2008 – Software programming Brady Marks
This site-specific installation uses digital technology to slow down the process of image recording in order to reveal human activity as part of the daily cycle of tide and weather. Eventually the imagery will encompass the annual repetition of the seasons as well as long term fluctuations associated with climate change.
A small, high-resolution web cam is to be located in the Silva Bay store and coffee station on the south end of Gabriola Island. The view outside the window, will be relayed live via a computer, to a wall mounted monitor display. Specially written computer soft ware, will change the on-screen image, one pixel at a time. In this way, the image will be totally replaced every twenty minutes on an ongoing basis.
Like the brush strokes in an impressionist painting, each pixel will represent a single passing moment. To the computer, time passing is just a series of zeros and ones. But to our human perceptions the pixels flickering on the monitor screen are like so many tiny windows on a moving wall of time.
The view of Silva Bay is real enough, but the artwork is neither a still photograph, a movie or video. The piece has no fixed duration yet, at any given moment, contains an accurate trace of time present as well as time past. There is no recorded image, the work can never be finished and what you will see on the monitor screen will remain as ephemeral as the light which dances on the waters of Silva Bay.