as Time-Slice. Multiple cameras arranged around a moving subject are all
triggered at once. The resulting images are then sequenced and screened
as moving footage. The result resembles a mobile gaze moving through
a frozen world. The science-fiction filmThe Matrix(Andy and Larry
Wachowski, 1999 ) made the technique famous, although the directors refer
to it more dramatically as Bullet-Time. Although it feels strikingly contem-
porary, the technology for doing this is as old as cinema, if not older. If
Muybridge had fired all his cameras at once and animated the images via
his Zoopraxiscope we might have had a century of time-slice. That it came
into being only recently is less an anomaly than a sign of the fact that for
any image form to come into existence it must first be imagined or desired,
and imagination and desire are historically grounded. The basic structures
of photography and cinema have existed for a long time, but they have
proved flexible enough to accommodate ever-newer conceptions of time,
space, movement and stillness. That is why they are still with us rather
than belonging to the nineteenth century. Macmillan’sDead Horse( 1998 ),
a time-slice film of a horse at the moment it is killed at a slaughterhouse,
alludes to this historical delay with its clear reference back to the work of
Muybridge and Marey. 59
48Tim Macmillan,Dead Horse
(video installation, 1998).