A collection of work from Berlin, “Senefelderplatz” presents a series of still images made from moving images. In each case, Gabriel Winer created a video of the subject and used computational techniques to derive a single picture from thousands of video frames. The outcome is something between a photograph and a film, a compressed filmic experience. 

 

This approach originated in 2016 with the work Senefelderplatz, in which a single color value of the sky was recorded every second over the course of one winter day and night. Rendered as a spectrum, the data constructed a landscape of light.

 

Winer returned to this idea in 2022 to create new images of Berlin’s environments. In Landwehrkanal, the changes in pixel values between frames reveal the dynamics of water in the city’s canal during a storm. A single line of pixels is pulled from each frame of a night drive through a city district for Wedding, and in Waldsieversdorf the image was created by scanning vertically across the video, revealing the influence of wind on a stand of trees.

 

These techniques act as proxies for natural perception. A stream of light, similar to what the eye collects, is interpreted by a subjective post-process, similar to what the mind does with visual input. While the resulting images are impressions of real light, they are not photography in a traditional sense; they are always an artifact of their particular inquiry into the recorded information. They are attempts to grasp the flow of life, collapsing temporal experience into a single frame.

 

 

The exhibition is open to the public by appointment only Monday through Friday 10am to 6pm. Please email ccam@yale.edu to schedule an appointment.

Yale ID holders can visit the exhibtion without an appointment.

Gabriel Winer, Yale B.A. ‘02, is a filmmaker and designer and has taught experimental filmmaking at New York University and American University. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.