created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified
The photo-multigraph, discovered during a media-archaeological investigation into optical illusions, opened the door to an enchanted world of cloned appearances. In Verfünfungseffekt, we use the medium of video to create a kaleidoscopic portrait-in-motion where the perspective-shifting shards of ego are recorded in a synchronized performance of solipsist intersubjectivity.
Our video-multigraph allows for the compositing of tiny offsets in time-shifting delays applied to one, or several, of the mirrored selves—shattering the cloned perfection, as well as the conformity, of the multiple presences. Extreme isolation warps the brain and when you are truly on your own, the mind may push your sense of reality down a labyrinth of Kafkaesque corridors.
The original footage contains all five characters (1 + 4 reflections). In each scene the actor is in synchronized dialogue with the mirrored versions of himself. The fivefold-video portrait subverts the usual technological meaning of the photograph as “unambiguously capturing reality.” By multiplying the image, it instead shifts focus to “the multiplicity of being.”
Invented by James B. Shaw in Atlantic City, New Jersey during the early 1890s, a photo-multigraph is created by placing the sitter between two mirrors which are angled to produce four reflections of the subject.
By exposing a person’s face from every angle, the photo-multigraph was touted as a system which would enable “us to see ourselves as others see us.”
It will be impossible to make our faces appear to the most advantage by a clever pose, for the latest innovation in photography, the multiphotograph, which is destined to become the photographic portrait of the future, will reveal all our defects and crudities.
Verfünfungseffekt is filmed between two large adjacent mirrors supported on a scaffolding. The mirrors constitute two sides of a triangle—the angle being slightly short of 90 degrees in order to produce 4 reflections of the person standing inside. The actor performs at a pizza-slice-shaped table (reflected into a perfectly circular table when placed at the tip of the triangle) with his back turned towards the camera. The film is recorded in RAW format with a doubled framerate providing the optimal color and motion information for further digital compositing.
The result is wonderous in itself, but this is only the first step of the processing. Using the node-based digital compositing software Fusion, the characters are masked out with the included rotoscoping tools, and then reintroduced with an individual time-remapping curve applied on each character as separate appearances, capriciously shifting between two different framerates (50 over 25 and 25 over 25 frames-per-second). Disarray between the reflections is introduced, scattering the perfect synchronicity of the mirroring effect.