"TIMELESS" STORIES
It’s funny … some stories are called timeless stories … but, of course, they’re not.
You know: The Odyssey, Rip Van Winkle, Shakespeare. Stories that
still work, regardless of what decade you read them.
“Eternal?” Sure.
Even “ever-ready.” But these stories
are heavily dependent on the movement of time in their plots, their
characterizations, their moods.
Which brings us to the possibility of stories not driven by time … stories which might resemble ... say ... our Mind-Benders
selection in Issue 1, “The
Zoomquilt.”
New viewers of “The
Zoomquilt” usually express some variation of “wow.” Some people make comparisons to the
Eames’ classic film, “Powers of 10" (see this online interpretation of the same idea), or Escher,
or those frequently-copied, frozen-in-air moments in “The Matrix.”
What do they all have in common with “Zoomquilt?”
They all offer scenes that reveal themselves by moving through space, and not
necessarily by moving through time …. timeless
stories.
“Powers of 10” uses magnification to tell its story of
relative size, orders of magnitude, and the size of the universe. Escher hints
at stories untold, twisting space in ways both impossible and impossible to
refute, implying that time is irrelevant. And the effects in “The Matrix” literally
stretch the moment around a scene, as if time were negotiable.
With its seamless infinite zoom, a marvel in itself,
“Zoomquilt” opens yet another door to stories driven by movement through space, not
time. The funhouse/medieval imagery and the winding orange walkways certainly
hint at narrative connections.
Space: the new frontier.
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