Magnifisyncopathological

At the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown last night, I saw SLOMO VIDEO:

100 ONE MINUTE SLOW MOTION VIDEOS

SLOMO VIDEO is a unique creative compilation of works by over 70 video artists and filmmakers from around the world. The video festival will swerve into cinemas around the world, transubstantiate time into taffy, and turn the usual expectations of a video show on its side and inside out. These 100 slow motion videos will pull the audience through a molasses-tinged warp of catastrophic visual and audio beauty.

I first learned about this during the opening advertisements the Drafthouse was playing before V for Vendetta opened. In them, you see a marvelous clip of an egg exploding, fragile roses dropping on a surface, a close-up of a match igniting, and some dumbass setting off fireworks. I'm thinking, sweet, this looks real interesting.

Online, one picture is prominent in the Drafthouse advertisements: Harold Edgerton's ".30 Bullet Piercing Apple". That closed the deal for me. I'm fascinated by high frame rate, slow motion film depicting both high energy transfers and close-up detail revealing the hidden complexity of otherwise mundane things. I bought a ticket, expecting that kind of video to constitute the bulk of the "festival."

About:

This whole project is about slowing everything down. We live in a culture where rush rush RUSH dominates the mainstream psychology. Life can and should be slowed down so we can examine what it is we are really doing. Are we in synch with our world? Are we in synch with our own selves? This project dives into this universal problem with the desire to pause and examine reality in its primitive bare units.

SLOMO VIDEO is truly the best theater experience ever.

I was disappointed. Most of the 100 clips were apparently done on standard consumer video equipment. Very few had detailed macro results. Several were very funny ("The Four Kid Tenors" was particularly hilarious) and some were really interesting ("Slomo Bats", "Snails Playing a Theremin," and "Static One" for example).

But far too many seemed utterly pointless, of the "quick, film that broken TV as we drive by it" variety. Lots had questionable post-production work that obscured the subject matter and dulled the ears. I quickly grew tired of extreme close-ups of human mouths. At least five clips had only segments of slow motion and one (I think "Time Passes Slowly When You Are Irritated") wasn't in slow motion at all.

I forget the name, but one clip consisted of a gigantic green pixel slowly moving from the left to the right across a pink background. As it traveled, the big square block's color turned pink and the background turned green. Halfway, they were the same color and by the time the pixel reached the right hand side, they were opposites again. That was uninteresting enough, but then the screen stayed static except for a slow color change as a tone generator slowly wound up from a few hundred Hertz to a few thousand Hertz. People in the audience were laughing at how lame this was.

Seriously, what the fuck? This was not at all what I was led to believe. I was expecting something like:

• bullets interacting with various substances
  
• overweight people jogging
  
• athletes performing in sporting events
  
• disturbed liquids
  
• fire
  
• building demolitions
  
• machinery

The theatrical experience of watching 120 one minute slow motion videos back to back could possibly be akin to a full-on zen state... imagine an audience mesmerized by essential moments of reality that we rarely "see" because our eyes and mind don't flicker that fast.

Our brains are not geared to accept reality at odd paces, so when we experience a much slowed down reality, our brain struggles to make sense of it. This, my friend, is a trip! Let alone 120 different odd-paced realities from a diverse group of personalities, SLOMO VIDEO is a guaranteed journey through time and space... and you don't even have to strip and sit in a deprivation tank.

I should have read the FAQ. I might have changed my mind if I knew the project was about being "psychedelic" and arty rather than being (for lack of a better word) scientific.