Video sculpture:spatio-temporal warping

Abstract

In this thesis the concept behind our notion of video sculpture is to imagine an image sequence or movie as a three dimensional volume. We then also imagine that there is a frameset that traverses the image sequence to give us what we commonly think of as a video or movie. In the ordinary sense this frameset moves through an image sequence in a completely timeparallel linear fashion. In video sculpture, we free the frameset from these bounds so that we can sample space and time in completely unorthodox ways. We can view the whenwhere in previously unforeseen perspectives. Slices of the video environment can simultaneously reveal both past and future actions within a single frame. Building on this free representation of video spacetime, we then wrest the frame once more from the present constraints of topography and/or topology. The frame can bend and twist and jump and dive. The view of a fading quadratic surface cutting through two scenes makes for a beautiful curtain transition. We present a framework and an implementation for modeling the frame as it passes through the image sequence volume object.