A project which both breaks the process of change into microscopic fragments – single snapshots in time – and builds these up to demonstrate the ceaseless evolution the planet we inhabit, Epigram visited Undershed’s thought-provoking new exhibit: FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth.
By Rachel Shortall, 2nd Year English and Philosophy
Situated on the ground floor of Watershed, Undershed first opened its doors in October 2024 and is a space dedicated to displaying globally renowned immersive artwork and introducing audiences to new modes of engaging with creative content. FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth – running from May 2 to July 13 – is certainly no exception to this ambition. Consisting of time-lapses which stitch together swathes of 3D scans (in many cases taken daily in a single location over timespans as large as several years), the exhibit allows observers to see the evolution of these landscapes in motion, and from a range of different perspectives. As co-director Matt Shaw puts it, ‘You’ll see time unfolding in front of you in a way that’s impossible to see with your naked eye or through the lens of a traditional camera’.
The piece owes its inception to ScanLAB Projects, an innovative studio dedicated to presenting our world in novel ways by re-imagining the techniques used to document it. Abandoning the imaging processes to which audiences have grown accustomed, FRAMERATE utilises custom-built software - deemed ‘the future of photography’ by its creators - to present locations including a quarry, a forest, a construction site, and even a pub as they have never before been seen.
To achieve this, each site is 3D-scanned at regular intervals. Those which change more rapidly, such as the construction site on which work is done daily, are captured as often as every 24 hours. Meanwhile more gradually developing sites, like the cliff in the process of being slowly eroded by the tide, may be scanned only once a year.
In each case, the data from a given location is transformed into a series of time-lapses, each presenting the setting from a different aspect. These time-lapses are then displayed simultaneously, each on an individual screen located in various areas around the room. In this way, observers have the freedom to choose how they interact with the setting in question – will they zero in on a screen which offers a close-up, highly detailed section of the area and its intricacy, or will they situate themselves somewhere where they can see multiple screens at once and revel in the interplay and comparison of the different perspectives on display? ‘Each screen’ says Shaw, ‘is like a portal into these different sites.’.
No screen, however, presents its setting with the solidity and constancy we tend to associate with the earth as viewed out the window in real time. Indeed, it is in subverting this and instead cutting together these time-lapses such that their locations appear to be in constant flux that the creators are able to express both the ‘beautiful and the terrifying’ aspects of ‘landscape-scale change’, in an unfamiliar and eye-opening way.
Arranged in a dark room with instrumental music permeating but never overpowering the imagery, the exhibit is set up so as to give audiences time and space to sit with the work and to interrogate it on their own terms. This is central to the aim of the piece, because though Shaw affirms that ‘environmental concerns are the core of … FRAMERATE’, these are handled with exceptional subtlety. From the wild freedom of forests in bloom to the claustrophobic confinement involved in cattle-milking, contrasts and connections abound amongst the settings on display yet rely on observer contemplation to be identified.
Co-director William Trossell clarifies, ‘We don’t want this to be a strongly worded piece about the climate, we want people to come to come to some of that association themselves’. For him the exhibit is primarily ‘a mindful piece about taking away some of the anxiety that we all see in our lives with change’. Rather than a stern telling-off, the exhibit is ‘about a moment of reflection; about calming things down and really taking the time to look and perceive’.
In an era of ever-increasing anxiety about our rapidly altering climate, pieces like FRAMERATE which balance images of change at its most natural with those which paint a less favourable picture of how our actions are impacting our planet, are essential in thinking about our present situation in the calm, measured manner necessary. It is in facilitating this that FRAMERATE is able to conjure a ‘new feeling about how the world is evolving’ and our place within it, and for this it is definitely worth a visit.
