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So I’m staying with an image of waves and swimmers in this composite exercise. I’m not yet experienced using Photoshop, and so knowing that, theoretically, I could do just about anything to an image in the program, I really wanted to work with just a few functions, namely the orientation of the layers as well as their opacity. In the video from last week I tried to dissolve/complicate the movement of the figures below the surface of the water with the movement of the floating raft at the surface by varying the opacity and scale of the video clips. Beyond a brief (suggestive) narrative what seemed to resonate were the feelings of floating and sinking, maybe even the haptic awareness of both sensations simultaneously.

While manipulating the layers of this composite image, I had that same affect in mind. Obviously the fluctuation of the video isn’t replicable in a still format, and so in order to generate visual movement I duplicated the two primary layers and then flipped them to add to the number of figures/textures in the image and then adjusted the opacity. The re-orientation in conjunction with the alteration in opacity seemed to challenge my perception of the image, which I guess means that I lost my sense of top and bottom, surface and depth. I could now look at the image in multiple ways: the swimmers, mirrored and abstracted, lost their original context and became figures, repetitions—also, there was no longer a clear horizon, rather the wave form of one layer, which marked that orienting line, when duplicated, morphed into the central horizontal blue band. Baron discusses the idea of plurality in the digital archive as part of her discussion of Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, how the multiple screens of Mass Ornament assert the archival material’s inherent synchronic and simultaneous qualities (149). It seems to me that the ability to duplicate layers, to repeat and re-orient in the same space, presents a similar resistance to a causal (though I’m not sure that’s the right word, maybe diachronic or logical) understanding of the image. Here, while the shifts in opacity create depth, there’s also a sense of flattening since the hierarchy of the layers is no longer apparent. Is it one figure repeated, or many different bodies repeated? Are the swimmers swimming or sinking, moving or static? Is there a particular body of water evoked, or, simply, water?