"Flat Earth"

"Flat Earth" - Camera setup - Ted Lyman 2003

Created By: Ted Lyman
When: 1 pm Tuesday April 1 2003
Where: HCC Campus Theater, Palm Avenue and 14th Street

Ted Lyman is currently at work on "Flat Earth", a film that uses stop action and time lapse techniques to develop geometric shapes in spaces and landscapes. The artist describes the work like this:

"The imagery of Flat Earth is based on the fact that, while the camera/lens system creates the illusion of the third dimension, it does so on a two dimensional surface. I exploit this phenomenon by beginning a shot as a normal image, then, through time lapse or stop motion animation, generating a linear form in the frame. As this shape is in a three dimensional environment, the eye sees it in deep space."

" My last step is to mask out everything surrounding the form, which, at this point, reveals itself as geometrically symmetrical in two dimensions. Essentially, the image shifts from deep to flat space."

" Part of my interest in this effect is conceptual and aesthetic, but I also have another ambition. When Maxim Gorky, the Russian author, went to Lumiere’s First Motion Picture Program in 1896, he initially saw only "a world of shadows" on a flat surface as he had not been educated in viewing the screen as deep space. I want people to reclaim a fragment of that perceptual innocence from Flat Earth; thus dismantling an illusion they have accepted as real since childhood. "

The work will be premiered at the Hillsborough Community College - Ybor Festival of the Moving Image.