V4D
A photograph keeps one instant. V4D keeps a stretch of time: a body moving through a space,
stored as points that each carry a place and a moment. Nothing about that time is decided
when it is kept. It is decided afterwards, each time it is looked at.
The Timegraph lens is how it is looked at. It chooses how much time is held at once,
how that time is laid into space, and what time does to what it holds. A photograph is
writing with light; a timegraph is writing with time.
Ways of seeing
- Now
- One instant, as a photograph keeps it.
- Echo
- The present thickens into what has just passed, which is still here: what Husserl called retention, the comet's tail of the present; Bragaglia photographed it as a path rather than poses.
- Firebrand
- Rumi, Masnavi I:1144–1147: the world is renewed at every breath, and its continuity is an appearance made by speed, like a whirled firebrand seen as one line of fire. Watch the spark become a line as the time held grows.
- Dissolve
- The present holds; before and after come apart into dust.
- Exposure
- The shutter never closes, as in Hiroshi Sugimoto's theatres and Michael Wesely's years-long exposures.
Touching it
Drag to turn the body in space. Scroll or pinch to come closer. Press and hold to stop time;
let go and it runs again. The words along the bottom change the way of seeing; so do the keys
1 to 5. Space stops and starts time, F fills the screen, H hides the words.
Every number behind the lens is in the studio (key S).
Your own time
Sit, the last word along the bottom (key 6), opens your own camera, only when you
ask: first a mirror with memory, then, when you are ready, a sitting of twenty seconds, as
for a daguerreotype. Hold still; the sitting develops into one image of all its time,
which you may save. The camera closes when the sitting ends. Everything happens on your
device: nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is kept unless you save it.
The figure
The figure walking here is a stand-in: a stock character from Adobe Mixamo, walking a stock
clip. The first sitters, people kept in time from a camera, come next.
Lineage
Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Zbigniew Rybczyński,
Daniel Crooks, Memo Akten's volumetric slit-scan, MoSculp, and Nils Vilnis (@vinils), whose 3D
slit-scans set this work in motion.
V4D, Virtual Fourth Dimension. © 2026 Mehran Ahmadi. The work, its name and its images are
all rights reserved; the code is open under the Apache License 2.0
(github.com/MehranMarxian/v4d). It needs
WebGPU: a current Chrome or Edge, Safari 26+, or Firefox 141+.