Throughout an entire year the station will collect and modify a 360° image and sound, from the outskirts of Kullorsuaq; a North-Western Greenlandic settlement with 400 inhabitants, most of them earning their living by hunting whale, seal and fishing. Four inhabitants of Kullorsuaq will participate in the project and frequent the research station, performing repeated walks and stage profane actions that intersect the yearly seasons with daily human routines.
The research station itself will consist of four cameras, microphones, electronics and computers in a weather shielding. It will work alongside other research stations and their scientific instruments already on the hillside of Kullorsuaq. There it will register the surrounding landscape and continuously calculate the velocity of time from the recorded material.
Unlike normal video and sound recordings, which have a fixed frame-rate, or interval between stills and samples, the station will capture images and sound at varying time-intervals based on a small and simple motion capture system. The inhabitants and performers will have a direct influence on the final material. Their momentary presence or absence informs the speed of the video and sound recordings; when the cameras registers that the visual activity in the surrounding landscape is exceeding a default setting, the recording accelerates. Thus the station continuously registers the varying amount of action as proportional to the velocity of time.
By applying this set of rules we attempt to construct the velocity of time as a consequence of human action.
Video
Four cameras are pointing towards the four corners of the world, filming a cubic panorama of the landscape. Whenever a digital picture has been registered, it is remembered. A percentage representing the amount of pixels that have changed in relation to the previous pictures is calculated. If the resulting percentage of quantifiable change falls below a threshold, the image is forgotten. As such the research station will model pixel changes over time by forgetting images that lack differentiation to the past. The result is a cinematic film of the landscape with a constant amount of quantifiable change. Small movements appear fast, big movements appear slow.
Sound
The research station records sound in relation to the surrounding landscape and in relation to the ground underneath.
A quadraphonic recording system is installed with the four cameras of the research station. The microphones are recording the immediate surroundings in time slices, reactive to the video activity: every time the video system takes a picture, a short sound recording is made. The time slice of a sound has the same duration as a video frame. i.e. 1/25 sec.
A second quadraphonic recording system based on solid borne sound sensors is installed in the ground. The full length of the year is recorded. The sub-terrain recording will be played back with a varying speed relating to the varying velocity of the video material.
