Sometimes people refer to time as a “fourth dimension”, which is true in some sense but also misleading since time is qualitatively different from the three spatial dimensions. You can rotate an object so its height becomes its length or width, but in the real world you can’t rotate duration into depth.

MoFrames is a collection of images that do just that. The image on the right was constructed from a video of two swing dancers, with the background removed and each video frame shifted slightly forward and overlaid using a piece of software called Recreating Movement. The MoFrames site contains more examples including a page of videos that play with time, space, and motion in unusual ways.

(via kottke)

See also Golan Levin’s list of slit-scan video art and research.

Here’s a nice year-long timelapse for the new year. You may prefer to watch it in high-def.

One technique I haven’t seen before is the use of tone mapping to prepare each frame. Tone mapping is usually used to compress high dynamic range images so that they can be displayed on a standard computer monitor. You can’t show the the absolute brightnesses in an HDR image, but through tone mapping you can preserve the relative brightnesses.

For timelapse purposes, what tone mapping does is hide some of the variation in lighting conditions between frames. This means that you don’t get unpleasant flickering in the video when a dim, cloudy day is followed by a bright sunny day. Shadows still appear and disappear across frames, but this is a clever way to preserve the same overall brightness.