The concept is simple: things that seem immobile and inert may actually move or change color, but so very slightly that we can't see it. Record the motion on an ordinary video camera, however, analyze the images pixel by pixel and amplify minute changes in color or tiny movements using special image processing software developed recently at MIT, and you can produce a new video that makes the invisible visible. The process is called Eulerian video magnification.
What had been motionless can now be seen as actually moving, changing. A baby's stillness can be converted into visible breathing. A man's face can be seen as changing color with each pulse of blood. People looking into the camera but not moving are seen to actually exhibit a variety of tic-like movements, individual to each. Engines and structures can visibly reveal their patterns of vibration or sway. Videotaping the motion of ordinary inanimate objects like empty potato chip bags, what had been spoken nearby can be recovered and (roughly) recreated.
It's not that pulses aren't already taken, blood perfusion already measured, torques and vibrations already monitored, sound already recorded, but that these patterns of change can be magnified and so transformed into imagination-stimulating visibility.
What struck me was how the stillness of living things is, in fact, incessant dynamic movement, and the stillness of inanimate things masks a throbbing imparted by whatever is active nearby. The classic and obvious division of things into what moves or changes and what doesn't, breaks down. Everything either produces change or is changed; nothing is fixed or isolated, and not just on the micro or atomic scale but the macro or structural.
It makes my head reel. The scope of the notion of address and addressability is expanded. What cannot be second-person to us? Once upon a time clear water was just water, but it has since been colonized with microbes; or the dark spaces of the sky were empty but since been filled with galaxies and nebulae. It's not so much the fullness on every scale that strikes me, as the interconnection--limited perhaps only by the speed of light. The cosmos is readable on every scale of space or time. Messages may be damped or attenuated, but everything speaks and responds.
There's an obvious artifice in this as there is in false color representations of, say, thermoclines, but like the artificial voices which speak for those with disabilities, it's still a true channel for communication that wasn't open before.
Of course, all kinds of new monitoring are possible, for good or ill, but the significance I feel bursting over me like a wave is the extended potential for encounter. Oh, God-in-love, how much the medium of messaging has be multiplied in density. I feel giddy.
What had been motionless can now be seen as actually moving, changing. A baby's stillness can be converted into visible breathing. A man's face can be seen as changing color with each pulse of blood. People looking into the camera but not moving are seen to actually exhibit a variety of tic-like movements, individual to each. Engines and structures can visibly reveal their patterns of vibration or sway. Videotaping the motion of ordinary inanimate objects like empty potato chip bags, what had been spoken nearby can be recovered and (roughly) recreated.
It's not that pulses aren't already taken, blood perfusion already measured, torques and vibrations already monitored, sound already recorded, but that these patterns of change can be magnified and so transformed into imagination-stimulating visibility.
What struck me was how the stillness of living things is, in fact, incessant dynamic movement, and the stillness of inanimate things masks a throbbing imparted by whatever is active nearby. The classic and obvious division of things into what moves or changes and what doesn't, breaks down. Everything either produces change or is changed; nothing is fixed or isolated, and not just on the micro or atomic scale but the macro or structural.
It makes my head reel. The scope of the notion of address and addressability is expanded. What cannot be second-person to us? Once upon a time clear water was just water, but it has since been colonized with microbes; or the dark spaces of the sky were empty but since been filled with galaxies and nebulae. It's not so much the fullness on every scale that strikes me, as the interconnection--limited perhaps only by the speed of light. The cosmos is readable on every scale of space or time. Messages may be damped or attenuated, but everything speaks and responds.
There's an obvious artifice in this as there is in false color representations of, say, thermoclines, but like the artificial voices which speak for those with disabilities, it's still a true channel for communication that wasn't open before.
Of course, all kinds of new monitoring are possible, for good or ill, but the significance I feel bursting over me like a wave is the extended potential for encounter. Oh, God-in-love, how much the medium of messaging has be multiplied in density. I feel giddy.
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