Kimberly Kradel 
Lagtime
Lagtime 6 (Original Series)
SF1242 (Lagtime: San Francisco Chinatown)
Slideshow
Original Series 2007
Lagtime: San Francisco Chinatown 2009
purchase individual prints by clicking on link in slideshow
Tenative Scheduled Exhibition: July 2010 @ Autobody Fine Art Gallery in Alameda, California
Contact
Kimberly Kradel
P.O. Box 191473
San Francisco, California 94119
kimba AT kimba DOT com
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"People like us ... know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
-- Albert Einstein
"What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time."
-- John Berger
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Artist Statement
It is important to understand that this project's backstory, and my process of making these photographs, is the major part of this piece, with the photographs being the end result, becoming the project's physical proof.
Note: This project, everything except for the final, tangible photographic prints, exists only in a digital landscape. The films are shot digitally and played over the internet. The photographs are taken with a digital SLR camera and stored on the laptop, then processed with Photoshop. They are then moved to both this website and to the site of my online printer, where the prints are then ordered. It is only when the prints arrive on my doorstep, and that I sign them, that the a full cycle is complete. Some of the prints are quite beautiful, some are merely interesting, while others are neither.
The Backstory:
My original series of work, Lagtime, began while watching TV over a really slow connection on the internet. Occasionally the connection would lag, the moving image stopping in a blur. Not really in one “frame” because digital video doesn’t really have frames as we think of them in film. When the first image stalled and blurred, I thought “That would make a great painting!”
By the appearance of the fourth blurred image, I began shooting these images off of my laptop screen with my dSLR camera, in essence, although not consciously, capturing time in the abstract. I took many photographs over the next few days and as I was liking the resulting still images, I began to watch movies via DVD on my laptop, hoping to create more. I did. A whole series of them.
At first I was only creating interesting images, and not thinking so much about the why of the project.
Then I began to analyze my own work.
To begin to understand this project, one has to understand the difference in how moving film and moving digital images work and how they are different.
Moving film moves one frame at a time. It is basically a series of 35mm still images that when shown through a projector create the illusion of moving images. If a film got stuck in the projector, it would still have a clear image because it would stop on a frame, or if it stopped in between frames there would be a clear marker of a black line between the frames. There is also the chance that the film would break and there would be a torn image or no image at all.
When watching the very same 'film' in a digital format, the images kind of slide from one image to the next. Only the pixels from the last image that need to be replaced are replaced in the next. So that every time you see a 'frame', it isn't a whole image different from the last. When the digital film lags, or stalls, or even blurs, you are literally sliding between the frames, between the images.
Another aspect of this project is contemplating how time moves, or how we perceive time.
If we scrap the concept that time moves like clockwork, moving forward in a linear fashion, we can begin to imagine: that time is perhaps fluid and moves like water, perhaps in a spiral, or maybe it stacks itself in a layered pile like sheets of paper, perhaps creates a loopback, that there is no thing other than the present, that all things, as well as all of history, exist in what we refer to as now. When our thinking about time changes, we begin to open up to the concept that antiquity and the present may not be all that far apart.
Currently, we agree to measure time in the linear format. The seconds go from one to two. In between the seconds are milli-seconds in between those are nano-seconds.
What I am attempting to prove, rather than measure, is the existence of one point in time where the past (as in millennia), present (the instant of now), and future (as in the unknown going on for millennia) are all present and knowable.
This project will be successful if it gets the viewer to think about the concept of now, what it is, when it is, and how it relates to different concepts and lengths of time, and to think about the big picture of our existence.
Because I did not want my work to be derivative of commercial films, I wanted to experiment with creating my own films, then creating a new series of images from those. I chose to film in San Francisco’s Chinatown because it is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. This neighborhood is the closest one to me locally that matches my requirement of containing some sort of antiquity in it, although to be honest, it is not nearly old enough. (And you know what that means ...!)
Series began in late 2007. Lengthy Artist Statement written in September 2009.
Note: October 3.2009: Since writing the above artist statement I have been researching on the web, looking for an explanation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity or something similar in physics to back up my project. What I have found instead are philosophical references to such things as the book An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne, which I have not yet read, and other references to Aboriginal Dreamtime and The Fourth Moment in Buddhism. The first two talk about the past, present, and future existing all at once, but on a dream level, and the third talks about being present in the now. All things that are worth some more research and study to see how they might also relate to this project.
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