Martinou Kyritsi Leto — 50X

50X

Leto Martinou-Kyritsi

The images in this photographic series were taken with a digital cell-phone camera set to capture at its extrememost, 50X zoom level: by definition, a subjective measure of magnification. Details are distorted, edges are hazy, and colors are bleeding and merging with each other to form a fluid landscape of emotions, all equally powerfully contributing to create what was experienced, at the time, as a profound spiritual stillness. This series forms part of a work in progress exploring the dual conceptual themes of the Pleasure Garden and the Ghost City – metaphorical spaces that encompass living presence while being concomitantly encompassed in it.

—

The time-base displacement error is a major problem caused by the change in magnetic tape speed, which, although small, is enough to degrade the picture. A 1-megacycle pilot tone is recorded on an adjacent track on the tape and the zero-crossings of this pilot are used to key the sampling circuitry. Thus, regardless of the tape speed, the digital sampling is always referred back to real time, and time-base displacement errors are eliminated. Since the information bandwidth goes to 200 kc, at least 400,000 samples per second must be sampled according to the sampling theorem. A 500-kc rate is used for sampling, and each one of these samples is defined as a picture element, or pixel.

– Billingsley, Fred C., “Processing Ranger and Mariner Photography.” (1966). Optical Engineering 4 (1966): 404147. The first-ever definition of the pixel.

Ώς οἱ μέγιστοι τῶν θεῶν καὶ φίλτατοι τῇ πόλει πάρεισιν! Ἐνταῦθα γὰρ Δήμητρα καὶ Δημήτριον ἅμα παρῆγʼ ὁ καιρός. Χἠμὲν τὰ σεμνὰ τῆς Κόρης μυστήρια ἔρχεθʼ ἵνα ποιήσῃ· Ὁ δʼ ἱλαρός, ὥσπερ τὸν θεὸν δεῖ, καὶ καλὸς καὶ γελῶν πάρεστι σεμνόν. Ὁθιφαίνεθʼ, οἱ φίλοι πάντες κύκλῳ, ἐν μέσοισι δʼ αὐτός. Ὃμοιος ὥσπερ οἱ φίλοι μὲν ἀστέρες, ἥλιος δʼ ἐκεῖνος. Ὦ τοῦ κρατίστου παῖ Ποσειδῶνος θεοῦ, χαῖρε κἀφροδίτας.

– Athenaeus, “The Learned Banqueters”. Vol. VI, Ch. LXIII. Transcribed version from: “Lyrici Graeci (Poetarum Graecorum Sylloge)”, Jean François Boissonade, Paris, 1826.

The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting-place for daydreaming. And often the resting-place particularized the daydream. Our habits of a particular daydream were acquired there. The house, the bedroom, the garret in which we were alone, furnished the frame-work for an interminable dream, one that poetry alone, through the creation of a poetic work, could succeed in achieving completely. If we give their function of shelter for dreams to all of these places of retreat, we may say, as I pointed out in an earlier work, that there exists for each one of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past. . . And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic.

We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell.

– Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics Of Space” (1957). Translated from the French by Maria Jolas for Beacon Press, Boston, 1964.