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This project came to me after stumbling across the album art for Migration, a soul album by the California group Creative Source. What struck me was how powerfully meaning was conveyed through the distorted imagery. Migration—self-evident, full of tension and internal conflict, yet also beauty. It conveyed all of this depth without calling attention to itself.
Slit-scan is an age-old technique in photography, even employed by Douglas Trumbull in creating the Stargate sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it **wasn’t merely the technique that fascinated me—it was the morphing of identity as we move through time and space.
In our fast-paced digital age of screens and cameras, I wanted to explore identity through time and space using those very tools. Thus, Transience came to be. Using the slit-scan technique, the piece captures the human form over a duration—distorting and stretching it into an ephemeral trace of motion. Participants—both witting and unwitting—become co-authors of these portraits simply by moving through space.
Fundamentally, this piece invites reflection: What does it mean to be seen, captured, and abstracted in digital space? And more importantly, what traces do we want to leave behind in our brief passage on Earth?
As someone who has had to migrate often throughout my childhood—attending six schools over twelve years of schooling—and even today, as an international student at ITP, these are questions I continually contend with. Not only about how my identity is shaped by each time and place I inhabit, but also about the ways I, in turn, shape those spaces.
To me, this piece is an expression of those ideas—an appeal to slow down, reflect on our place in the world, and embrace the distortions.
Thanks to the ubiquity of slit-scan across media, there was a lot of documentation for slit-scan photography. This and this by Dan Shiffman were particularly helpful.
However, I started quite easy. I knew I wanted to employ BodyPose’s MoveNet model to trigger the capture of frames, so I made this sketch where detection would merely capture an image of the entire frame.
