With 4k, cinematographers have been working
at that resolution with the Red One since 2008 – though when a term like 4k is
used, arguments break out about what that means – can a compressed signal ever
really represent it’s supposed resolution, when there are so many factors that
represent the true resolution? One of my earlier artworks uses this technology
but the issue with 4k has been how we display the actual image for some while,
but all key manufacturers now make 4k displays and also, now, the manufacture
of the domestic TV screen is getting closer and closer to the quality of the professional
display – so prices are coming down. I intend that the new research centre buys
a 4k display in early in 2014 so that we can then display what we capture.
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSEL.html
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSEL.html
Earlier this year in collaboration with
University of Bristol and BBC Research and Development I was privileged to lead
several shoots in Higher Dynamic Range which had the intention of being
displayed in HDR as well – this was a world’s first and because of that the
code is still being written though we can display a basic edit of the piece at
8bit with one track spread across the dynamic range of the Dolby 6000 nit
screen. In the eye brain system we have around 14.5 orders of magnitude of
response which at any one time we use 5 orders of that scale - so in going into
a starlit environment we slide down to the bottom of the14.5 order scale and on
entering a desert landscape in bright sun, we slide those 5 orders of
sensitivity up that scale to the top – thus keeping the highlights exposed
properly for viewing. In this scale 1 order of magnitude is vast. So the
difference between the eye brain system and what is displayed is immense. The
screen you are viewing at best displays 2 – 3 orders of magnitude and the HDR
screen we are capturing images for at University of Bristol is 5 orders – the
same as the eye brain pathway. Using the term orders of magnitude means that
the scale is not just arithmetic, but geometric – the highest values of the
scale are millions of times that of the bottom of the scale. The eye/brain
system is truly magnificent in its capacity.
Later in 2014 we expect to have combined
the 2 tracks we shot into a truer form of HDR. The most surprising – and
disturbing element of the shoot was in learning that 100 years of
cinematographic law had to be turned on its head: In exposing for 6 stops of
latitude between the two exposures I could only monitor the highest exposure
which was 3 stops above the correct exposure, in the knowledge that the true
exposure was set in virtual space and as with film I had to have ‘faith’ that
the end image would be exposed properly. One track recorded 3 stops over, one
track recorded 3 stops under – therefore I had to knowingly gather an
overexposed image in the hope that somehow the two could be combined and a
decent image delivered. When we finally had the code written for the recombination
I was relieved to find that it had worked. It left me knowing how we’d achieved
the end result, but emotionally I didn’t know how it could be ok when my
experience was of searing over-exposure. Interesting.
Over the year I set about the process of
setting up a research centre that meant presenting to various academic research
committees and with luck by April 2014 we shall be authorized to proceed.
Meanwhile I began the process of attaching visiting professors and the first
was Emeritus Professor Chris Meigh Andrews of Central Lancashire. Chris is a
professor of electronic and digital art and adds his weight towards
investigating the histories that have been written on the subject (including
his own second edition of ‘A History of Video Art’) plus an investigation of
where we are and where we’re going during the advent of the digital. For my own
summation of that issue you can read a short paper on the Future of the Moving
Image and how it will affect the production of Art at this URL: https://www.academia.edu/3807490/The_Future_of_the_Moving_Image.
On another issue, previously, Arts and
Humanities subjects have utilized the theorization of a subject through various
strategies, such as dialectics, structuralist analysis, semiology and so on.
But now there is a sense within academia that though these have been useful
tools, they are no longer fit for task, due to the constant and rapidly
changing landscape caused by the introduction of the digital era. In the UK,
the Arts and Humanities Research Council has called for new ways of evaluating
subject areas and many researchers have wholeheartedly embraced empirical
principles, a consequence of which is to have embraced cognitive neuroscience
as a primary route for the use of eye tracking devices, fmri scanners and then
combining testing with social science practices of evaluating the data or
‘evidence’.
One of the issues with this practice is
that truth at best is implied – that a hypothesis is set up, an experimental
test administered and if the cards fall right then the implied truth of the
hypothesis is ‘proved’. It can be argued that deep within the ideological
position taken by empiricism is in a fact a gnosticism argued by many cognitive
neuroscientists, that there is a grand human project to excise it’s entire
knowledge into exograms – or sites of memory outside the person (a book, a
computer, a map, hierloglyphs etc) - and it follows that the final
manifestation of this project is exporting all knowledge into data. A final
outcome of this act is as yet un-theorised by cognitive neuroscientists but I
have proposed the concept of velocitisation to help describe acts on the
internet that express behaviours that speak of human change. With a simple
gesture like the Harlem Shake, one person gestures mimetically that everyone
should ‘do their own thing’ and later in the piece, all then gesture
mimetically that difference. What this describes is a positive response to
change, rather than a dystopian response. But there is not theoretical position
on this behavior and the social sciences have only just begun to take up the
challenge.
Enter Complexity Theory, born of
mathematics and physics and the human response to the multifarious comprehension
of complex behaviours. Complexity theory seeks to theorise the complex and has
a set of strategies to deal with this apparent limitlessness, by limiting it’s
possibilities through rules drawn for the complexity that has been witnessed. Of
course what seems limitless is actually limited and so this is a mathematics
ntended to pick up at the point at which human systems given up on numbering
and categorizing. It is the point at which we might say ‘I saw many starlings
in a murmuration and they seemed to act together as they flew’ or that a
weather system is too complicated to describe but that it worked through a
series of states that derived from prior states – this is where we know that a
system is complex and may do one of several things and science does not yet
know which way it might go and possibly that we will never be able to predict
its exact outcome.
So since the 1940’s when Illya Progogene
began thinking about complexity, we now theorise that a system can be ‘complicated’
but is not necessarily to be described as ‘complex’, where complex does mean
complicated but can go one stage further by being able to enter new states,
through ‘emergence’. A car engine is complicated but will only remain as such.
A storm is both complicated in terms of the many factors that come together to
form it, but it is ‘complex’ because several other states may emerge – a
hurricane for instance. So complexity is about richness – chaos is no longer being
‘chaotic’ because in that chaos lay a set of variables which can result in
ordered states it can become also then become further ordered, or disordered.
But the main point here is that what seems
too much for the human system to ‘count’, but can now be mathematically modeled
and therefore described – at least in some part. Before we described something
as having a number too large to be counted – now we can say we no longer need
to number something in its description – suffice it to say that it is now to be
considered as complex and can act in different ways that could be one of the
following. This too has to have an impact on human consciousness with regard
the introduction of different frame rates, dynamic ranges and resolutions – right
now the young express a preference for higher frame rates but the old prefer
slower frame rates. Why is this? (is it related to higher frame rates in
computer games?) What does this preference say about human evolution? Is it
temporary or indicative of eye brain development? And so on and so forth…
So when the research centre begins its
activity we will look as much toward future technologies as towards the past (a
critical issue will be the re-investigation of how past histories have been
told and hat they have included as ‘important’ in the telling). We will look at
technology as much as at the human system that utilizes that technology, we
will take account of the biology of the human system – the equipment that each
human is endowed with – and we will also look at the cultural systems that
encompass the individual that help create meaning and significance in the
production and consumption of moving images. We will look at the cognitive
systems employed by human species, and the situation the individual finds him
or herself in, with regard the cognitive distribution of information.
