary, fragile human communities.
The tree’s leaves seem like an oncoming avalanche of smoke, dust, and debris overtaking the thin wood walls of the homes: in their suggestion of frozen disaster, these images underscore how violently photography can arrest the kinetic.
(Here).
And yet everything seems so delicate when shrouded in this light. I am reminded again of the quality Heineman’s photos have: the aesthetic of something captured, gently removed from the streaming temporality of life, measured and recorded and tagged, then let go again. I imagine, thinking about it now, that photography and scale-models appeal to me because they are comparable: the deliberation excision of a specific moment or set of dimensions and its careful reproduction.
(Here).
J.S.S. has even offered to help you learn how to do this, should you be so inclined; and if you’re not, you shouldn’t waste his time unless you want to wind up in his massive skull collection, the likes of which I’ve seen in exactly one place besides his apartment.
once again, mills is far too kind.
my draw towards the infrared spectrum of electromagnetics is quite nothing different than my appreciation of other spectrums entire. did you know that if you could tune a proper radio to 2-8MHz you could hear every time lightning strikes the earth?
perhaps what is striking about the images is that there is no visible light sensed by the data acquiry module within the camera (due to the addition of six layers of roscolux congo blue gel) and all wavelengths sensed exist at all times and exactly between the sensitivity of the wavelengths used for radar and doppler, and that of our own eyes.
huh? here’s the heavily abridged breakdown:
reference = steady direct current = 0.0Hz
3-30Hz (100-10Mm): ultra low frequency; earthquakes, space plasma physics
audio freqs. are mechanical, not electromagnetic, but they’re from about 15-20,000Hz
10-16 kHz: ultrasonic
54-72 MHz: channels 2,3, and 4 on your tv
806-890 MHz: yr cell phone’s operating frequency
30-0.76 µm: infrared light and heat
0.76-0.39 µm: visible light
0.032-0.00001 µm: x-rays
0.0005 ångstroms: cosmic rays
truly, like the predator, this is a world unseen yet relatable when using a sensor attuned. unlike the predator, and through the use of an elemental spectrum-focusing array (in this case of wavelength receiving, and don’t think for a second that your camera’s diopter won’t need some adjustment due to the huge waves it’s now seeing), all things may be “arrested” and transferred onto a permanent medium visible to our own restricted eyeball receptors (i don’t like to use the term “capture” or “arrest” when it comes to photography when it is more precisely a electrochemical or electromechanical spectral shifting of photonic waves (the object still exists, the waves that hit whatever sensor after bouncing off the object didn’t stop at the sensor either)).
cuckoobrain and i were talking about submarine radar and sonar a while back and i explained that the screen is like a readable graph of the pulses because we lack the sensory breadth to usefully intake much of what is going on there. i blame evolution for this but there are some that have been able to push the envelope; let alone those that hear radio stations in their teeth-fillings…
i swear, sometimes i don’t know how she’s able to put up with the crazy yammering i’m wont to do.
anyway, and in summation, i present this mccarthy passage:
“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
