Getting sedimental about Boylston Street

It's a really cool study. However, at the risk of complaining about other's work, I really wish people wouldn't create animated gifs like this. It would be more enjoyable if a webpage just showed each image in a row so the viewer could take their time and view each picture one by one without the cycle restarting at the end. This is true with so many of these "timelapse" compilations.

At the Fogg, as part of the presentation of Bosch inspired engravings and what not, there is a video based the drawings. Watching it helped me see the dynamism of his characters which is not as easy to see when viewing any given engraving for only a minute at a time. Even spending 15 minutes with one image does not reveal the degree of movement and dynamism that becomes evident when the images are animated. So the animation made clearer the sort of dynamic feeling that a person of the 15th century would see (assuming they were wealthy enough to purchase an engraving).

I believe that television and movies have trained our minds to expect moving images. A 15th century person would only expect still images; obviously television and movies did not exist. The closest would be live performances.

Animated images - cartoon and real life - dominate the visual component of modern culture. Most still images are only advertisements or covers; neither are terribly complicated in the amount of visual information (although the subliminal messages of sex appeal, vitality, etc. are a different level of complexity). Of the many images that populate the daily routine most are still and are meant to be seen for only a few seconds before the eyeballs move one.

Even advertisements are morphing from static to dynamic images. Just look at the huge annoying advertisement screens at South Station. Or the attempt to install psuedo-moving images via a series of displays in the Red Line tunnels. We have trained our minds to respond best to either quick simple images in advertising - and propoganda in general - and demand that the more complex images be part of moving pictures whether at the movies or on television.

If there is any deficiency in a need to have images moving and changing to keep attention it is the result of the choice to rely mostly on moving images rather than still images. In other words we have trained ourselves to expect and want images that change according to frame rates with the result that appreciation of static images, whether as paintings, drawings, murals, etc. has been relegated to an occasional hobby practiced by only people with specific interests in still images (artists, art professionals and people who just like paintings and drawings, i.e., a minority of the population). But for the average person with little background and little interest in appreciating static images the only images that capture and holds attention are those that are moving.