Stan Brakhage’s piece, “Stellar”, was both unsettling and beautiful. The pace of the images appearing, transforming, and disappearing creates an essence of rhythm, and therefore a concept of time. The slow-paced beginning of the sequence creates a little bit of anticipation and drama before the images start to flash closer together. The first time I watched it, obviously influenced by the name of the piece, I looked at it as a setting in outer space. I felt like I was traveling through a tunnel of nebulas, stars, and vividly colorized matter and that the short periods of time represented the dark sky before the next colorful array zipped by. These aspects of the piece caused me to think of Stellar as a chronological sequence that a viewer traveled through from one end to the other.

The second time I watched it, after reading the commentary at the end, I thought about it in the form of music. I was half way there when I saw it with fresh eyes because I thought of the piece in regards to time and rhythm, which is what music is based on. In order to think of it as a silent song, I created music in my head that went with it and imagined the sounds the different images could make if they were able. I found that the more drawn out one image was, the longer it held a note or certain sound that swelled in my mind. The fast-paced sequenced of colors that often looked rough and scratched up represented more of a distorted noise. During these panicky flashes of color and light, I thought of sirens, extremely distorted electric guitar, running scales on a keyboard, and the creaking of a metal swing. When it slowed and showed certain slides for a few more seconds than the others, the mental music seemed to slow down and hold its resonance until the speed picked up again.

After seeing it twice and interpreting it two different ways, I watched it a third time and thought about the ways the piece could have been physically made. I was not at all aware of how Stellar was made, but I decided to assume that the images were made out of paper that was transparent and let light through to a lens. In this mindset, I saw the paper crumbling, letting light in through the parts that weren’t doubled or layered to create light and shadowed areas. Other possibilities were that the color was made from chemicals or paint on transparent film, that a light was turned on and off and the video was sped up at different times, or even that the video was made up of individual images pieced together. Looking at the physical qualities of Stellar, as well as the conceptual and visual qualities helped me to see very different perspectives on a very complex work of art.