The graceful movements of a professional dancer are rendered as a cloud of flickering metallic dots using inexpensive Xbox Kinect sensors and 3D tools. Constantly shifting and changing even as the dancer stands still, the data points create a ghostly impression against a black backdrop, seeming to embody motion itself.

Asphyxia is a collaborative experimental film project by Maria Takeuchi and Federico Phillips, performed by Shiho Tanaka, combining various technologies to stress “the desire to be expressive without limits.” The sensors scanned data points on Tanaka’s body, which were then combined and used as the basis for the creative development of the film.

The filmmakers rendered the data into this hauntingly abstract form, placing it in a photorealistic environment to add to the eerie quality of the finished product. Check out the behind-the-scenes process above to learn more about how it was made.

With compelling attention to depth, detail and movement, French photographer Julien Douvier uses cinemagraphic techniques to capture everything from fleeting moments to frustrating routines that define life in bustling contemporary cities.

Working both in black-and-white as well as color, depending on what he is trying to depict, many of his works are simple loops of short time periods – typical cinemagraphs – but others go beyond that basic typology, too.

In his Routine series, for instance, individuals are looped but also overlaid in multiples within the frame, creating a sense of infinite or endless repetition – in other sets (examples shown below) he utilizes transparency, nature and reflections to enrich each frame.

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City Cinemagraphy Animated Photographs Of Urban Motion

A children’s book with an interactive twist, Motion Silhouette engages readers through pop-up pieces that require lighting to animate shadow pictures on each page.

The idea is to add elements of manual animation that are necessarily subjective – each person will hold, turn and highlight the cutouts in different ways.

Secondary readers or viewers (young kids watching over parents’ shoulders) will also have their own unique experience each time.

Motion Silhouette is actually a sequel to another book, simply titled Silhouette (excerpts shown above), a work which similarly uses slightly less-developed pop-up pages to create a more basic multi-dimensional experience.

From its Japanese creators, Megumi Kajiwara and Tathuhiko Nijima: “I will begin to talk about the story and illustrations shadow falls on top of the page overlap. In this work, you can enjoy the animation of shadow phantasmagoric by you move the light. Trees and become bigger and bigger, which aims to train a distant star. Story that changes depending on the page falling shadows, shadows move around the top of the page.”

Busy shipyards, city streets, rain-streaked skyscrapers and other iconic staples of cities come alive in this portfolio of shadowy oil paintings.

Valerio D’Ospina captures movement in the strokes of his brush, but the blurred results also take on that uncanny real-yet-indistinct character of a dream or memory, a little like the work of Alexandra Pacura.

Born in Italy, Valerio studied in Florence, painted in Paris and eventually moved to Pennsylvania – his range of industrial subjects reflects studies of historic Europe as well as the infrastructure of the United States.

He was trained to teach, but has since turned toward full-time creation. From his bio: “After this teaching experience he decided to focus exclusively on painting, receiving positive feedback from private collectors and galleries from around the world.”

A subway speeds by the platform, leaving most passengers with a fleeting impression and fast-fading memories of people glimpsed only for a moment, but not this crafty slow-motion documentarian. If you watch no other video today, this week or this year, make the time for at least one of those below.

In the above video excerpt, Adam Magyar captures frozen bystanders in fast succession (50 frames per second) at a Tokyo, Berlin and New York (Grand Central) train stations. His custom technology captures everything, and limited post-processing generates a kind of three-dimensional panoramic portrait of everyone in view. These finished products come both in the form of prints and videos, but the latter in particular are must-watch wonders.

“In Stainless, I scan rushing subway trains arriving to stations. The images record a number of tiny details of this moment. We see people staring towards their destinations standing at the doors framed by the sliding door windows. They are scrutinizing the uncertain future. Similarly to all my images, their main motivation is arrival. The darkness of the tunnels deep below the city turns these chemically clean mock-ups into fossils of our time. “

Magyar uses slit-scan and other technologies and techniques to, as writer Joshua Hammer describes, “bend conventional representations of time and space, stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art evokes such variegated sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, even the 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone.”

The extended film from Tokyo is shown above. It is truly mesmerizing to watch the most mundane behaviors caught in mid-act, be it a wet dog in mid-shake, creamer hanging over coffee mid-pour or a woman seen in mid-sneeze. It took Magyar years to perfect his craft – the worthy projects that led up to it (shown below) are essential to understanding how he achieved his current mastery.

If the process behind this uncanny effect seems impossibly complex: his signature un-moving montages came with a great deal of time and technological experimentation. This Stainless series is indeed just the latest in a long line of  experimental photo projects, starting with Squares (shown above) which features collections of people taken out of time and selected to force a grid-like order on passersby.

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Time Stands Still Sublime Slow Motion Subway Panoramas