13 x 17,000 (1997-2000)
⭆ Film & Art | The Definite Motion Picture by Martin Reinhart
Above: Boat Trip on the River Danube (2000). Use the < and > buttons to browse through the panorama.
In 1997 I finished the equipment that allowed me to make »tx-transform« work as an analogue medium. An essential part of this setup was a slit camera that could continuously exposure 60m of cine film. I was fascinated by the possibilities and by the idea of producing a singe photographic image of this length. I now had a camera capable of capturing super-wide panoramas, but no way of printing it out. Subsequent research showed that the longest rolls of photographic paper used in mini labs measured 170m and produced 13cm wide. So I decided to go for the maximum size and called this project »13 x 17,000 – The Definite Motion Picture – the first part of the title referring to the dimensions and the second to the fact that viewers would have to move passed such a long image in order to see it completely. I believed this was an interesting concept for an artwork and began to plan an analogue enlarger that would allow me to print my negative strips on paper. The machine consisted of a light proof, film-like movement of the photographic paper and two magazines that contained the paper. I chose a Fuji model magazine because they were almost ubiquitous at the time. I made an agreement with one of the mini-lab owners who gave me a special price for development.
It took me a few months to build the hardware and, as always, that was when the problems began. Since I had no experience with developing colour film and so always had to wait for the lab to develop a test strip of paper, it took endless attempts to get the right exposure. Shooting the negative was complicated too since there are few subjects suitable for this kind of aspect ratio. I tried train and car rides and even took the camera to a roller coaster, but these experiments only proved that the camera was extremely sensitive to vertical deviations. Vibrations and any unevenness in the road/rail that are normally not noticed, were actually recorded as seismic, becoming vivible as disturbing errors. The ideal conditions for an undistorted and error-free image of this length would therefore be a vastly extended object at a constant distance from the camera shot with a steady, flowing movement.
Meanwhile the first digital laboratory in Vienna had opened and I was one of their first customers, asking what was the longest continuous image they could print. They were not sure what would be possible with the machines they had just purchased. As it turned out a nine-meter print seemed plausible. So I changed strategy and abandoned my original idea to work with analogue film. Instead, I used a PAL video camera and to get the maximum vertical resolution, turned it to portrait orientation. This was combined with the first and newly finshed version of my »tx-transform« software. It meant I could export all the video stills individually and assemble a new image using only one vertical line from each of these frames. One problem I did not expect was the fact that there was virtually no digital image format that could contain the image I generated: in the end it had a resolution of 51,327 x 720 pixels or 36.9 mega pixels. At the time this was not supported by any software. So I had to slice it into six pieces thereby producing smaller files. Fortunately, the Lambda printer was able to print the parts one after the other without gaps on the paper roll.
Finally, with help of Vienna-based Cyberlab I overcame all these problems and was able to print out a single shot of a 20 minute boat trip on the River Danube in the summer of 1999. The print later was exhibited several times and one copy was purchased by the Federal Chancellery of Austria (BKA), where it was displayed in the conference room for years.