Crossings and Meetings (1974)

Overview

A lone man walking across the video screen is the starting point for this dynamic formal exercise. This image and its accompanying sound are subjected to increasingly complex and proliferating configurations to arrive at what Emshwiller calls a "visual fugue" in time and space, structured like musical or mathematical sequences. The walking figure and its de-synchronized footsteps are multiplied, slowed down, accelerated, reversed, syncopated, overlapped and otherwise altered in multifarious variations on a theme, building in a kinetic, almost narrative progression of compositional relationships. The screen is finally transformed into a dance of motion by male and female figures in an abstracted, colorized space. Rather than an analysis of movement a la Muybridge, Crossings and Meetings is a celebration of the potential for representing movement in time and space through video.