inbetween space

According to Claudine Ise, editor of Vanishing Point,
“One of the most common ways of perceiving the urban environment today is through the window of the moving automobile. The fleeting, sweeping glances employed by drivers and passengers tuns the built environment into something dreamlike and abstracted, a steady stream of lights and shadows across a series of reflective surfaces. Non-places like these make up an increasingly large percentage of our built environment. The city is a type of a dream space that exists in the subjects mind as much as it does in material reality. The space of this absent, authoring vantage point is occupied by me as the designer/creator. The space is also embodied by the viewers and subjects of this work.”

Today’s critique about my second film raised some interesting questions about what I am trying to say, and what I am capturing. Or, maybe what I am trying to say through what I am capturing. Some students thought that my film was about the experience of the journey and about motion through time. This is partially true, as the whole five minutes of the film take place when the train is moving. I thought the film was about the anti-destination, which may or may not be a journey. It was about the process of going somewhere, rather than about where that somewhere was.

Choosing to film the commuter rail is a very important aspect of this subject matter. I tried to chose an experience in which I am moving through the landscape, but it is through a prescribed, unchanging route. I am not driving, and I do not have control to start or stop. It is a fixed route with a fixed schedule. The only thing different is the day, the time of day, and the direction I am shooting. I like the controlled variables, the constants which allow me to study the same thing over and over again. It is not about layering space, but about repeating space. Through repetition, nuances become apparent. These commuter rail sequences repeat, fragment, and juxtapose. They reconstruct the space of the 8 minute commuter rail.

The time spent in the commuter rail is an inbetween place. The subject matter I chose involves a space which is both an exterior place as well as an interior environment. You sit inside the cabin, immobile, staring outside at the moving landscape. It is also a place where people spend countless hours, but hardly think about that particular threshold of experience or time spent. Highway 5 is also an inbetween place, an artery linking San Francisco and Los Angeles dotted with fast food chains and gas station convenience stores. These are places of transition, as well as standstill. People are moving through them but the places hardly change.

I am not attempting to romanticize trains, but they intrigue me as places which allow mobility and movement. They transport their inhabitants away from one place to arrive in another. This transition and transportation, the change through various environments, slow or fast, is an interesting threshold. Here space is compressed, as the exterior landscape moves and people stand still.

In the film, I tried to compress time and space, and did it in the time based medium through slow and fast motion. I repeated the same building, and also book-ended the film with similarly paces slots. The shots look similar, but are different. That subtle difference interests me. Using repetitive imagery relates to using repetitive techno where the melody sounds similar, but if listened to closely, slowly reveals changes subtle variations. It is almost mundane in its repetition.

There is interest in the mundane, the overlooked, the taken for granted. We experience space through this normal routine, this uneventful sequence of events, or of events. The world is moving world us, and we can chose to focus on it, or get lost through the repetition. There is no beginning or no end in this cycle, but the cycle constantly evolves and changes.

What is it about the “no beginning and no ending” aspect of space that makes me want to reconstruct it? It is a continuous circular notion of time, where things change but come back to the same place, which is not quite the same. This relates to the notion of taking the commuter rail back and forth, from one city to another and then back, and documenting both directions of the trip. On the commuter rail, as opposed to a train journey, people are not really traveling one way and back, but keep going back and forth.

As E.V.Walter wrote in Placeways, “We recognize different kinds of place change. The same place does not remain the same. No city is what it used to be. Yet, despite great changes, some places continue to make sense.”

Perhaps, this is why I kept being drawn back to the commuter rail. It is a space that at once does not change, but also changes constantly. It is a place of fast time and slow time, and of exterior and interior space. It is a place you don’t think about, but exists in everyday. It is not a destination, nor a real journey. It is a place of opposite dualities coexisting simultaneously.