Photographer and video artist Robert Bowen has long been fascinated by New York’s skyscrapers. His interest in the city’s architecture and in early moving images come together in this project in which 3-D hyper-stereoscopic depth is digitally extracted from archival 2D film footage. As Bowen writes:
One day in 1903, the filmmaker, J.B. Smith, on assignment for the Thomas A. Edison Co. of West Orange, NJ, took a boat ride around Lower Manhattan. This project takes off from a digital stereoscopic conversion of what Smith saw, what he didn’t see, what we see now, what’s missing, and what’s been added since.
This video presentation is based on Bowen’s experimental media project, N.Y. Background. The film will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Museum Director Carol Willis.
Robert Bowen
Robert Bowen is a New York-based new (and old) media artist whose work includes site-specific visualizations, performances, and screenings combining computational photographic approaches, in particular, temporal montage. He teaches courses on Photo/Video, and Computer Art in the MFA Program of the School of Visual Arts.