My name is Cory Archangel. And we are looking at the movie Colors by Dennis Hopper, one horizontal line of pixels at a time. A movie is made up of lines of color. And I'm just stealing one of those lines at a time and playing the movie through in real time. I was interested in kind of taking the magic away a little bit, and understanding what actually happens when you watch something on your computer? What's going on? That kind of investigation is important in my work. Because I guess I'm a tinkerer.
When we first see the piece we will see just the top line of pixels from it; and each time the movie plays through, we will then see the next line and the next line and the next line. The technique is called slit scanning. It's been around for 40 years, I think. It was first developed for special effects.
What you're hearing is the movie, and what you're seeing is also the movie. It's just a tiny little slice of it. So if there is gunshots in the movie, or if there’s an action scene in the movie, the colors are going to be flying all around. Because the camera, and what it sees, is probably moving quickly. If the camera pans up to a blue sky, you're probably going to see all blue color. So it's a direct one-to-one relationship.
The movie will take about 33 days because there's about 400 lines, or maybe a little more, in the movie, and the movie I think is about an hour and a half. And that's in order to work its way down to the bottom of the screen. To see every color in the movie takes about a month.