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Carl Rosendahl: Slitscan Carnival

By Holly Willis
November 23, 2010
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Last month, Carl Rosendahl, who has a passion for filmmaking and technology, visited the Fresno County Fair and shot some video. Then he processed the video footage with software he developed himself (he's a member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center and is based at the center's Silicon Valley campus). The technique he used is called slitscan photography, and results in an eerie and intriguing distortion of space and time (it was used, for example, in the famed Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Rosendahl employed the technique to great effect such that the dazzling four-minute video, titled Slitscan Carnival, is a pageant of color, with multi-hued stripes floating upward in languid waves while streams of people drift through the air in psychedelic flurries. Trees twist and spiral inward, and the video builds finally to ecstatic abstraction. To round out the piece, Rosendahl added fairground music, using "Music for an Underground Circus" by Ergo Phizmiz, a piece that twists and tweaks the typically cheerful carny sound to craft a curious and melancholy aura, perfectly capturing the sense of wonder in this visual treat.

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