geoffreyowenmiller
Paradox (Whale Hunt)
//Images below text//
This is a revisiting of the whale hunt narrative (largely based on Moby Dick) seen through the lens of Zeno's Arrow Paradox. In Zeno's paradox, an arrow flying toward a target never arrives if you always have to get halfway to the endpoint before getting to the end, as you can forever halve a distance. In animations, you have to main frame and go-betweens that draw the frames to smooth out the motion.
I took a narrative I knew well at that moment and thought of what the first and last moments, a beginning, and an end. Then I had to decide what the middle moment was. At what point in the story did it change from being the beginning of the story to the end of the story? The middle of a film is usually considered the half the runtime. The middle of a book, when the pages read equate to the pages one has yet to read. But what about the narrative arc itself? Of this, then that? The middle is the end of the beginning and the end is the beginning of the end. But it is what lies between that gives our stories their importance, meaning, and richness.
So the exercise was to think about what were the midpoints of the narrative between the beginning and the middle, as well as the middle and the end, and so on. Find images for these points. And create a form of sequential art/storyboard that if the challenge was taken up, could produce a new basis for an animation or film.
For me, the story starts with a ship sailing on the open ocean, and ends with a beam of sun illuminating the ocean. The middle point of the story was when the white whale was first harpooned. The point when violence is brought upon another, and all the consequences that the mindset of the entitlement to do so that came subsequently.
The middle of the beginning was when they first sighted the white whale.
The middle of the end was when the whale turned from being hunted to being hunter.
The story was thus divided continually into points of before and after.
If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest at that instant of time, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless at that instant of time and at the next instant of time but if both instants of time are taken as the same instant or continuous instant of time then it is in motion.[15]
— as recounted by Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b5
That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
