Mistaken Landscapes

Mistaken Landscapes, 2024

Magazine, 8.5×11 in, 200 pages

The images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2023.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since the Model 4 came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.

Although the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. Although brief, the lag time between the first and last exposure causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with areas of misregistration appearing as a featureless, flat, gray tonality.

As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the landscape streaking by already seems unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shifting pushes the images into territory bordering on abstract and hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs Brad Pitt "Mistaken Landscapes" Audio

This audio playlist was created for the Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at sunset (approximately 8:36 PM) screening of Mistaken Landscapes at All Star Fine and Recorded Arts (film described in detail below). The film was projected onto a large window facing the street from inside the gallery. Visitors could follow a link on their smartphones to this audio track, then listen to the soundtrack while viewing the visuals from outside the space.

Forming a counterpoint to the rhythmic shifting of the distorted visuals, the audio of this film is constructed from recordings made while sitting still on the balcony of a Tokyo apartment. As with the HDR images that don’t precisely combine, the addition of sounds—a child’s tantrum in the courtyard, a neighbor’s koto lesson, rice cooking, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between movement and stasis, outside and inside, travel and home.

The star actor in this film is the visual/aural landscape itself.

0:00 A distant rock concert, birds, a truck with a speaker 

3:13 Rice cooking 

4:14 A tantrum in the courtyard 

5:09 An answering machine message about a missed delivery 

6:04 A speech in the middle of the night, a sudden arrival 

7:32 Stray Dog 

8:08 A murder of crows 

9:30 Wind 

9:52 Yuyake Koyake (Sunrise, Sunset), a child (animal?) having a tantrum, crickets 

10:22 A passing jet, a siren, a koto lesson, a baby crying 

11:54 Cicadas, cicadas breaking the recording device 

12:36 A baseball game, crows, a hit, crickets, crows 

15:16 Rain, a bird, a birdcall, a bird responds, an assessment 

15:53 A passing jet, Yuyake Koyake, Yuyake Koyake echos 

16:41 An unhappy refrigerator 

17:14 A voice from a speaker, a truck, briefly a scooter, the voice continues