Avatar in 3D by Artie Vierkant is (as one views it through his online portfolio, anyway) a four-minute seventeen-second video depicting a slowly-spinning animated 3D sphere on whose surface is displayed the entire one hundred sixty-two-minute runtime of the film Avatar which itself has been both:
1. “Sped-up” (as in fast-forward) in order to condense its runtime into the three minutes of Vierkant’s video, as well as
2. “Stretched-out” (as in a fisheye) in order to cover its spatial-representation over the entire total surface area of the floating sphere upon which it is represented.
In addition, the one hundred and sixty-two minutes of the film’s soundtrack have also been condensed into the four minutes seventeen-seconds of the video’s runtime, resulting in a madly electronic stream of audio data colliding with a madly electronic stream of video data and birthing an entirely new object which is at once both Avatar as well as an objective version of Avatar:
A slowly-spinning animated 3D Avatar sphere.
Now, on the one hand, this is a cool looking video with a decent joke:
The famously 3D film Avatar transformed into an animated 3D object; Avatar 3D into Avatar in 3D.
But, on the other hand—it should be said–there is something intriguing about what this joke accomplishes through its getting.
That is to say, to get the joke, one must get the idea that a work of time-based media could be thought of as an object spinning in space—no easy task as time is notoriously difficult to represent as a thing.
A productive decision on the part of the artist here, though, was to condense the runtime of Avatar drastically enough to mutate its legibility as a film to a minimum while, nevertheless, not condensing the runtime of Avatar so drastically that the imagery of the film would be entirely illegible.
One views here, then, a harmony occurring between both the runtime of Avatar (one does view the film) as well as an objective representation of the runtime of Avatar (one views a thing in the world).
Call it an avatar for Avatar, or an Avatar object, or a cinematic object, or, even, a temporal object running through its self.