High Definition and High Resolution Motion Imaging

Premediation

2012-01-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

The condition of the photographic image has been worrying me. So much so that I wrote on twitter on January 1st 2012: ‘In a world where anyone can make an image: Refuse.’

I have been noting the proliferation of commercial images and more, the way that software programmes have taken on a professionalisation of the generation of images. And the public through the lesser programmes, with their lesser tendency to professionalisation is generating near professional images - Another way of saying this is that the public is beginning to know what the hidden tropes of image making are.

A trope is of course not hidden, it’s there for all to see. It’s the cliche in action, the tendency towards order in a sea of chaos. Where we, the one hundred thousand monkeys, press the keys of the typewriters a sufficient number of times to imitate something that was once considered great.

A hidden trope is the mechanics behind the magicians art. It’s the quotidian gestures that put together seem to be magical. Saying that, there are of course photographers and cinematographers, who transcend the tricks and tropes of the form - but only a few.

So if we know how to generate impossibly beautiful images and saturate the world with them, do we then risk desensitising ourselves to the beauty of the image?

Of course we do, so then we re-invent the form again and again - and this reinvention takes the form of the opposite tendencies to create new tropes and tricks to create something new. The cinematographer or photographer who realises this eternal round of invention and reinvention innovates and creates the new form first.

'Remediation' is the word used to describe how an incoming media form is met with the thinking of the paradigm conditions by the prior media form - but what word would describe the atrophying of the medium just before the introduction of the new medium" Premediation? And is one of the conditions necessary for the formulation of the new medium its rendition as cliched by overuse?

A Kind of Wonder

2011-12-02T01:22:00.001-08:00

In the last century the iconic image was more prolific due to the lower level of production of images generally. Now the tsunami of images and the fact that the nature of the iconic has been identified and therefore disempowered by both its own ubiquity and the ubiquity of the image in general, renders the newly iconic almost impossible to produce.

Cartier-Bressons ‘definitive moment’, that moment that identifies the essential image that characterises the moment that is available to the photographer had she or he the technique to capture it, and Conrad Hall’s confusingly titled ‘photographic moment’, given that he was a cinematographer, are available for all to achieve as technique has been quantised, digitaised and made ready for popular use via an availability through the 'professionalisation' of software. Naturally, when software developers could increase functionality in software, they did and this lead to the software outputting the semblance of the professional with the person addressing the software having very little professionalism - as professionalism is much more that 'the look of a thing'. Training in higher educational institutions took on the need to familiarise their student with 'the look of the qualitative' and utilised these software solutions so that an apparently ‘more professional’ trainee might be produced for the job market place. Equally trainees met this new level of training with enthusiasm and mass technique and mass aspiration to be the single producer of the iconic rose to meet the challenge. But as the Italians rightly say: 'Pochi sono chiamati, ancora rispondere a molte' - Meaning:

‘Few are called, yet many answer’.

Conrad Hall maintained that each still frame in a shot should have photographic quality (approaching Cartier's Definitive Moment in certain senses) but mainly in compositional quality, so that between the beginning frame of a shot and its end frame, all frames in between as the cameras eye roams across the scene should have the highest compositional quality, as well as the ‘correct’ play of light and subject activity. Hall was saying that even when the cameras eye roams across what could be called abstract compositions, because the subject cannot always be in frame, if the camera when behind a post for instance then the image produced should be like that of an abstract painter, perfect in all of its attributes.It should follow that the ubiquity and availability of high quality equipment and training to a high skill level makes available to all, this level of awareness of the construction of the image.

If the craft cannot be applied whilst in the act of capture - it’s ok as new functionalities of composition are available in programmes that fix reality. Take 'After Effects' for instance, there’s not much that cannot be rearranged in this programme when aligned and data exchanged with Photoshop, so that what was not achieved in the craft act can be genrated in ‘post’. Post meaning: the situation when one has time to think and dwell on construction of all the elements so that they appear to have been produced in the act of capture. This is of course both tautological and impossible.

But the world calls us to act when acts are necessary and craft acts need be realised when that moment calls. Post construction of the iconic is false as it is pre-conceived and post-conceived - realised from a position of understanding ubiquity and cliche, yet without the discriminative ability that stops its production. It speaks of what once was iconic and tries to duplicate what others have done before and in its replication in a plastic medium and renders images non-iconic from lack of application of the taste that would be the very thing in the moment of capture that resisted cliche.

But post analysis is simply that and it is a form of dull and stultifying practice which renders its compositions also dull and that itself stultifies the production of the sense in us that is a response to the observation of the iconic. A kind of wonder.

The ready ability to respond to the world at the moment when the world produces the circumstances for the production of the iconic comes from continuous practice and a conscious awareness and the desire to stand on the verge of excitement at the possibility of its production. This excitement to visit this moment through the medium of realisation is what any craftsperson can utilise to elevate their practice to art.

Midnight

2011-10-22T04:37:00.001-07:00

Impossibly, something absolutely perfect happened yesterday night whist watching Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’.

For years film and video has been trying to be self-reflexive, to truly encode the fact of the making in relation to the audience. This is about how the subject, the makers and the audience are bound together in a group agreement to suspend disbelief about the act of watching a fiction of some kind, about how the cleverer works encoded this into the subject matter to reveal some deeper truth when you are in the depths of immersion in the fiction of the piece.

In the middle of the film Gil Peters goes back in time and meets Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Louis Bunuel.

Gil: I'm Gil, nice to meet you. It's a pretty name.
Bunuel responds: A man in love with a woman from a different era. I see a photograph!
Man Ray: I see a film!
Gil: I see an insurmountable problem!

At that exact moment the projector in the cinema turned off and the safety lights came up and I was amazed that Woody Allen had arranged for thousands of cinemas across the globe to do this in every performance of the film. We sat for a moment and I mused on the nature of going to see films and engaging in fictions and what immersion and suspension of disbelief means.

A voice emitted from the projection box that ‘we’ll get the film on as soon as possible’. How amazing that Woody had issued dialogue for the cinemas to speak. Then the sound came up to let us back into the film gently, then the image, then the lights went down. What orchestration. I got back into the film.

Later I went to the box office and they told me that the electricity in the small city where I live had gone off at that exact moment.

You couldn’t have planned it...

The Developing Language of Digital Technologies

2011-09-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

On 7th September 2011 in Los Angeles, the Directors Guild of America exhibited the new Sony F65 Camera to the Movie Industry. This is the newest flagship Digital 4k camera with an 8k imaging sensor (where 4K refers to 4000 lines of resolution - this is the gold standard because it comes near to what a 35mm negative can do in terms of resolution and detail). It is only the third 4K camera to have been made after the Red One and the Red Epic. So Why an 8k sensor though? According to the Niquist/Shannon Sampling Theorem, to derive an actual and accurate measurement of (in this case) resolution, you need twice the sampling rate to achieve a true measurement. Therefore an 8K chip delivers 4k resolution. With the F65 Sony is seeking to take the high ground of Digital Cinematography with an act constructed to displace all of its competitors.

In what follows want I want to examine this growing description of this work, a developing language with accompanying development of ideas that even the most blasé film or media student is to some degree conversant with, though their level of familiarity with the language does not necessarily mean they would understand the subject - especially as a lot of what is said by professionals is said within within metaphor. So to reveal as much of the indicators and referents to true meaning I wish to use some of the flurry of posts on the Cinematographers Mailing list on the day after the presentation of the Sony F65 as a snapshot to examine the attitudes and the developing language of those at the coal face of this developing technology as well as the developing language itself.

The CML was created by well-respected UK Director of Photography. Geoff Boyle’s respect comes from amongst other things his maxim: ‘test, test, test’ which is itself pure scientific materialist values. There are various professionally oriented lists online, like the absurdly named but hugely useful (and respected) Creative Cow which deals with most professional software programmes, plus there are many other lists that are full of ‘wannabees’ or students or ex-students who wish themselves to be in professional company. Of course as these people mature then those lists also become more professional. CML however, takes no prisoners and excels at ‘flaming’: there is zero tolerance for professional stupidity - that is, asserting something if you do not know it to be true yourself through having tested the logic, or citing peer-agreed and unquestionable professional reference.

The professional practitioner has a peer-review process as stringent as the academic model, with the same outcome of loss of respect from your peers if you get this wrong. In the early days of the groundbreaking company, Red Cameras, Red used the enthusiasm of its early adopter community as a PR space to broadcast its product. CML participants looked on initially, then challenged the claims of the adherents and some would argue that this in itself was to Red’s greatest benefit - because when the CML community itself had tested and then did praise the product, the approval was worth that much more when it did approve because of its initial with-holding of approval.CML has many different Cinematography lists from lenses to grip gear, from 70mm cameras to Digital Cinematography lists and these are visited daily by people at the very top of the professional sector and who are themselves practicing in the industry, through to people who mostly stay silent to learn - from feature film cinematographers down to second or third level camera assistants or edit assistants.

In attempting to reveal the meaning within the language of these professionals my intent is to disclose what will become important for theorists and later users of the technology when it filters down to educational or commercial or domestic use. It is becoming clear that the gap between professionals and then on the bell curve, the early adopters, or early users is closing.There is a set of reasons within this function, chief amongst them is the simple fact that mass-production eventually contributed to mass-availability and then mass-demand for higher quality. There’s also Gordon Moore’s Law which states:

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer”. Gordon Moore, Electronics Magazine, 19th April 1965.In 1975 Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years (1975: Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics).

Theorists seek to sit outside the bell curve of adoption of technology, sometimes between research labs and research initiatives and professionals. Sometimes they create ideas prior to the research labs. Theorists evoke what happens in the world or in a specific domain through the use of language and the issue in this article is language, how it develops, who uses it, whether it informs thought, or whether new ideas generate new language - in a co-dependency of arising, as Noam Chomsky would have it.So we’re now at a moment in September 2011 where we have larger chips, faster recording mechanisms that handle what data those chips output. But higher resolution isn’t everything (as we’ll see within the comments that I’ll present you with below). Colour bit depth, accuracy of rendition in both capture in photosites and how those photosites are ‘read’ - for instance was the recording 8, 10, 12, 14 or 16 bits of colour - or higher? And frame rate for smoothness of movement plus increased immersion in the display device - but also what the dynamic range of the entire image is. Does it replicate the functions of the eye? If the camera does, does the display device? And so on and so forth.

LANGUAGE, REFERENCES, NOTES
So there’ll be a degree of jargon in what follows, meta-language and meta-ideas. I’ll not annotate at every moment, but occasionally I will try explain the ideas, plus I’ll summarise at the end. Please pursue the information even if the numbers go beyond your attention span (or will to live) and these will be revealed to be either true, sleight of hand or untrue (due to a distortion of truth). If you can stay with the argument, I shall seek to reveal the discourse between professionals and shine a light on the potential future meaning of the exchange between them.Please also refer to my online oral history research resource: A Verbatim History of the Aesthetics, Technologies and Techniques of Digital CInematography, which catalogues a global view of the developments in this new subject area by asking practitioners, theorists, Cinematographers, Artists and Professionals who use this technology what they think this technology is, what it does and what changes it is causing to happen. It can be found at: http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/indexHDresource.htmLastly, I found myself writing extensive notes in the text to make what was written understandable, then I realised that these interrupted the narrative of the professionals musing on what was going on and what would arise from these technological developments. I pulled them out and placed them in the typical footnote position, then as asterisked notes at the end of this article - yet again the interruption was huge.

So I’ve now reorganised the entire article so that the days exchange is followed by a section called: Preliminary Summation, then a section entitled ‘Technical Notes as an Element of the Argument’ which is followed by a conclusion (or Coda), which itself is a set of parameters, to be read as just as informational or revealing as the rest of the language. I note this all here because I’m seeing the form that I’m writing within, changing before my eyes.

THE DAYS EXCHANGE BEGINS
On Wednesday, 7th Sep 2011 00:53:38 -0400 (EDT) the strand of exchange of ideas began on the cml-digital-raw-log digest recipients cml-digital-raw-log. Tim Sassoon, a respected professional grader or colorist, begins the exchange by quoting an online mail-out from Bandpro, suppliers of professional equipment:

"Band Pro is now accepting pre-orders for the new Sony F65 digital cinema camera. With Sony's F65 Introductory Pack you can be one of the first to get their new 4K camera when it starts shipping in January 2012. And, with the full compliment of accessories that are included in the pack price of $85,000 you'll be ready to shoot 16-bit 4K footage out of the box. The Sony F65 camera utilizes an 8K digital sensor..."Tim comments:“I gotta say, that's pretty aggressive pricing for Sony. Will Arri step up to the 4K plate? I'd be willing to bet that by 2014, shooting or posting features at 2K will be very passe”.

So here Tim is predicting the end of 2k by 2014 - and yet for most people who are still shooting at around 1920 x 1080, they’re shooting with equipment using Gop structured pictures (where only some of the data is passed in Groups of Pictures from capture into processing before being falsely recombined into full frames to display - but of course, it may again then be torn apart back into GoP structures for internet streaming before display). So for the more purist data engineer, these are heavily compressed images at the outset and therefore not worthy of use.

Here Carlos Acosta Date: Tuesday, 6th Sep 2011 22:25:45 -0700 talks about the levels of data this sort of device (the F65) will generate and how we deal with that. He also compliments and chides Sony on being formerly a closed organisation but also compliments Red Cameras on opening Sony up (against their will!). He corrects the comment supposedly from Mike Most:

“My favorite comment at the event (from, I believe, Mike Most): Jim Jannardknocked $100,000 off what would have been the price of the F65."Carlos answers: ‘That was me Bob ;-) What I saw tonight is Sony descending from the clouds looking to join the boots on the ground. It's kind of about face for them to even offer an "open" architecture. Of course we really don't know what the promise of openness really means any more than we know how much time fits on a 1TB data card. Being realistic, if it was totally done, it would be delivering right now. They obviously covered the lack of critical details with slick power point and and funny jokes. Kidding aside, $85k for a system of this caliber ain’t bad at all. The images were really fantastic. I suspect the Mike Most will have his questions about data format and other workflow issues answered. It will generate stunning quantities of data pushing many users to shoot in HD anyway”.

Within this paragraph is held the information that Sony are now following Red in the development of their cameras. Preciously they used to ‘prove’ the product befoire releasing it. The response from the professional users was often that engineers had designed the camera and consequently professionals had to make all sorts of adjustments to make the equipment fit for use. Here Sony are now releasing beta level equipment as evinced by there being a lack of a complete post-production path, but like Red they’ll now rely on the good offices of the professional community to sort this out. The euphemism one could use here is ‘consulting with the community’ to bring it on side - equally one could criticise both Red and now Sony for releasing equipment into professional usage that doesn’t actually work!

Michael Most on Tue, 06th September 2011 22:05:36 -0700 quotes Bob Kertesz:“My favorite comment at the event (from, I believe, Mike Most): Jim Jannardknocked $100,000 off what would have been the price of the F65." (note: Jim Jannard owns Red Cameras)”.

Mike Most then responds:“Actually, I didn't say that. But I agree with it. The economics are changing, no doubt about it. But the nature of the Moore's Law rate of technical advancement has now dictated very different economies of scale with regard to technical devices like modern digital cinema cameras. Since these things are effectively obsoleted in a relatively short time, the purchase price has to be considerably lower to account for the shorter shelf life. I've never really talked to Jim Jannard about that, but despite his "obsolescence obsolete" statement, I think he foresaw this, and one of the reasons he came up with his dramatically lower price points is because he understands it. He has been remarkably generous in his upgrade policies, but I think he understands the implications of faster development creating faster obsolescence very, very well”.

Another post from Mike Most, Date: Tuesday, 06th September 2011 22:17:56 -0700 quotes Tim Sassoon:“I seriously hope they don't roll their own de-Bayering accelerator, as threatened at Cinegear and like RED, and instead write to NVidia CUDA engines”.Most carries on: .”..And BTW, since Sony is claiming that the sensor doesn't actually use a Bayer pattern, we probably shouldn't be calling in debayering in the first place. Maybe we should call it de-rotation debayering. Or maybe de-Hyper Hadding. Or maybe just image reconstruction, although that just sounds so SMPTE....”

Here Mike Most is reconstructing or inventing language to try to deal with the changes. Debayering is the system used to reconstruct colour information from a Black and White signal (effectively). Color filters are placed over the photosites in a specific pattern and then read back in post and reconstructed into a colour set within a certain colour space. The colour space of a printer, your optical system whist reading this, and a plasma display are all entirely different. So coherent systems that maintain colour throughout the chain are a necessity. Hyper Hading is a reference to early chips that where enabled with hole accumulation iode Sensors - it’s another strategy to turn light into data, into displayed light once more. In fact his reference to image reconstruction, though he jokes about it sounding like the SMPTE organisational way of referring to things, is quite apposite in this instance. It describes what actually happens.

Sony have always played this kind of game however - in the early days in it’s tussle with Kodak it named it’s Digital Video system: Cine Alta. The use of ‘Cine’ being a direct reference to film to create the beginnings of commercial displacement that would eventually win the commercial electronic corporations war against the photo-chemical corporations.It’s important to discuss Sony’s camera naming policy as it’s a key component of their commercial strategy to supersede the photochemical corporations by referring back to a film past. The two preceding cameras were the F23 and then the F35. Both these cameras costs hundreds of thousands of dollars - but as you’ll see, the F65 is under $100,000. For years Cinematographers had clamored for a 35mm sized chip so that all the benefits of 35mm could be exploited - after all, that had been the optical proactive in Hollywood since the beginning. 35mm optics automatically gave the kind of cinema we were used too. You know the shot where the two lovers kiss and the background is out of focus thus placing a spotlight and emphasis on the moment? That was due mostly to the physical pathway derived from 35mm optics. Though any Cinematographer could produce that shot on any format film or video (using different techniques to limit depth of focus).

Up to and including the F23 Sony had been wedded to a smaller chip size (usually half inch but in this case 3 x two thirds of an inch chips) and they’d also been wedded to CCD’s as opposed to CMOS chips. CCD’s discharge line by line and CMOS discharge the whole sensor in one go - there are various physical artifacts related to both processes. When Sony created the F35 they adopted a 35mm sensor CCD sensor - thus coming into line with both Red Cameras and Arriflex with their D21 and latterly the much praised Alexa system in terms of optics. But the F65 changes to a CMOS sensor and also refers to the double size of 35mm which is 70 mm, but abbreviated to 65mm. In industrial film production 70mm was physically slashed into 35mm, then into 16mm, then into 8mm. All of the variants which use the term ‘Super’, simply get rid of one row of perforations and therefore enable the frame size to become larger taking up the space where one row of perforations used to exist - surprisingly this renders an extra 40 per cent imaging area.However, the confusion employed by Sony is that the F65 is in fact a 35mm sized Sensor.

There is currently one type of digital cinema camera with a 65 mm sensor, the Phantom 65 made by Vision Research. Paradoxically this has a 34K sensor of 4096 x 2440 pixels and of course this has larger photosites due to the sensor size.

Mitch Gross on the same listing comments on Alan Lasky’s comment:On September 7th , 2011, at 1:10 AM, "Alan Lasky" wrote:“It is good to see Sony loosening up a bit”. “I think the Reason there is not a clear message on post path is that Sony has chosen not to ram one down everyone's throat. Unlike the past, Sony's mission this time is to be very open in how the system can be supported. Yes you can integrate with current SR workflows, but you can also use all of the various 3rd party systems because Sony will provide SDK information for them to ingest the files. This is very much like Phantom CINE files or ARRIRAW, but a bit different than REDRAW because RED makes everyone incorporate their de-Bayering engine to insure that the process is consistent. One other difference with F65 is that it is a different pattern than Bayer mask, so that might take some more math work from the various processing systems out there, but again, Sony will provide the information. It's obvious that they have a way to extract the information beautifully. The download station has 10G Ethernet. We have an onset download station we built for The Phantom CineStation download dock that can empty a 512G CineMag in under an hour using 10GE. I would expect similar times from the Sony system. And $85K for the complete camera with the shutter, VF, recorder, a mag and the download station? Yowsa, compare that to the $300K system of the F35 a few years back! Killer deal, Sony”.

So here in amongst the detail is the debate on the way technology is taking up the call for faster, more qualitative technological response to the demands of the professionals who want better and better images. When Jim Jannard introduced the Red camera, it was as if in an irritated response to corporations like Sony who kept their systems to themselves. Here it becomes clear that these technicians: Cinematographers, colourists, graders, digital imaging technicians and editors truly understand the medium and are completely competent to understand the problems of the designers. It just might be that the cultural production of analogue and digital video, within the Asian market place suffered from the lack of openness of the societies that produced the technology. Equally however, the early European and American versions of that same technology were less user friendly than the Asian - or rather, Japanese, versions. So in the comment above Mitch Gross is discussing both cultural and technological issues - not to mention that both these strands of discussions are in the end in service to the aesthetic delivery of images into our world.

Michael Brennan a DP from Melbourne and also the editor of High Definition Magazine takes first the cultural and then the technological points up on Wed, 7 Sep 2011 20:56:08 +0100:“Of course we really don't know what the promise of openness really means any more than we know how much time fits on a 1TB data cardHe then quotes from various Sony pdfs;

“Series S55 cards (capable of 5.5 Gbps) will work at 2k/HD as well as 4k, "non 4k cards" series S25 (2.5 Gbs) will work at 2k and HD but apparently 4k at 23.98psf only.1TB SR-1TS55 card can store:59 minutes of f65 raw 16bit 4k 23.98psf29 minutes of f65 raw (4k x 1k) 16 bit 120fps572 minutes of HD SR lite 422, 23.98psf160 minutes of HD SR HQ 444, 23.98psfIn case of 3D recording record time will be halved”.

This is of course very technical and requires one to have a mathematical bent - but one is listening in to the metalanguage of the technicians - the twitter of the birds - that seek to bring advanced technology to us. He goes on (read this as if concrete poetry):“So three hours of SR HQ on a card that can be transferred in around 30 minutes. Note that there a two recorders one that does HD/2k the other that does 4K (and maybe HD too??) The SR-R 1000 is a portable 8TB drive with 4 x card slots. Takes 30 minutes to transfer 1 TB, can transfer 4 x cards at a time, looks like a tape deck. The SRPC-5 "transfer station" is a 1U form factor card reader with gigabit ethernet "to compliment existing on set data ingest" and a HDSDI out (if you want to transfer to HDCAM SR deck). Compact card reader is SR-PC4 with one slot and Gbe or optional 10Gbe (third party) and has optional F65 raw monitoring. Can copy direct to Esata drive via optional Esata interface. This is the one of most interest for use in the field, not sure of what the transfer time would be.....”...and then the characteristic joke to alleviate the compression of attention:“At last a Dcinema camera with a ND filter wheel :)”

This is all difficult to read - perhaps like a translator of the early mesopotamian writings, or middle Egyptian, the translator has to find the kinds of meanings the language delivers, And no, this is not deconstruction, this is reconstruction. This is in a sense pure language that cannot deliver all of its meaning when translated. This means something in a certain kind of way to people who speak meta-language.

Mike Most sends a comment from his iPad (he’s on the move) Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:43:16 -0700 He quotes Alan Lasky who wrote:“So, I have another question regarding the F65: considering the current state of acquisition, what is the realistic target market vertical for the F65? Features? Television?”Mike responds: “Yes. Add in commercials and corporate production. Maybe even the military”. And again quotes Lasky: “My concern is that with current economic conditions being what they are the F65 may be perceived to be "too much dog for the fight" in something like episodic television”.

Mike Most again: “Not a chance. Television is it's most likely immediate market, IMHO. It's basically being positioned as a superior file based image capture device, using a familiar and respected codec, at what is essentially an Alexa-compatible price point. If you look at it as a substitute for the Alexa in the television market, you can look at recording directly to HD resolution SR files using either S-log or ACES and passing it through a rather straightforward pipeline. Despite Red's protests and despite the 8K/4K nature of the product, that's probably more than enough to get it heavily used this coming pilot season, provided Sony can produce and provided the first units prove to be as reliable as the prototypes seem to be. If anything, it's the requirements of the feature market that are more of a work in progress for the F65, in part because those workflows can be very unique on a per-picture basis, and in part because I'm far from convinced that there will be any simple, economical way to handle that amount of data. Nothing I heard last night changes that view. My feeling is that going forward, Sony will ultimately come up with at least a mathematically lossless compression scheme for the RAW data, perhaps multiple levels of compression a la Red. But I have to agree with my friend Jim Jannard that the uncompressed-only ship has already sailed.Only my opinion, though. YMMV.”

He signs: Mike Most, Colorist/Technologist, Level 3 Post, Burbank, CA.As he says at the beginning of this post: IMHO - “In my humble opinion”, which is a caveat phrase which says : I really know what I’m talking about, I have the experience and the expertise - however, I do accept that sometimes I can be wrong and please let me know if I am. There’s a lot of clues in this post. Sony has missed the uncompressed ship as it sailed three years or more ago when Jim Jannard of Red piloted the boat from the shore. Arriflex with the Alexa has grabbed the high ground because they’ve manufactured a camera more akin to Panasonic’s manufacturing response to Sony’s cameras in a previous era - the Alexa is a camera that delivers good pictures from the outset whereas Red needs work. It’s the difference between a stable mare and an unstable stallion. The other acronym Mike Most uses here is YMMV which means roughly ‘your mileage may vary’ which basically means your experience may be different, better or worse than what is described.

Here, Most responds to Jim Houston. On Sep 7, 2011, at 9:02 AM, Jim Houston wrote: “I thought the description of the strategy was very clear. There is no one-size-fits-all workflow. ... Yes, lots of vendors have lots of work to do, but the strategic approach was very clear.Most responds: “I think my original statement was a bit stronger than it should have been. I do see that Sony is basically making the data available and also making tools to interpret it available, and bringing in third party partners to do the specific implementations, and that's a strategy I can certainly agree with. I think my only real problem with what's been presented so far is that if one wants to record and preserve the original RAW data, there's nothing currently on the table to do that short of investing in petabytes of storage (an exaggeration, but for certain projects maybe not much of one). No matter how cheap storage is getting, it's still an awful lot of data to ingest, keep track of, and restore. And perhaps I've had too much Kool-Aid in the last 2 years or so, but I no longer see the need to adhere so completely to the "uncompressed is the only way" mantra. Even mathematically lossless compression would cut down those storage requirements by many terabytes on a typical feature project. And that has to be done at the camera/recording level. I still hold out hope that Sony is going to offer such a path, but I didn't hear any evidence of that last night, at least not on the RAW recording”.

And here he steps up to the mark and begins to comment on the current situation:“Like it or not, we no longer live in a world where big facilities are the sole province of high end work. And we no longer live in a world where big iron can be the only solution. One of the lessons of both Red and Alexa is that when products are brought to the market that can be handled by both big iron and desktop solutions, the market is widened, acceptance is faster, and products are championed. I think that will likely be the case with F65 recording HD sized SR files, but I'd like to see a similar path for the higher resolution material that the camera can produce, allowing smaller shops and individuals to produce 4K projects with sensible storage requirements. Red has already shown that it can be done. I'd like to see Sony take that ball and run with it a bit.Competition can be a beautiful thing.”

Here’s one of the critical issues with the development and availability of uncompressed and RAW technologies: That big iron solutions (i.e. multi-million pound post houses in the worlds capitals) are in parallel with desktop solutions (once only every MAC computers, but now as PC’s have emulated MAC developments they also can be used, as well as Linux and other platforms). Wavelet Transforms have underpinned s called lossless or Raw data and mid-2008 suddenly 4k images could be played back with only three standard hard drives ganged together, in 2006 it had taken me 8 hard drives ganged together to produce the same outcome. Wavelet’s had been available in 2005, but not with this efficacy. We are in the middle of an onward rush, a tsunami of technology.But this technology, in delivering greater resolution (as well as dynamic range and also frame rates) is alleviating some of the earlier anxieties of the move from film to video to data cinematography.

Here, Tim Sassoon comments on Mike Mosts earlier point and then brings up a critical point:In a message dated 9/7/11 11:43:49 AM, Most writes:“Sony will ultimately come up with at least a mathematically lossless compression scheme for the RAW data”Sassoon’s response is:“Remember that the larger the frame, the less significant compression artifacts are, and the more important higher bit depth is”.

This is a very important comment as it shows that anxiety is a response relative to the conditions of the time. In the early days of HD and 2K the idea of an artifact within the image produced a complete and total adherence to the idea of lossless data amongst the most serious professionals. This was related to the fact that they did have experience of the highest levels of image generation in 35mm and 65mm film. They had a history of dedication to methodologies that avoided any kind of compromise of the image generation, development and display process. This evinces itself latterly for instance, in Christopher Nolan’s adherence to the use of 65mm to generate high quality entertainment features.But of course lossless data is an impossibility because it is never really achievable: even if one retained all of the data generated (at massive storage cost), the particular criteria adopted defeats the notion of lossless-ness. What I mean here is that the paradigm governing the technical thinking of the time says that data is a costly thing to generate. Not in monetary terms (although high levels of data do generate actual cost) but costly in terms of storage and the ability to manipulate the data for editing, grading compositing etc. Consequently generating 8 bit data with 256 samples (of a data criteria like YUV - so that’s 3 times 256) obviously generates less data than 10 bit (with 1024 samples per channel) - and so on. The real point here is that one would need an infinite bit depth to truly represent the world - but then one would reproduce the world - so what in effect, would be the point?

Mike Most comments on Tim Sassoon’s point:“Remember that the larger the frame, the less significant compression artifacts are, and the more important higher bit depth is.I think you and I are basically saying the same thing (no surprise there ;-D ), with one of us pointing out that even mathematically lossless compression is really not a requirement at these frame sizes.”Mike Most is saying that with the human optical system there might in fact be a limit far below the infinite horizon of data that the purist originally sought, that will work for the discerning eye.

PRELIMINARY SUMMATION
So, here we are again at one of those seemingly watershed moments, which actually do not have the power of metaphor associated with a watershed with further inspection. In hindsight it might have seemed very dramatic at the time. With the Sony announcement of the F65, it might have seemed as if a distant horizon has rushed forward towards us and simply looked like they were very near indeed. What looked technically impossible before now looks technically not only achievable but far surpassable.But here I’d like to step back into film’s past to generate a sense of scale for the present. In his book ‘Using the View Camera: A Creative Guide to Large Format Photography’, Steve Simmons describes the relationship and also advantage between the larger still image film formats of camera over and above 35mm SLR cameras:

“The film used with the various view-camera formats is much larger than 35mm film. Film for the 2.5 x 3.25 camera is 5 times larger, 4 x 5 film is more than 13 times larger, and 8 x 10 film is 53 times larger. The increased film size produces clean, crisp images with a captivating sharpness. The surface textures of such materials as stone, brick and wood look almost three-dimensional in view-camera prints and transparencies. Large display prints have unblemished clarity and depth because the negative doesn’t have to be over-enlarged.”

This immediately refers to Tim Sassoon’s point: “Remember that the larger the frame, the less significant compression artifacts are, and the more important higher bit depth is.Also, if you work through the figures, 8 x 10 film (using the Canon Rebel as a guide) is 53 x 18 megapixels: that’s 954 megapixels! As you’ll guess, I’m being disingenuous and playing somewhat (but even if you used the Red One camera, that would be 440 megapixels). Steve Simmons talks about a ‘captivating sharpness’. ‘unblemished clarity’ and the images of materials look ‘almost three-dimensional’. This is all about increase of verisimilitude as our current technological tendency is about a series of increases in capacities which produce clues that translate as verisimilitude - hence the other phrase Steve Simmons uses ‘looks almost three-dimensional’*(See note at end).

So for a long time now we’ve had the ability to capture very, very detailed high resolution images. The difference now with Digital Cinematography is that we can fire these off at 24 frames, 25, 30, 48, 60 - in fact the capabilities of frame rate display is continuously increasing. We are effectively enabling still photography rapid fire to allow it to join cinematography, and by being digitally enabled we must append the title to Digital or Data Cinematography. I would conclude from the above that we are in the very early days of what is to become possible. And what eventually arrives will be far outside what we can currently imagine.This brings to mind some experiments conducted at the University of Bristol where Tom Troscianko in the department of Experimental Psychology has produced data that shows that current 3D techniques only generate 7 per cent more immersion than standard 2D images of the same subject matter. The technique used to measure ‘immersion’ is related to arousal. In fact, increased technological capacities, such as higher frame rates, higher dynamic range capture and display together with increased resolution produce more depth clues and generate a deeper level of engagement than 3D technologies.

So I myself have been guilty of believing in the digital revolution and given many papers on it - even the idea of the post digital. I’ve ruminated and written on the notion of data as being too closely related with digitality which many signal engineers regard simply as actually an enhanced analogue method. After all, Fourier presciently invented the Wavelet transform in 1807 and the ‘meat-grinder’ Discrete Cosine Transform in 1800 - way before digitality in the middle of the analogue era. I’ve written before on the idea of data as being pure and unmediated by numerical remediation - after all the data captured within the medium of the hologram is not mathematical, nor mediated (except in the strict sense that it’s held within a medium). But it is quantum and photonic in nature - both appendages or descriptions deny the notion of the mathematical - where mathematics is a telescope or viewing device into the ‘stuff’ of the universe and photons are of the stuff of the universe and light behavior appears to be quantum (in this perceptual realm at least).

It would seem that the idea of a technological revolution is a human gesture towards a paradigm change. It would seem that the reinvention and use of language is part of the strategy. To call something that’s happening ‘Digital’ when all you’ve know previously is analogue functionality, is very similar as the gesture of naming something ‘High Definition’ - which albeit can be seen to be a PR gesture, might also be an actual necessity for innovation and development (again thinking of Noam Chomsky in relationship to thought and language being two halves of the same coin) It’s the use of language where you aspire to something beyond the now. ‘The Truth’ and the idea of ‘now’ are of course dubious notions, unless you believe in the idea of the direction of entropy and therefore accept the forward notion of ‘Time’s Arrow’, (when there’s always a ‘next’).

On the same list the day after the F65 was launched, this post arrived from Harry Dawson: Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 10:43:19 -0700“With film "going away" in a few years, there needs to be a 4K replacement, right? I'm shooting a project where we are doing 4K scans from 35mm. Not doing SFX but spanning three vertical plasma screens. Seems like SFX are going to need a higher resolution answer than Alexa. Here might be an answer, right?”

Harry is posing the question of ‘next’. In this case I won’t go in to what he’s suggesting technically as I’ll leave that to your own researches. Digitality now sits where ‘the Modern’ used to sit. It’s here right now and it feels good, because it suggests we’re in a period of movement, that we are materially achieving the dreams of our imagineers, science fiction writers beginning somewhere in the 7th century BC with the writer of the Epic of Gilgamesh, who’s original title was “He who saw the Deep”. I’m speaking here of an actual ‘writer’ who used text and of course I do accept that human’s have created forward looking stories from the beginning of language (and in the case of images in the cave paintings of Lascaux - who’s to say these were not imagined bountiful futures rather than ‘movies’ about the past?)

So in a sense I’m arguing that future imagining, via science fiction writers of the 1950’s and sci-fi television shows like Star Trek that posited warp drive and holodecks were the original acts of scientific theorising, that then created a vision for everyday scientists to work towards; that possibly at this point in time, where the world seems a little out of control, ‘the church of future hope’ is actively proposing that technically we can do anything - and given that our optical system is perhaps the most powerful and overwhelming sensory system - and somehow ontologically characterise what we actually are - then digital imaging is the place where the forward thinking work which seeks to usher in a new paradigm is taking place - it seems to me therefore, that the language and the conversations of those people that truly understand the technology, the possibilities it makes available, the developing practice and the following technical developments is a determinant of what will actually occur.

TECHNICAL NOTES AS AN ELEMENT OF THE ARGUMENT
I will now outline some of the ideas that may not have been fully described earlier (because I didn’t want to limit the progression of the above narrative). I’m now proposing that though these are informational, that they also or revealing imminent technical, cultural and aesthetic developments.In the early days of HD where the naming of terminology described the aspiration for something better than what we’d been used to, High Definition simply meant ‘better’ at 1920 x 1080 photosites rather than 768 x 576. In 2007 when I started my Creative Research Fellowship the technology was very clunky, the recording mechanisms seemed incapable of recording the data generated and the idea of recording a truly lossless stream of data seemed impossible.

Then I became aware of various critical issues which determined the parameters of generating, recording and displaying digital images: Modular Transfer Function, which describes a chain of delivery from capture to display where resolution is defined by the lowest resolution link in the chain (like plumbing where flow is derived from the thinnest of pipes in the system); Wavelet Transforms which power everything digital by being that bit cleverer than discrete cosine transforms: the first being linked to the functions of a circle and the second being linked to the square. Clearly the smoothness of a circle as a metaphor is more gradual and gentler than the hard right angles of the square. Therefore reconstructions of data that’s been compressed with the functions of arcs and circles is more delicate than those compressed and uncompressed using the functions of a square wave. Wavelets just seem intuitively more reconstructable. I’ve used the term photosite rather than pixel as it is a more accurate description of the light receptor that generates a voltage which is then processed into data than the word ‘pixel’ on a CCD or CMOS sensor, (as it is where the basic data for a ‘display pixel’ is generated).

With regard the denominator ’2K’, HD is often referred to inaccurately as 2K, as 1920 is near to 2 thousand) - HD is 1920 x 1080 photosites, but one of the more true variants of 2K cinema, which uses a 2:1 aspect ratio is 2048 x 1024 photosites. The true 35mm sensor however might better be described as being in the region of 2000 x 1500 photosites because this generates an aspect ratio of around 4:3, which is the original 35mm academy ratio, which can also be expressed - if you divide 4 by to get 1.33 (Academy was actually 1.375).If you take a 35mm sized sensor that is 2k, then of course it has larger photosites than those on a same-sized 4k sensor - as there have to be 4 times as many packed in to the same space - and as with all things, when you do this sort of thing, there are drawbacks (which is for another article).The 4K variant using a 35mm sensor is 4096 x 2048 (double the 2k variant which uses a 2:1 aspect ratio). So using the 4K variant that would equate to 8.3 million photosites - so the Red Camera has a sensor (speaking in DSLR terms) which is less than half the recent cheap Canon EOS Rebel, which retails for about $900 and is 18 megapixels.

You get the point though - and importantly when you shoot in megapixel amounts of photosites this is then multiplied by how many frames per second you can shoot - so whilst Peter Jackson shoots the Hobbit Movie at 48 frames per second - at 4k and in sterographic 3D (i.e. two streams of 4K at 48 fps) the data streams are huge.Colour bit depth is typically talked about as 8, 10, 12 etc. What this refers to is the amount of samples taken - therefore how subtle the colouration is. 8 bits describes a sample of 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 which as a sum equals 256 samples. 10 bits is two more times 2 which equals 1024 (and so on). Incidentally each byte of data is comprised of 8 bits of data.Colour bit depth sits within a Colour Space (which is the term that describes what the parameters are for the gathering of and display of data). Clearly a printer has an entirely different colour space than either the human eye, or a plasma screen, or the newer Higher Dynamic Range Display technology that you will be seeing shortly.I could carry on and this ‘argument’ would also seem to transmute into a ‘glossary’. In fact the language and the thought become the same. In time of course these will again separate as we gain distance on the subject area.

It’s always been a difficult practice to theorise what is happening when it is happening.We’re now post-digital (so some claim) which I read as meaning: ‘we’re no longer confused about what it is and now we feel comfortable’. This means that people are looking to the horizon as if it’s the present. 4k now - 64k tomorrow - and why not? There’s a changing paradigm to be witnessed here. Digitality requires numerical representations of whatever the digital device is dealing with. Numerical equals mathematical. But there are ways of generating data that are not mathematical - within the hologram for instance. Pure data captured without mediating light through maths.

CODA
To try to make all of this that little bit more clear, here are what I offer some defining criteria for Digital or Data Cinematography:

a) The optical pathway is 35mm or above (if you research the reason that 35mm film was set at 35mm, you’ll see it could have been derived from manufacturing techniques for photographic usage - that is what was technically and industrially possible at the time).
b) it generates a progressively based image flow relating to a specific time-base as opposed to an interlaced image flow (one full frame of information at a time rather than a field-based workflow)
c) like one of its predecessors, film, it holds the image in a latent state until an act of development (or rendering) is applied - but unlike film is non-destructive of its prior material state)
d) it’s capture mechanism though generating a nondestructive, non-compressed data pathway from which an image can be reconstructed, is not its sole intent as a medium or method of capture (but is distinguished from digital video who’s sole intent is to generate images in a compressed manner from less than 35mm optical pathways)
e) the latter three qualities are also base characteristics of many developing digital technologies – for instance real time mapping of environments requires a capture of at least 3 infra-red imaging sources (Cameras used as sonar devices) running at 25 fps at a 'reasonable' resolution

Digital cinematography is more than just capturing images - it's a portal onto the digital landscape so far unexplored due to its apparent function as an image capture medium i.e. remediation.As a conclusion this short list may be satisfying or unsatisfying. There are many other ideas to work through and many developments coming that will need similar examination as this technology grows and changes.

and the point of a DP is?

2011-09-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote this some while back, when Benjamin Button came on our small screens - and then forgot to post - but here it is anyway:I work with data or digital cinematography, but I'm a film sympathiser, or should I say cinema sympathiser? It's an aesthetic thing and there's some Digital Cinematography footage I see that looks like video in its worst most 'live' state. Benjamin Button for instance. Or maybe it was the re-interlacing it went through to get to TV that did it, but it was painful to watch even though it was lit well.

As digital cinematography develops the new HDR function is ok but it's represented in standard viewing space on any normal display and there's the rub. If light in the visible spectrum can be said to be of (say) 15 orders of magnitude and the eyes in the human system are instantly capable of 5 orders of instantaneous magnitude (and this is utilised throughout the 15 orders depending on time of day, levels of luminance and a lot of other factors - like a searchlight of conscious perception sliding up and down the scale) then the average standardly available display is around 2 - 3 orders of magnitude (at best).

With new HDRx on Red, If you shoot 5 orders of magnitude then compress it into standard display space, then everything is lost. The HDR display technology that Dolby is working with, is around 5 orders so HDR capture - 10 levels of black and 30 levels of white above normal displays - correctly displays all of the gathered light. This is far better than exhibiting a conjuring trick: 'look no lights to achieve what was only possible by lighting'. If you are looking at a CRT, LCD or Plasma when you view the now famous red barn shot: http://camerarentalz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/hdrx-barn.jpg you'll see that everything that HDR truly is - is missing.

In 5 years proper HDR will be available generally (given Moore's law). When you see real HDR Display, that doorway in the shot is hard to look at because it's 2 orders of magnitude higher than what you're looking at in standard display space. People originally got excited about HDRx for the wrong reasons which were to do with an advance in their technique that would be made possible - almost as if the average DP is searching simply for natural light to solve their basic aesthetic problem - and for me that basic problem lay closer to the experiments and work of people like Dziga Vertov than it does to, say, Billy Bitzer. I buy Conrad Hall's assessment of the necessary search of the longtime cinematographer that is to find the photographic moment in every frame of the still - not it's technicalities, but in the aesthetic demand to make every frame as good as every other.

The Human Gaze

2011-09-08T05:13:00.000-07:00

One of the UK’s national treasures, David Hockney, is experimenting with the human gaze by gathering together 9 HD cameras (consumer and therefore heavily compressed) to generate a single shot of the English countryside to produce one very high resolution image. My own experiments with the human gaze also addressed the issue Hockney is addressing by the act of looking, which he sometimes terms as ‘drawing’. This being the language of his enlightenment about making art. The art work itself is a metaphor for seeing. There is a shot of the countryside. There is no cutting. He does in fact use different moments of time from the different cameras and also slightly different angles of view (slightly more zoomed in or out) which in fact refers to his earlier polaroid recombinations of the world which somehow evoke cubist styles of painting and thought as expounded by Braque and Picasso. Hockney says that he idea of drawing is about looking and seeing - you simply have to look if you're going to draw. You have to engage. Meditate. Clear the mind of ratiocination so that there is only perception - and for the artist then give a clear response. Hockney is effectively arguing that art is a mediation between the world and the public. Warhol before him said look at the mundane things in the world around you - they too are art. Koons upped the ante towards kitsch. Hirst said value is the thing (his platinum skull). All along Hockney is saying: 'Beauty'. All of this refutes the idea of ‘interpretation’ as a way of deriving meaning, as espoused by those that critique or theorise the work. This is becoming a time when artist and audience no longer need the high priests, the theorists and the curators to tell them how to respond to art. Digitality and post digitality is enabling ‘entrainment to succeed where interpretation failed. The Artist, the artwork and the audience all become one, from the moment of creation, to the moment of perception - all entrain together. This is an entirely valid way of being, as valid as interpretation was for its time.

By way of a letter to a fellow artist on the subject of the cadaverous nature of HD images

2011-06-09T05:10:00.001-07:00

"Hi - glad you got back to me. Just to give you a context, I started using video in 1976 when we actually cut the tape with a razor blade then used sticky tape to join it - the resulting edit was like an explosion as it went past the heads and visually the image fell all over the place....

But then over the years as each new development happened things improved. One of my first art pieces was what we now call glitch art as I really liked the mess-upds of the medium - in fact video always offered surprises. All my friends became teachers because we were before the YBA and their use of video - we were doing what people like Gillian Wearing did - but the time was too early. Education or industry offered the only employment. So I decided that I needed to know the medium - like a 14th century painter I wanted to mix my own paints. That meant for me joining the industry, so with one hand I earned money, and threw it away making art with the other. Now as the industry is full of too many people the best place came up as a research fellow in education in my long-time interest of HD which I first came across in its analog form in 1992...

In some ways I agree with you but then I guess I have a whole history invested in the fact that the stuff actually works and gets better - however, that doesn't blind me. I'd learned to bring life to the video image often imitating film people who heated up the developer a few degrees so that it made material changes to the way the film looked. At the moment the cadaverous nature of data cinematography is because everyone leaves their footage till post to cast a thin patina of colour on top of the image rather than 'heating up the data' and interfering in the process and perhaps breathing life into the corpse.

In fact in 4 years of making HD work I've only managed to bring HD to life a few times as it's a fluttering technology that often goes flat-line on you.You get cast as Dr Frankenstein trying to bring the monster to life. Also the definition of the term HD is a problem. For me it's an industrial and therefore political term, now redundant. Sony needed to defeat Kodak or at least marginalise their photo-chemical Empire, which they're now done. But HD to me is tv driven - even being 16-9 is a reference to the buried desires of all the people that used to shoot 4:3 because glass vacuum technology could only go so big and electron guns with magnets switching them on and off started creating a whiplash effect over a certain size - so as 16:9 is an extrapolation of 4:3 then even the super hi vision 8K system is a complete remediation of an earlier technology - personally I haven't shot HD 16:9 for 3 or 4 years now. I always set to 2:1 and then project to the same aspect - but in my next project I'm turning the camera sideways and projecting 9:16 and a variant will be 1:1.

On the subject of remediation - I'm always wary of letting analog/digital and HD remediate what I now call Data cinematography or data imaging because the first three have nothing to do with the last which has more in common with telematics, haptics, mapping of 3D space and all the digital technologies that have been co-opted by pervasive media studies. I think of data imaging as being capable of being an image but also being a lot more. Kinnect spits out infra red pulses from the chip then receives them back again at different rates - like sonar - and maps the environment. It's a kind of image, but shows a little crack in the wall which when it comes down will describe a landscape we know is there but only guess at the content which is : the digital (or post-digital as it's now being called).

And on that note, in some ways data imaging is not really about the data. HD was, but what comes next is a window on a new landscape, a trojan horse technology beyond the two dimensional image and all that that entails. I mean I suppose that in offering more than an image within its definition, it then offers 3 dimensions - not in the quotidian way that 3D or stereography describes reality, but more in the Kinnect way. But of course Kinnect is a remediation too. I've seen 3D virtual objects that you can touch and been in environments where you stimulate events in telematically removed spaces which are mapped to the space you are in. Fundamentally it's the Hollo-deck from Star Trek - and yes, at the University of Bristol they have actually teleported a piece of matter from one place to another instantaneously.

Then there's 'metaphor' which always takes the eye off the ball. Basically 'HD' is not cadaverous, because it never lived. However I know what you mean - I like the fact that you're responding to it and naming it, describing it.

I'm probably already compromised because when I decided to get into the industry to fund myself as an artist rather than teach about what I didn't know (and some of my friends are now as high as it gets in education - and they've never once practiced and stopped making art a long time ago) I probably know too much technically to function as an artist... Having said that I'm about to shoot a new piece (so now I work in education like all the other old fucks but still use the money I earn to make art -:) Last December I showed 18 new works in HD at the P3 Gallery, before that I exhibited one of my HD installations at St. john the divine in new york for 5 months - it got a lot of good response and I think it got over the cadaverous nature you describe... That's sort of what I'm trying to take on".

Far Horizons, now behind us

2011-05-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

The National Association of Broadcasters event in Las Vegas has just occurred - a very typically American title in that it assumes that all of us, all 6 billion are of that nation and persuasion. The main news here is the innovation of a robust set of Digital Cinematographic pieces of equipment with Sony's F65 as the biggest piece of kit in that as it uses an 8K chip it actually for the first time delivers 4k real resolution (with regard to various theorems and rules of mathematics). F23 means 'two thirds', F35 means a 35 mm sized chip, F65 means a 65mm film sized gate as the size of the chip.

Regardless of the paraphernalia and excitement around an event such as this, in the end NAB simply announced that whereas several years ago high resolution data on a par with photo-chemical film was almost impossible to achieve on many different levels (light response and rendition in a filmic way, the ability to record the signal without massively compressing the data - all of that stuff) right now we can surpass the level of quality of film. By that I mean that the resolution is higher in both capture and display and with the advent of High Dynamic Range Capture and Display we can surpass the rendition of what the eye sees with Digital Cinematography in a way that is higher on all counts than with Film. It has helped that finally CMOS chips have caught up with CCD's in development.

Forget the arguments about whether film does a different thing (which of course it does): on a technical level the argument is over.

That is a big statement - When I came upon HD around the early nineties, that was an impossible thing to imagine.

Invisible when appropriate

2011-05-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

I try not to be so on the nose in the title of these posts but last night whilst watching 'Pina' by Wim Wenders (bless his cotton socks) apart from being ecstatic at the content and especially Pina Bausch's choreography for Stravinsky's Right of Spring - the 3D was invisible.

And in that it became invisible because the content was appropriate, so 3D came into its own. It took a ‘Wenders’ and a non-commercial subject to use space in a way that was worth doing and hence part of the film-makers palette. Of course Tim Burton et al can use the medium (because their gaze within whatever medium is skilled and talented) but the craggy old German had the simple sense to ask himself what the aesthetics of the medium were capable of then not only use these, but to use them in a way that did not - excuse the pun - stick out.

Rather Wenders simply used 'depth' like colour, light, camera movement etc as if it were simply one of the elements of the palette that the film maker has access to.

It’s still a pain in the backside to have to wear glasses, but holographic 3D is already being tested in the research labs so we won’t have to wear these 60’s Jetson styled objects for much longer.

Cinematography

2011-04-23T03:50:00.000-07:00

At the most recent National Association of Broadcasters event in Los Vegas (NAB 2011), the developments within Digital Cinematography have taken the project over the brow of the hill. For a long while resolution was a central issue and when resolution became discussable in realistic terms (where manufacturers were realistic about the actual resolution as opposed to the hoped for resolution), then the rating of the stock/data in terms of light response and also in terms of tonal and colour response came into play. S now we have resolution equivalent to film (and better projection), the sensors will have a high speed and low noise floor, and the colour and tone response – especially if one uses Higher Dynamic Range imaging principles – then we can begin to develop a true artistic response in this medium.

Sony exhibited the F65 camera – a name challenging the film format of 65mm – this camera has an 8k imaging censor and realistically says it is intended to deliver 4k (remembering the Niquist-Shannon sampling theorem where you need twice the sampling to deliver the resolution). Plus there were many, many other developments in 3D and all areas of the subject.

So now it’s time for artistic image development that does not simply rely on post to confer a look – now the main project begins; to develop artistry with data.

3D is here to stay - and?

2011-04-16T09:33:00.001-07:00

I’ve been trying to find out why I don’t particularly like 3D. I enjoy the simple circus attraction of course, but when I put the glasses on it distracts from the basic reason I go to the cinema to see a film, as opposed to watch it in some other way like on a plasma screen. I like to experience the size of the auditorium - most of all it’s that. Within the auditorium space, what works is the sheer size of the image, but more importantly the audio enhances the sense of the space and when accompanied by sight in the right relationship the experience of 'cinema' happens.

If I put on glasses I might as well be at home in a small space. Cinema disappears. Something about putting on the glasses cuts off the larger spatial experience and also somehow modifies the sound in a synesthetic canceling out of the larger experience, and pulling off the glasses to witness the blurred overlay of images detracts from whatever visual pleasures do survive visual because you realise that it’s all happening in the eye and brain.

There’s a more philistine approach which likens the invention of 3D to the invention of perspective and asks the question: of what use is the invention of perspective to a work of two dimensional abstract expressionism? This is 'argumentum ad - hopelessness (Sorry I don't know the latin for that). However, I shan’t deal with this because it’s a disparaging argument and there are better ones.

With the glasses on there is certainly an experience of what freud calls unheimlich - the uncanny - but though there’s a small pleasure in the experience of the 3D evocation of what’s before you, somehow the addition of what 3D gives has an equal measure taken away by the above elements, from the experience. And because expectation is heightened from the offer of an additional experience, its neutralisation is as an addition, disappointing.

The indescribable ‘strangeness’ that Freud discussed in his essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ is certainly present in the viewing of a 3D movie but once more it is neutralised by the kind of use it undergoes currently - popcorn 3D movies are the province of 3D and even Tim Burton’s authorial eye in ‘Alice’ is taken towards the chocolate box by its verve and competency of use. If you remember the Third Man and a Touch of Evil, though both are great, Wells use of the dutch angle has so much more power because he’s innovating with it, whereas Karol Reisz’s use is systematised and formulaic. A Touch of Evil evokes the uncanny, the Third Mans uses it to effectively deliver a nice viewing experience. Wells isn’t interested in ‘nice’ and todays use of 3D is all about 'nice'.

In seeing the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I had hoped to be disabused of 'nice'. Werner Herzog (Mr 'not-nice') and he who is mostly comprised of uncanniness itself, tries to use 3D ‘properly’ in that he synchronises the use of 3D with a subject that demands its use. All the Lascaux cave paintings are in two dimensions - yet painted on carefully chosen 3Dimensional pieces of rock. Herzog argues that this pre-cinematic use of still-yet moving images is enhanced by the sensation of looking at what we know to be a 2Dimensional form in its first use displayed in a 3 dimensional form.

If the early artists used psychedelics to project themselves as flatlanders (using the VIctorian notion of 2 dimensional beings experiencing a 3Dimensional form as a point which grows into a circle and back down to a point) then those psychedelics enabled the earliest artists to create a form that when experienced today is recognisable as such. But of course, Herzog is saying that we’ve lost our wonder at their prescience - so he uses 3D shooting to re-evoke it. But in the end I think I would have preferred to see the film without glasses on and in 2D.

I look forward to WIm Wenders use of 3D in 'Pina' in the hope that he will actually make 3D come to something (but Pina Bausch's work is already amazingly wonderful and one might suspect that it shouldn't be messed around with) but my suspicion is that in general yes, 3D is here to stay this time because what it requires technically is present within digital acquisition in a way that it was not within film - but now that it is here to stay it will become ubiquitous and quotidian - some of us will say of course that it was never as good as it was cracked up to be anyway. In essence, 3D is its own worst enemy.

Roll on holographic 3D as the next technology and all the rest that are to come - but actually, it’s the art within the use of all technologies which is the important thing - as we all suspect before we formulate a sentence to discuss the issue.

The Look: Digital Cinema Aesthetics and Workflows

2011-02-12T09:14:00.000-08:00

The Look: Digital Cinema Aesthetics and Workflows will take place in Bristol (UK) on 1st April 2011

I am placing this post here because the syposium will summate what I'm currently trying to do.

This one-day symposium will explore, and attempt to demystify, the movement of film and video footage through the digital production process from camera to exhibition. The ‘look’ of a film used to be the domain of the cinematographer. As a result of the various new forms of image manipulation that have appeared in the last decade and a half, new types of collaboration have resulted – for example, between cinematographers, post-production supervisors, visual effects artists, and colourists. Given the multiplicity of ways in which the aesthetics of a film can change after shooting is complete, a key question presents itself: who controls what aspects of a film’s look?

This symposium will trace how the ‘look’ of shots changes at each stage of this process, explain some of the technologies that effect these changes, and discuss the decision-making behind these changes. It will also explore the reorganisation of production roles and responsibilities that has resulted from the digitisation of film-making workflows.   The symposium will draw from a range of specialisms, bridging theory and practice: invited speakers will include Oliver Stapleton BSC (The Proposal, The Cider House Rules), Geoff Boyle DoP FBKS (Wallander, Mutant Chronicles), Jonathan Smiles Digital Production Supervisor, (District 9, Green Zone) Luke Rainey Colourist, (Band of Brothers, Man on a Wire), Professor Duncan Petrie, Professor Sean Cubitt, Dr Richard Misek, Dr Charlotte Crofts. Introduced by Professor Sarah Street. Mark Cosgrove, Director of Programme, Watershed Bristol

The day will consist of four sessions: image capture, data management, colour grading, and display; then a final plenary. Each of the four sessions will comprise a presentation by a film industry professional, a presentation by a film academic to open up wider questions, and a dialogue between the two hosted by Terry Flaxton AHRC Senior Research Fellow (and DoP). The intention is to introduce the practice of each to the other and of both to the general public, facilitating an open conversation about the aesthetic issues, pressures, technologies, and production roles involved in contemporary film production.

TICKETS: £50 With pre-ordered buffet lunch (If not ordered, meals can be purchased in the Watershed Bar, but waiting times may be long), £35 (including only morning and afternoon tea and coffee)

To book, Watershed box office +44 (0)117 927 5100

More information and schedule: http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/KT4.htm
Concessions available. The attendance of industry professionals at this event is contingent on their feature commitments which is clear at the time of writing.

TREADING WATER

2010-12-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

This is a holding post whilst I try to digest the end of one fellowship and the beginning of another.

Since my last post I've been to China, given a paper in Xi'an and put on an exhibition there - plus shot a new portraiture project in Beijing; been to Switzerland to give a paper; been to New York to take down an exhibition from the Cathedral, plus shot a new portraiture project there in New York; shot a new portraiture project in London, put on an exhibition at Salisbury Arts Centre and finally put on a major exhibition at the University of Westminster's gallery on Marylebone road which featured 18 new works on 12 HD displays - with 6 of them at 20 feet x 10 feet - plus convened 4 talk sessions on the nature of the digital in the last month of the first decade of the 21st Century.

Phew.

One thing that strikes me is that the flow of invention and innovation has rapidly sped up: When I started the fellowship the things I am now actively dealing with were glimmers in visionary thinkers eyes.

So digitality is here and everything we always dreamed about is also coming - with the possibility of everything that 1950's science fiction writers were foretelling also coming: modified humans with gills that can take advantage of other watery planets - no problem, we can do that, in time.

So our vision can be put into reality but we still slaughter eachother and pick off Iraqi citizens for fun because we're so displaced behind the digital viefinder that they're just something on the telescreen that needs removing. Sounds like the adolescent behaviour of a young species to me.

The ray of hope in that statement is that the sallow young become the mature old.

The students of Pythagoras were encouraged when entering the temple of study by a sign above the portal which admonished them in the following way:

"In all thy getting, get wisdom."

The study of the effects of Resolution: the entertainment industry and academic positions

2010-07-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

As an AHRC Creative Research Fellow with special regard to high resolution imaging, I have spent the last three years exploring this area through the use of a static camera looking at how increases in resolution affect the choice about what images are gathered and how the audience then responds to that choice. In short I wanted to understand what happens when resolution increases in an electronic moving image. My use of static camera was about starting at the beginning, much like early film, with similar choices about natural light, though film choices were related to how much exposure they needed to excite the silver solutions with. I use this methodology because I believe from long practice as a cinematographer that the addition of movement raises the complexity of the study by a geometric factor. So eventually, when I fully understand and are capable of articulating the issues of static camera and resolution increase, I will study the effects of moving camera and resolution increase.

This all cannot help but necessarily lead to the idea of ‘research’ itself and though I try to speak about what I have discovered in my search – oddly called ‘re-search’ which tips a nod to the notion of a priori (pre-knowledge) as opposed a posteriori (knowledge reasoned through experience or ‘fact’) and rediscovery of what one already knows through being born in to this kind of thinking (I know, my upbringing gives me a Platonic world view, but I do try to break out occasionally and look away from the shadows on the cave wall). So all of this must lead towards the nature of what an enquiry is, who is enquiring and what their vested interests might be.

To give you some insight to those issues in relation to myself, I am working to a basic tenant: that the twin purposes of academia are to teach and to reason – the two are not disconnected – and inherently in both is that they have a benevolent impact on society.

Later this year I shall begin organising a series of symposia and conferences on various issues around image making. These will be variously for academia and also the professional realm as a primary audience. One of these conferences is set for March 2011 and will explore the current state of digital video technology – though as the symposia progress I shall try to assert a different terminology. For instance, Digital Cinematography no longer utilises video technology, but rather raw digital capture technology. As a colleague of mine argues: ‘recent advances in video recording technology, notably the development of the Red camera, have had a revolutionary effect on work practices within the screen production industry. Film is rapidly becoming video history’.

This is an interesting argument but I believe it is only part-correct and should read: ‘Film and video are rapidly becoming Digital Cinematographic history’, where the idea of digital cinematography is easier to understand for the non technical person rather than ‘raw data acquisition and treatment’, which is what it actually is. Video is of course a different medium to Digital Cinematography (or its other title, Electronic Cinematography), for various esoteric reasons. But the base line is that video begins and ends with an image, whereas Digital video starts as data and ends – in a way analogous to film - as an image. Both video and data raw come to the same place but begin differently. When exposed, video is fixed in its exposure – with Digital Raw you can return to the source data and reset its exposure index before again re-rendering it into the image domain.

Both Film and Digital Cinematography record a latent image and then develop, or render that image into a perceivable and then pliable form. Film leaves behind it a series of atifacts: rushes, negative, answer print, release prints etc, but Digital Raw produces materials as extensions of its raw state which can be returned do indefinitely and it is therefore ‘non-destructive’. Undeveloped Negative film is transmuted into negative film which holds a negative image – digital raw, effectively source data in a handy package can transmute or render into any of its states and still be accessed as digital raw. To reiterate, after exposing film, it is set in an exposed state with a set of fixed values which realate to its exposure indices. When Digital Raw is exposed, one can return to it and then re-set it’s exposure index before proceeding through it’s subsequent processes. This is unique amongst image gathering mediums.

And I utilise this property regularly.

Our conference will also go on to discuss how digital technology promises to bring ultra high-definition imaging (with eight times the resolution of HD video) and ultra high-speed recording (of up to 2,000 frames per second) into mainstream screen production.

We have a series of questions to ask around this assertion: What do these numbers mean? Will the next generation of HD technology approach a technological sublime or simply stimulate new levels of commodity fetishisation? In trying to answer these questions, our symposium will engage with possible futures for digital video technology, now that the screen industry’s digital ‘revolution’ has apparently ended.

So, as I have researched into the effects of resolurtion, standard tv has taken up High Definition imaging as an adjunct to standard image gathering. This has lead to an emphasis on the spectacular: the shot of the tree canopy where the landscape falls away to reveal a waterfall and a gathering pool some 7000 feet below; wilderbeest on their long migration across the African savanna coming to a steep bank into a river which sme will die in negotiating; the polar bear as it gingerly slides its way across thin ice whilst its cub bats at its feet oblivious of the danger to both.

Here, broadcast TV has sought to integrate its higher definition image gathering into its flow of entertainment and consequently whilst the trailer images have some sort of impact, when homogenised into the flow of a standard piece of documentary entertainment the high resolutions simply become part of the flow and experience of being entertained. Sky TV for instance, being nakedly interested in subscriptions, pushes HD as a selling point whereas the BBC tries for the Reithian goal of educating the British masses.

Meanwhile Hollywood has sought to deal with the passing of analogue photo-chemical film and the move into electronic digital cinematography. On a meta level the exposing of film to then capture a latent image which then required developing to reveal the negative image is similar to raw digital image acquisition requiring light to also gather a latent image and then rendering (developing) to reveal a captured positive image. In a sense raw data capture has more in common with earlier reversal film which also revealed a positive image than it does with negative film.

However, the latitude of the positive digital image has a similarity in terms of its exposure and latitude of response with film negative (as opposed to the narrow margins of exposure of reversal positive film). The main point is that working professional cinematographers have embraced digital raw as commensurate with their needs – in fact it is a rare photo-chemically gathered film that now does not go through a digital intermediate process (DI) before once more being scanned out to photo -chemical film for distribution. The slow move to Digital projection is one dependent on economics, not aesthetics.

The issue of the development of a cinematographic high resolution aesthetic circles around Hollywoods’ use of the image, which like that of TV is to subjugate a potential developing aesthetic to its own needs – in this case to raise a spectacular response from the audience in a different way from TV. That use has been discussed many times in papers and journals but circles around the involvement of the audience in a passive way to the spectacle. The audience sits in the dark and expects to be entertained.

High resolution imaging which initially indicated that people would spend more time looking and therefore needed far fewer cuts in a moving image entertainment, far from limiting the amount of cuts in a movie, proceeds unabated. In blockbuster movies shot with digital capture the amount of cuts is still at an all time high so the effect of high resolution is obviated and reduced by its formal use. (please See Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis – plus then examine for yourself a film like District 9 for the background to this assertion).

Then there’s the thorny issue of depth of field; thorny because there’s an almost universal and unquestioned allegiance to the idea that low depth of field is good because it is somehow one of the main marks of the act of creating cinema and that anyone worth their salt knows this. But of course it is an opinion and therefore can be argued against – especially in relation to images that are formed intentionally in high resolution.

Cinema has several of these markers, camera movement, wide aspect ratios, low depth of focus (or depth of field of focus). The latter is about isolating the subject from the background – making the subject stand out. It has been favoured by cinematographers because they too see the value that mid-second millenial painters used between 1550 – 1650. It is a technique similar to the use of chiracuso in painting championed by Caravagio – where the painter utilises a technique of isolating the foreground figure to give precedence to what they want us to look at in the painting. So the cinematographer values a tool that gives them power. But unlike the painter who in the past was also shackled to the desires and motivations of the patron, (be it bishop or merchant) the cinematographer is not the sole artist within the collaborative act of making an entertainment like a movie.

What is not often discussed in relation to the aesthetics of cinema, is that with the rise of the idea of the auteur, which defeated the 1930’s practice of leaving the movement and orientation of the camera to the DP because he was the only person who had the training to know what would come back as next days rushes – with the rise of the idea of the auteur – he who knows all creative practice - the DP rarely gets to choose anything at all. The director has become more versed in the use of camera and lenses and with the aid of the grader or colourist can now completely sideline and demote the cinematographer to quality control clerk during the production process – formally the DP worked in this role throughout the entire process from pre to post production – as well as integrating artistic values and championing these above the demands of mammon.

The journals that champion the Director of Photography’s role, such as the American Society of Cinematographers Journal, were initiated as an act of PR to aggrandise that role and therefore keep the rates of pay high and they spoke in terms of the cinematographers art and used the language of the mercantile sailor. The DP was said to ‘helm’ a movie or in some case ‘lensed’ it – meaning ‘captained the good ship Hollywood to port’.

But the art of the cinematographer is is more truly a craft – because all of the signs and markers of the craft are learnable – whereas art has an indefinable element within it that is not learnable –rgardless of the philistine moves of advertising executives like Charles Saatchi to colonise the meaning of Art. Of course all practices - and this includes crafts - can be transcended and in so doing the practitioner elevates the act to an art. But all too often simple mediocre work is positioned as art because the cinematographer sees him or herself as the gatekeeper against mammon – when in fact they are fulfilling the role of a security guard or night watchman. Someone has to do this after all.

But in this gate-keeping, cinematic tropes have grown to prominence that are counter productive – especially in relation to seeking out a high resolution aesthetic.

In terms of the nomenclature of producing images, title like, Lighting Camera, Cinematographer, Lighting Director or Director of Photography, - The 1st and third come from TV, the 2nd and fourth come from cinema – though the fourth is being used in TV these days (especially in the UK because the more times a DP is credited as such on TV the more likelihood they’ll be voted into the British Society of Cinematographers. As the BSC says it is unapologetically an elite organisation. Membership guarantees respect and respect guarantees employment. In other countries there is less class associations than in the UK – but then the UK is the worlds most class based society (in any meaningful way related to exportation of values). All of these titles derive from an economic necessity and relate to a role on a particular kind of production. There is also a relationship between the nomenclature used and the level of budget and the kind of product to be generated.

To return with force to the technical arena – if standard TV images are generated at roughly one quarter of high definition at .5K effectively, where K refers to 1000 lines of resolution, then current Digital Cinematography gathers images mainly at 2k, though the Red One argues that it gathers at 4k resolution. It should be born in mind that High Definition images are 1920 x 1080 pixels – whereas 2k is 2048 x 1024 (in some systems) So the term HD is in fact a consumer term.

Red One cameras are 4096 x 2048, but when truly measured their value with regard to Modular Transfer Function is 3.2k. So the caveat to add to any claim about the resolution of a system is that all image gathering is conditioned by Modular Transfer Function – the simple rule of algorithms, that as with the phrase, ‘a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link’, whatever the level of resolution of gathered image and its pathway through rendering, post-production and display, the module of lowest resolution within the pathway is the conditioning resolution of the entire chain. So, the accepted resolution of a Red 4k image is in fact, 3.2k (under laboratory test).

There are issues around film being scanned at 6k rather than 4k for capture in the digital domain and also that the 2k standard is some 4 times less resolution than 4k – and so on. The argument might be put forward that film could be seen as having a higher resolution that Digital, but the reality is that most film is witnessed by an audience at 1k after its degradation through answer prints and release prints and then its final degradation though old, low resolution lenses on standard cinema 35mm projectors. Besides that I have it on good authority (people on non-disclosure contracts with the military, so I cannot site the sources) that experiments with 64k are happening.

THE SUNNY GROVES OF ACADEME
Academia has itself fielded a common response to the digital realm by maintaining that the digital is immaterial in form – due fundamentally to its disappearance when the electricity is turned off – yet the outbreak of commercial digital development laboratories belies that assertion. If the digital has no materiality, Hollywood doesn’t agree – it makes its money where it can and its belief in digital materiality challenges the standard academic response.

Academia as a branding system for the ‘excellence’ of scholarly studies, or more precisely as an acknowledged regulation system for the practitioners of fact gathering and the proposing of systematising of ideas into easily digestible formulas for the exposition of learning, has a huge amount of stupid people working within its boundaries.

What I mean by this inflammatory statement, and I use it as a shock tactic to get my audience to sit up and take notice, is that many leading media academics propagate the acknowledged and accepted value system within their research area.

The 19th cetury project to organise material reality derived from Renaissance rediscoveries of Greek ideas, then proceeding on through Enlightenment values, which danced around the development of scientific materialism, which then developed into an obsessive compulsive gathering and cataloguing of ‘facts’ in the 19th Century - became a project that embraced systemisation, but which also encoded system errors into its outcomes.

With a nod to Ivan Illych and as a particular instance, his concept of ‘iatrogenisis’, where contemporary allopathic medicine produces at least as much illness as it cures – the system of academia produces blind-spots in knowledge, not necessarily in facts (but that has happened), but in knowledge - and knowledge is a product of the age-old human project of getting wisdom – where wisdom is an integrative and gestalt collation of ideas as opposed to a linear analytic system.

In Greek sophistry above the temple gate of Pythagoras it is written ‘In all thy getting, get wisdom’. The Sufi tales of the Mulla Nasrudin, the holy fool of Islam, often use the stupid scholar (stupid because all he sees is what is immediately in front of him and not the whole) as the butt of his joke. The story is of four blindfolded wise men and an elephant for instance, where one thinks it a water spout (trunk), another a fan (ear), a another a pillar (leg) and the last a throne (the elephants back). Many cultures have this story of the folly of too much learning – or fact gathering,

The Persian poet Rumi uses this story as an example of the limits of individual perception: The sensual eye is just like the palm of the hand. The palm has not the means of covering the whole of the beast. But – of course it is important to have the university system as guardian of the practice of knowledge. Someone has to do it. Especially as the internet is bringing access to all kinds of knowledge to the general populace – and like the practice of alternative medicines and the blurred boundaries of good practice, there needs to be a systematizing and guarantee of the quality of the practice – we are in danger of academia being marginalized and sidelined. Hence many governmental value systems for generating impact.

Yes we can stand back and criticize this on many levels – especially if our academic value system is rooted in early medieval values derived from religious institutions which focused on the project of the importance of learning – but we are out of joint with the times if we simply criticize and offer no constructive ideas towards regenerating the project of academia.

So, given the above, it is our solemn duty to challenge simple values that are propagated without due thought and critique and in my very tiny instance is I wish to interrogate the idea that the digital is immaterial in form. For me this is derived from a scientific materialist position that cannot accept a reality that cannot be touched – just like Thomas from the disciples of Jesus. It is Judeo-Christian and archaic in value and in form.

A system derived from a set of empirical sensations accepts that somehow, what one senses is ‘right and true’. However, there is nothing innate in the argument that believing something to be true of course makes it true. That is a false argument. But then arguments are part of the sensory mechanism that validates everything that we are and validation itself is a moving feast.

I also detect an adverse reaction to the thinking that attuning ‘natural philosophy’ with metaphysics – a pre-enlightenment position that is no longer valid. Since Heisenberg formulated his uncertainty principle there has been no going back when thinking about material things. They simply do not exist. Like the Buddhist world view that accepted that all things co-dependently arise, we as academics simply have to be more open to possibilities – even if they are truly uncertain and unpredictable – and immaterial.

So – with regard to my study of how resolution affects both what the maker makes and how this is experienced by the audience, the key issue is the relational and inter-subjective paradigm that is developing. Here I would site new ways of evaluating what is happening to the audience by using ideas like entrainment and synchronicity to set the basis for the evaluation – but that is the next part of the argument.

Please either read the post that follows

New Understanding of the mimetic and the diegetic in the creation of Art

or go to my paper:

New Understanding of the mimetic and the diegetic in the creation of Art

which I gave at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Art in July 2010.

http://bristol.academia.edu/TerryFlaxton/Papers/202924/New-understanding-of-the-mimetic-and-the-diegetic-in-the-creation-of-art--Xi-an-Academy-of-FIne-Arts--July-2010

New understanding of the mimetic and the diegetic in the creation of art

2010-07-26T03:53:00.000-07:00

This is an image free version of a paper I gave at the Xi'an Academy of FIne Arts, July 2010

First the audience sees my short experiment ‘In Re Ansel Adams’ To be found here:

http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSELembed.html

Eight million years ago, when our oldest primate ancestor sat and gazed across the tree canopy in an absorbed, reflective and contemplative act, the look our uncle was engaged in was full of sentient conscious energy. That attentive gaze has been with us ever since and is now resident in the gaze of the visitor to the museum, cinema or art gallery - and that energy is met by the gaze looking back out at us, captured in every image where the subject stares back out at the world.

I’m interested in the energy of our gaze. I’m also interested in the gaze of the subjects of portraits who send a similar energy back towards us. Because of this I’m also interested in the surface of the image, the meniscus of the meeting point of those two energies as they are displaced in time by the surface of the screen.

- When we represent the world we sometimes show the self captured in the medium looking back out at us with an extra-diegetic gaze, with an energy that is mediated by the surface of the medium, be it paint or pixels. The energy is shifted in time by the surface of the screen from when the subject was captured to the moment of ‘now’, when the audience sends its energy to the subject.

‘in Aristotle's Poetics, diegesis is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with mimesis, which is the imitative representation of them: so a character in a play who performs a certain action is engaged in mimesis, but if he recounts some earlier action, he is practising diegesis, he is telling us about an event. The distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’.

- That gaze whether it is of the subject looking out at us, or us the audience looking back at them, is full of the sentient energy shared with our ape ancestors and it is now measurable in audiences as a small voltage change generated by the massed neurons jumping across the synapses of the audience’s brains. MFRI scanners can visualise for us the movement of attention across the brain – one of the surprise discoveries of this technology is that the brain makes choices before the conscious will. Also, it has been found, by the end of a long period, like watching a feature film or a play, everyone in the audience will blink at the same moment – we as a group will have decided when it is the least important moment to look.

In the life of the Amoeba it will occasionally stop the process of subdividing to then ‘entrain’ with other Amoebas. They come next to each-other and then an extension of themselves, a bridge made of their own flesh, is offered between the two and they exchange internal substance – they ‘entrain’ and become part of each-other.

- If two clocks with pendulums are placed in the same locality, they eventually come into synchronicity and their pendulums swing together. This example of entrainment and synchronicity is not supernatural, but a product of physical processes.

This idea of entrainment is a metaphor, a key to unlocking and developing an understanding of the audiences evolving requirement that has surged ahead of current theory of the display of art, which in the West is rooted in ‘interpretation’, which comes to its apogee in the foundation of the Institute of Social Research, known as the Frankfurt School, whose propositions now inform the contemporary mindset that determines what is regarded as meaningful in art and what is not.

- Frankfurt School“The philosophical tradition now referred to as the "Frankfurt School" is perhaps particularly associated with Max Horkheimer (philosopher, sociologist and social psychologist), who took over as the institute's director in 1930 and recruited many of the school's most talented theorists, including Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), Herbert Marcuse (philosopher) and Walter Benjamin (essayist and literary critic).”

The School developed an evaluation of what art is and does through interpretive ‘reading’. This function has worked until recently but now digital innovations begin to overthrow the medieval innovation and subsequent techniques of the reproduction and mass availability of text - which finally prompted the school’s ‘reading’ of art. This is a methodology derived from archaic and classical values.

- However, the audience has changed and developed beyond this narrow definition. The audience is now silently demanding that new transdisciplinary arts and sciences deliver to them, not what has become a simple interpretive relationship to works of art, but instead a complex gestalt response from within themselves to art - and this cannot happen if the curatorial elite deny this evolution, by themselves being ignorant of it.

In all of this there is the issue of language itself – and here I have to nod in respect to Noam Chomsky - and make an intelligible list of some of the language

The descriptor of ‘attention’ constantly changes:

- In the 12th - 16th centuries in the West, we gathered attention – gathering being a word derived from agrarian language
- In the 19th century we focused attention – deriving from the important technological invention of photography
- In the 19th and 20th centuries we used the phrase: ‘to pay attention’ – this derives from commerce
- When focusing on something - we attend to it – we wait, we have patience – is this use derives from Monastic pursuits ?
We talk in terms of attention penetrating an idea – is this derived from an act of warfare, or perhaps from biology?

We also give attention, seek attention, catch attention or at worst, when we can’t be bothered: We feign attention, meaning we deceive the other person.

We have attention deficit when we can’t concentrate. When really challenged the subject has attention deficit disorder - we have fractured attention – did this derive from accidents in 14th century Venetian glass workshops?
- When we map attention we reference 13th century Portuguese map making
- some things require attention – they demand attention which necessitates the giving of attention – this seems to come from a Royal demand, an Emperor perhaps…
- and in the army we stand to attention to demonstrate total commitment of self to subject….

In his study of women’s magazine advertisements, Trevor Millum distinguished between forms of attention:
▪ - attention directed towards other people;
▪ - attention directed to an object;
▪ - attention directed to oneself;
▪ - attention directed to the reader or the camera;
▪ - attention directed into the middle distance, as in a state of reverie;
▪ - direction or object of attention not discernible.  The invisible world.

Millum also categorized relationships between the above depicted thus:
▪ - reciprocal attention: the attention of those depicted is directed at each other;
▪ - divergent attention: the attention of those is directed towards different things;
▪ - object-oriented attention: those depicted are looking at the same object;
▪ - semi-reciprocal attention: the attention of one person is on the other, whose attention is elsewhere

Daniel Chandler has also made some notes on the kinds of gaze one can identify within an image. There is:

▪ - the spectator’s gaze: the gaze of the viewer at an image of a person (or animal, or object) in the text;
▪ - the intra-diegetic gaze: a gaze of one depicted person at another (or at an animal or an object) within the world of the text (typically depicted in filmic and televisual media by a subjective ‘point-of-view shot’);
▪ - the direct [or extra-diegetic] address to the viewer: the gaze of a person (or quasi-human being) depicted in the text looking ‘out of the frame’ as if at the viewer, with associated gestures and postures (in some genres, direct address is studiously avoided);
▪ - the look of the camera - the way that the camera itself appears to look at the people (or animals or objects) depicted; less metaphorically, the gaze of the film-maker or photographer.

- In my image for you of the great ape above the tree canopy reflecting on the image that he sees and reflects upon - when he comes down from the tree canopy he might engage with another ape and try to tell them of his experience of wonder as he looked at the sun going down. Now maybe he tried to replicate his experience in primitive theatrical gesture, or maybe he used grunts and gestures, elementary language, or maybe he scratched lines and marks in the earth. In all of this he would have used both mimetic and diegetic forms of description

- But a large and unspoken problem is always nearby – in English we call it the elephant in the room – something very large that everyone tries to ignore the existence of - because its presence is so difficult to accept.

Here I wish to raise Walter Benjamin’s famous question of 1936 - of whether or not a reproduction can maintain any element of the aura of the original, to the fore. Benjamin started a process whereby we have to look at the idea of the creation of art as a special activity and now we have to consider the question anew as to whether or not as society around the world changes in nature and form with relation to new digital media, should art change its nature and form?

When our ape ancestor made its sounds, gestures and marks concerning its experience of wonder – how much of that original experience was retained in its telling?

So – this is my first proposition, that we have always made art and that its nature and intentions have always been relative to the state of humanity, its consciousness, its technology and its concerns at the time.

- A second proposition might be that we are now on the edge of a paradigm change. Arguably we are always on the edge of a paradigm change because paradigms are of different durations: one of the smallest is a chronon – one instant of time. A much longer paradigm would last from the end of the last ice age through to beginning of the next – which if the scientists are correct, is very soon.

As I mentioned before, the recent intellectual paradigm of ‘interpretation’ as the most important way of understanding and valuing art was derived from the investigations of the Frankfurt School and this had previously derived its thinking from archaic and classical values.

In Western Greek mythology, the tale is told of Echo and Narcissus. Narcissus was beautiful but vain and Echo had fallen in love with him. - Narcissus had betrayed a youth who prayed to the Goddess Nemisis to correct the situation and Nemesis created a judgement that Narcissus should fall in love with the next person he saw – As it happens, that person was his own image reflected in a mountain pool - so Narcisuss became fascinated with his own image.

- Meanwhile, Echo who had already fallen in love with Narcissus, had angered her mistress, the Goddess Hera and Hera then punished Echo with a curse: that fro then on she could only use the words that she heard others speak. - So, coming upon Narcissus looking at his own image in a pool and talking to his image lovingly, Echo tried to tell Narcissus that she loved him, but of course she could only echo his words, which to Narcissus sounded like his own image responding…

- Now that’s what we call a feedback loop.

One reason for recounting the tale of Echo and Narcissus is to note their eternal relationship to eachother in their many and varied forms – for intance as sound and image in modern digital art – but also in terms of mimesis and diegesis – showing and telling. The process of Interpretation, as introduced by the Frankfurt school, because it separates the self from the experience through the act of intellectual discrimination, has the problem of potentially developing a feedback loop, which then renders the strategy as dis-functional.

Not only are we captivated by the reality of the image, by committing ourselves to suspending disbelief and believing the reality of the moving image, we are deceived by it.

As I mentioned previously, my major study as a research fellow is the effect of increased resolution on the audience.

‘More than a third of the people in the U.S. with HD capable sets believe they are watching HD all the time, when in fact they have no source of HD programming whatsoever - no off-air, no HD cable or HD satellite programming, no BluRay or even HD-DVD payer. They will argue that they're watching HD because their set is HD capable and they have it set up so the images fit the full width of the screen, and they have an "upconverting" DVD player. What that proves to me is that lots of people have no clue what they're watching, don't care that much, and the ongoing (Professional cinematographers) debates about how many pixels can fit on the head of a pin are an academic exercise at best when it comes to televised material. Survey after survey shows that what drew people in was that the sets could hang on a wall like a painting, and looked good when they were off.
Wed, 17 Mar 2010, Bob Kertesz’

This professional commentator is complaining about the lack of sophistication of the general audience with regard to mediations of the world by media that rely on hyper-real similitude, yet argues that their grasp of concepts around ‘taste’, chooses the artifact of delivery, as opposed to that which should be delivered. Not only are we not shooting the messenger – we are agrandising him. The fact that this very artifact in is the main deliverer of the agreed value system of democracy in its news and entertainment systems seems secondary to its commodified aesthetic.

- So what’s going on here?

- The surface of a painting captures the likeness of the subject. We stare into the painting, penetrating the time-space differential – the painter gives us the means of moving between our own time and the time the painting was made. The surface of the painting – the paint itself – is the means with which we travel across time. This is as much true of paint as of patterns of light on glass on the surface of a plasma or LED display

So, we now know that the human gaze radiates outward from the human self that looks in terms of energy. We know that the focus of attention of audiences’ brains can be charted by the voltage fields they generate. We can now map attention – we can now map the internal world of the apes.

In our art there is often a person depicted - who is displaced in time from the audience by the surface of the display – the meniscus of the medium - and the energy of their gaze can be met by the energy of the gaze as offered by the audience.

- So this is an important philosophical issue where we who exist now, are always captured in time and reality is always a little behind us… If you remember I mentioned that in recent work with MFRI scanners, one of the surprise discoveries of this technology is that the brain makes choices before the conscious will. So though time exists in some senses, our default mechanism is to exist prior to the surface of our contact with the world - beneath human consciousness something is choosing - prior to information being gathered by the senses for the mind to examine and judge. This too is another kind of meniscus, this time of consciousness.

- Here in China, a long time ago, King Wen formulated the 64 divisions of reality - - these 64 divisions, deriving initially from a binary pair, the digital byte, - the zero and the 1, the on and the off, the yes and the no – digital reality - these formula all describe the Dao – which exists at the meniscus or surface of consciousness – which some us when we close our eyes, experience as a screen – though some philosophies, such as Hinduism suggest that reality is a projection of our own energies.

- So – what do all of these ideas mean in terms of what contemporary art is becoming, or should become? I can only really truly answer by talking about what I’m doing artistically at this moment because my work is a direct response to the philosophical problems I’ve described above.

By end of August 2010 I will have completed a 3 year UK Arts research Fellowship in high resolution imaging. My core research question has been - :

In what ways will High Resolution Imaging change the work produced in the convergence of art and visual technologies and consequently, our experience of that work?

In researching the effect of increased detail in the moving image on the audience I have created a series of new artworks that exploits the effects of higher resolutions and is at a level of detail not yet seen before in either electronic or photo-chemical forms. This work has been produced at some 32 times that of standard televisual imagery, 8 times that of the cinema display and 4 times that of High Definition.

I have made a simple discovery. Engagement and resolution exist in an equation where engagement step changes in direct response to changes in resolution that are quantum and not quantative. That is, the onset of different and greater states of engagement, require step changes of resolution to have measurable effect – and the measure is the time people spend engaging with an installation at different resolutions.

Video - http://www.visualfields.co.uk/cannaregio.htm

With that in mind I am currently working to develop questions around portraiture in relation to the issue of photo-realistic representation and depiction, by creating works that exploit differences in scale in order to develop a high resolution aesthetic. I choose portraiture because it offers the possibility of mimesis - showing rather than telling - but also of allowing an exchange between the audience and the subject of the portrait, albeit mediated by the surface of the screen and displaced in time.

The work you see playing from Venice Italy is captured at a resolution 4 times that of High Definition and is usually shown life-size so that the subjects can be approached and scutinized by the audience. Usually each portrait remains on screen for 1 minute to reference long Victorian photographic exposure times.

Recently I have augmented the series with Portraits of New York, Portraits of Beijing and when I return to the UK I will create Portraits of London. My intention then is to present all 5 works in a large pentagonal shape so that the audience can step inside and witness on five large separate screens the photographic reality of people from around the world. The audience will look to the meniscus of the screen - as will the subjects. A spin off work, Portraits of the Somerset carnivals can be seen in the Expanded Cinema screening on Saturday.

- For many years and in this forthcoming show in particular I have been concerned with challenging the idea that the screen should be on the wall, that people should sit in seats passively to watch the exhibition. I have made works for instance where the audience must lie on the floor and look up at a large screen which is hanging 15 feet above them at an angle of 45 degrees where I have shot the passage of a boat through the narrow canals of Venice – by that I mean I have shot the buildings and the sky with the gentle rocking of the boat and the water and then asked the audience to entrain with the experience by taking the point of view the work was shot from.

- I also show works where I construct a well, or a hole in the ground where the image plays and the audience is invited to climb down and become part of the virtual and past experience – so that it becomes for them an experience that is happening now.

I will also exhibit my ‘sculptural work’, ‘In Other People’s Skins’, which you can see here in Xi’an – this is currently showing at a cathedral in New York.

My intention in this work and a lot of my work is to photograph something that is real – then project that very thing back on to itself – so with this installation I shot 5 dinner parties from above and projected them back down on to a table of the same size – the audience could then imitate the gestures of others – they could connect through the meniscus of the screen, through the surface of the display and entrain and exchange their conscious energy with that of others. By imitating the hand gestures of others they could inhabit the skins of others. Around the table there are 12 seats, which is reminiscent of the Last Supper in Christian mythology, on the table are 12 white plates – twelve white screens to catch the virtual food.

In Other People’s Skins attracts an audience of people that normally do not attend art galleries – very many of the audience comments speak in terms of entrainment as opposed to interpretation. This level of display asks the audience to entrain, or become engaged with the work, rather than simply interpret it to ‘mean something’. To interpret, we look for clues and so ‘read’ the work with a specific part of the intellect, yet entrainment uses synchronisation – another part of the intellect - to perform artistic alignment - and interpretation and ‘reading’ then follow as opposed to leading the process.

So – to answer the philosophical questions I raised previously – and perhaps to entrain with the distant gaze of our ancestor the ape in the tree canopy, I am trying to develop work that insists on the conscious-awareness of the audience of their own gaze, to amplify the energy present within that engagement. It is then my hope that this then enables the audience to take the time to look. I am interested in the exploration of the gaze stripped of the effects of interpretation – and here’s the main strategy and reason for this - so that I might then enter into a negotiation with the audience whilst acknowledging their intellectual autonomy, and consequently go beyond standard forms of contract between audience and artist which so very often involves a degree of disempowerment for the audience. We are not only artists and academics – we are also the audience.

CONCLUSION - MEDIATION AND REMEDIATION
My research has revealed to me that greater resolution produces greater periods of engagement. It is my conviction that the ‘effortless gaze’ that can be engendered and the experience that accompanies this, will chime with Maxwell Anderson’s propositions in his paper ‘Metrics of Success in Art Museums’. More than any other issue in the ‘Display of Art’, is the growing engagement of the concerned and discriminating viewer – the notion that success is in the quality of the experience of the art experience, that this is the most meaningful metric of success available.

Within current neuro-scientific studies it is becoming clear that our physical senses reveal only one ‘octave’ of a potential 80 octave spectrum of energy – this limitation itself is already a mediation of ‘reality’ and predicates an examination of ideas more familiar to science than the humanities and arts. I would hope that this inquiry might stimulate the beginnings of an investigation into what it means for art to exist on a surface that is itself a disjunction between two or more time periods or two or more energy states, that here is a potential to exploit the synchronous and gestalt concept of entrainment that could become used more and more often in the forthcoming paradigm shift that has already begun.

VIDEOS

http://www.visualfields.co.uk/TORPORTRAITS.htm

http://www.visualfields.co.uk/Carnival.html

It’s not just the resolution, stupid

2010-07-07T02:21:00.000-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

Since showing some of my high resolution works in Xi’an in China this June/July, I’ve come to realise something about the other factors that make resolution work as an artistic function.

This insight has come about because my Chinese audience expressly communicated that they liked the work that I was showing them because it chimed with them and their values. There was an outbreak of discussion around the relationship between form and content during the symposium that accompanied the exhibition where my work was shown in installation form. I also showed work in my presentation as did Peter Richardson from Dundee University in his choice of Portraits of the Smerset Carnivals. Our Chinese hosts argued strongly that much of the Western art that had been brought to China gave priority to the exploration of technical as opposed to artistic values in the majority of the work. Given Western funding priorities towards science rather than art, this was insightful of the Chinese participants to ferret this out.

This was not the case in their response to my own work however. My work had an amazing reception – I’ve been asked to some right back and teach and give workshops and show more work -perhaps I’m part Chinese or there’s something in me that chimes with their value system – and here I’m mindful that I’m talking about the most recent iteration of the concerns of about a quarter of the population of the planet – and this in itself makes me very happy. I don’t really care if our little western backwater doesn’t respond as well (although in some situations it does – it really does). It’s quite amazing that something that I’m doing chimes with the Chinese mind, though and it’s this that has set me enquiring into what it is that works.

The character of the response was that they really got what I was saying (given that the artist hardly ever knows the true direction of the impact of their work) in fact we set ourselves our obsessive compulsive tasks and then the audience receives the work in a completely different way anyway. C’est la vie.

There was in fact a recognition that there is a technical background to what I do – after all the work is made at 4k and then displayed as high as I can display in terms of resolution, and it’s been my conviction through observation of the audience response that people engage for longer periods with the work the higher the detail it carries. But – but. There’s something about what I’m choosing to create an image of and the way that I’m presenting it to the audience that is engaging people i n a powerful way. Again, I’m trying to be pure about what I’m writing here because I’m totally aware that on some levels what I’m writing could be seen to be self-promotional – that’s not the case I’m trying to decipher the cause of the response.

When TV seeks to show off its higher resolutions it shows nature and landscape footage. It’s impactful for a moment – you know the shots, the polar bear mother skids across the thin ice in case she breaks it followed by her cub who’s playfully batting her legs; or the wilderbeast shot from a balloon race across the veldt in their migratory pattens avoiding lions who are there for the kill; we see a tree canopy before the shot glides into the distance as the earth drops away from us as we soar over the mighty waterfall. Etc.

And I mean ‘etc’ because shots like these have a function which is a part of the form of the trail or longer documentary that they reside in. What I’m really saying here is that yes, these shots exploit the capacities of the higher resolution cameras and displays but that’s all they’re really intended to do; punctuate the form they reside in and the kind of thinking they derive from is the commodification of form – that its impactful-ness is utilised in loss of personal determination in relation to the emotionalism of the form. What I’m talking about here is something Brecht recognised - that the audience is simply ustilied by the artist in a group act that is all about its manipulation – it ebbs and flows in its sympathies according to the determination of the authors.

It is true that most all authors want their audience with them – but in some case – most cases – there’s an unscrupulous attitude about the audiences self-determination. Should it for instance divide its allegiance from the authors purpose, then author in terms of the sale of the work as a commodity would see it as a failure. Hollywood takes no hostages, it wants a ‘satisfied’ audience. And satisfaction is about a set of values that are learnable by any student who studies in the standard educational model to manipulate the audience. It is a loop that cirtcles around and around.

Craft oriented education wants complete control form the student of the form, contextual studies wants a critique – thye are essentially at loggerheads in their intent which is a real pedagogical problem.

The artist however wants above all to challenge the audience and not simply lead them like a lamb to slaughter at the altar of quiescence in terms of the value system that most media is utilised to reproduce.

In my work I have absolutely no interest in commodifying the form because in so doing it lessens the potency of the act of engaging in research in resolution – my work is about revealing the potency of the aesthetics of the form – and these aesthetics directly derive from the technical base of the form. This is also a ‘take-no-hostages’ approach – but it is in the interest, in the end, of the self-determination of the audience. I want the audience to consciously be able to disengage at any point with the work and given that element of the contract between artist and audience, then the audience can sample the act of engagement free from my manipulation of them.

So what works in terms of aesthetics when you’re involved in a guided tour through resolution (which is what my artwork is about)?

I am trying to offer complete engagement on a par with anything that Hollywood – or for that matter any contemporary art values that are perpetrated by aestheticians or art dealers can offer (both of whom are quite happy in each-others company though course they really should be deadly enemies if things were not currently upside down and inside out).

In the work I am enthusiastic about presenting an image – like Whistler vs Ruskin, I argue that 30 years behind a camera renders me experienced. I am a very practised cinematographer and have framed a thousand shots for a thousand different reasons for a thousand different directors, having committed myself to learning just what they desire and just what their aesthetic is (that’s something that happens between all directors and directors of cinematography – at least since the notion of the auteur director came into vogue).

Through having been in very many situations where it has been my sole job to ‘find’ a frame, with special regard to what my director might like, I’ve learned my trade. But at the same time my own imagination has soared in very many directions whilst accomplishing what particular directors want. Set me free with a camera and the black space around the light area that is the framed image is the most potent thing that can happen to me.

I am a camera.

So – as an old tutor once said to me, put thirty photographers in a white room with a window and you’ll get thirty different photographs – one of which will be close to brilliant – and that is the image I seek to find in all situations – that’s what cinematographers do (besides all the other stuff like invigorating the crew, judging exposure, imagining the look and the treatment and carrying the entire production through from inception to display).

Ok – enough description of what the cinematographers eye and mind are engaged in and why I and others like me can imagine what to do with the world and how to imagine it into being.

But there are other factors – the factor of the choosing of the image in the first place. Take for instance my Portraits of the Somerset Carnivals that particularly caught the Chinese eye and mind. Shot at night with the illumination coming from the carnival floats themselves (a cinematography problem in itself – judging exposure of the self-illuminating object), the idea was to shoot a portrait of a float as it stopped in its procession and then display it at 20 feet by 10 feet so that it was the same size as the original and then have it displayed in a different context from its capture. Xi’an in China is about as different as you can get from the original carnival location in Somerset.

So I gather at 4k and re-present at 2k (or 1K if there’s no budget) and this act alone allows the audience to peruse the work without the distraction of the petrol fumes and loud disparate sound sources that are coming at them in the original situation.

Then there’s the sound which accompanies the work – I would have asked a composer to create a soundtrack that also removed the original from its environment to an equivalent amount but to hand (or rather in mind for some twenty years) was Brian Eno and Robert Fripps ‘No Pussy Footing’ – the Heavenly Music corporation piece. I can’t describe it here other than to say: it’s abstract; it’s comprised of backwards and slowed down guitars and their overlays and echos. It was a perfect accompaniment. Sound is as important as resolution of image and does the extra work of disassociating the image from it’s prior relationships and ten conferring new resonances – these choices make the artwork (with other choices like how to display etc.

When shown in a 15th century barn in Somerset the piece has been described using the following words:

Classical statuary
Marionettes
Paper cut outs
Wedding cakes/Icing
Cloud formations
Science fiction film
Wild West
Mexican Day of the Dead
Mountains & Snow

The qualities the work brought to mind

Crystalline
Archaic
Glamour
Ghostly
Smoky
Feathery
Wild !
Painterly
Abstract
Ethereal
Baroque

This was followed by the following description:

‘What was exhilarating was the contrast between the slow meditative movement and image size of the floats passing by with the hectic activity on the film surface as lights went on /off / in /out smeared and melding, twisted and turned – was very visually exciting and allowed the eye to roam and alight on the new forms created within the detailed density of the frame. There is a monumental quality to the film – I don’t know if this comes from this contrast between the large size of the floats in frame and the total eyeful (!) one gets in looking at their details.

The almost harsh brightness of the float lighting against night is not something one sees outside of city so it was strange to see this in a barn with barn and an ancient one to boot !’

This refers to the location of display – a 15th century Somerset Barn.

In Xi’an the audience were equally enthusiastic. The translator did their best but I could see from the sparkle in the audiences eyes as they crowded around me to ask questions afterwards that they too found something similar. They talked of the powerful symbolising influence of the work – but with no particular symbol in mind. I think they meant by this that they were moved – and I do not mean emotionally, I mean more that they identified with the commitment of the act of engagement without usual western demands of having to give up their autonomy.

The idea of being moved without a definite reason is exciting because it intimates a spiritual movement and not emotional movement.

But it wasn’t just the Chinese that responded in these terms, the Swiss, the Germans, the Canadians, the Austrians and Finish all responded in a positive way. There was something in this screening which went beyond simple national boundaries and the work ‘spoke’ across these boundaries in n interesting way. The director of ETH, the institution where Einstein studied, talked of powerful ‘mesmeric symbolism’. Mesmeric Symbolism – this isn’t trance state, where one leaves what one was to enter another space, rather this is a state where you come to with a degree of transcendent emotion – all these words are wrong of course because emotion is not useful in the higher states – emotion is a lower state in some ways. Being uplifted is a general way to tal about this state.

Actually at this even the effect of the work was so powerful I received three distinct formal offers to bring the work and talk about how high resolution images was developing new aesthetics. The Swiss, the Canadians and the Chinese all responded in this way.

The work certainly mesmerises – but in the way that a hypnotist hypnotises – that is you are aware of everything and will do nothing against your will.

The eye is delighted by the surface texture of the image – there is much going on as the report above communicates about colour and detail.

I’ll stop now because it will take time to disentangle what is exactly going on. Watch this space for further thoughts about the extra characteristics required to make a successful artwork in High Resolution.

Exploring Digital Beijing

2010-07-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

If you’ve been to Beijing you’ll know that the West’s framing of the grand digital project is just that – a Western framing of the overall digital project that the whole of humanity has embarked upon. Being a Western framing it is skewed against or even omits the East.

You’ll know this because whilst walking through the crowds you’ve looked into the faces of a million souls that stare back at you in your difference and that stare tells you that what you have as the centre of your interests may not be the same as theirs.

Of course the principle human concerns are shared: love, hate, war, relationships, jealously, revenge, happiness, marriage and so on.

Also, those elements identified by Western theorists who are on the grand voyage to identify ‘the good ship digital’ are also shared – transdisciplinary understandings, the growth of the internet, the desire for pervasive devices, the long term urges towards having what Star Trek described as the ‘hollo-deck’, the ability to ‘beam me up Scotty’ and so on.

The thing that is different in the stare is the sense that you can gain that our predilections and concerns are just that: ‘ours’ and they’re born from our histories and cultural understandings, just as the Asian mind has its histories and cultural understandings. As Ru, my new Chinese friend tells me as I say to him that the West is decadent in many of its values: ‘Yes, but the East is brutal in many of its values’. This was a very honest thing to say and not necessarily meant in the way we might stereotypically understand it. Decadence is as bad a state as brutality. Decadence can be brutal and brutality can be decadent, but neither value directly follows the other.

The look in the Asian gaze says – ‘it’s my time now and I’m going to find out what that means’.

What it doesn’t mean is the decadent definitions that arose out of the analogue – the traditional academic studies that come through the Frankfurt School, then through the British and then the redefinement of French and American Academia and to some smaller extent British and other European nations, Canadian and Australian, of all of this into what is now framed as pervasive, digital and transdisciplinary and all those other word boundaries that circle this Western voyage – but to borrow a phrase – ‘it’s the whole sea, stupid, not just the bit around the boat’.

What you see when you look into a Chinese face is for a start, many, many different types of Chinese face within which there are many, many different types of soul (no apologies here, the word personality just doesn’t do it). There are 56 languages in China, 56 kinds of people in physiological structure with many subdivisions. But Western definitions are for me to be seen as a start towards a broader project about understanding what the digital is and might be and how it operates for the whole planet. It does a lot of what the West says it does, but that is only a part of the definition of the digital. To use a metaphor of the engine: we are busy looking at the carburettor – there’s still all the other stuff in an engine to understand, pistons, manifold, sump etc, which eventually will make us realise that digitality is not a carburettor at all – it’s an engine, a motive power for fundamental change in the human condition.

We know this on some levels but it’s the form of our descriptions that render us as parochial. We’ve done the best that we can up till now – but now we have to do a lot better and think a lot wider. What am I personally going to do about this? I’m going to try to learn to speak Chinese to at least begin to understand the idiom the Chinese exist within.

A workflow is a map

2010-06-17T05:04:00.001-07:00

In having to complete the task of writing a workflow of High Definition technologies, I realise that as I lay each part of the topography of the timeline down, I begin creating a map of the terrain. Between capture of image and its display are a series of processes that affect the data by degrees of limitation – and if you understand this level of digitality, then wherever you are in that digital landscape – and in this case we are in the country of resolution and its near neighbours, ‘significance, meaning and actuality’ – then you can look at the map, know where you are and navigate successfully to your destination...

Some Notes on the Theory and Practice of Innovation in Theatre, Film, Electronic Cinematography, Digital and Television Education

2010-05-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

The Fortuny - Mariano Fortuny's design for an early electrical lamp

INTRODUCTION
This article is concerned primarily with what constitutes the need to innovate due to practical pressures - and given I was a Director of Photography for a quarter of a century I will utilise my own work and its pressures in practical situations to reveal as much as I can about the process of innovation. I will also discuss the teaching of lighting and some of the methods I had discovered to reveal the sensibility needed by the fledgling Director of Photography that intuits and senses the materiality of light, so that that person is then equipped to solve lighting problems outside of mind-sets which engender and replicate what is expected in standard film and televisual forms. To be an art, lighting must not be standardised, the pursuit of the photographic moment within the flow of cinematic frames is a quest and an art outside of the act of standardisation.

The demand for innovation has developed within the art of lighting partly through budgetary pressures - in fact I will argue that the main development in lighting in the 20th century was due to Nestor Almedros, a Spanish Director of Photography working in Cuba, who had to think outside of his experience with little or no budget - due simply to being provoked by a mirror being smashed. Equally one must look at the career of Mariano Fortuny, also a Spaniard, born seventy years before Almendros, who was responsible for defining modern theatrical lighting. Fortuny was a wonder, a painter who Klimt took advice from on the use of gold in painting, a textile artist and designer who looked back to the Egyptians development of pleating materials, who the Japanese designer Issy Miyake, born 100 years after Fortuny, took inspiration from to develop his pleating methods in the 1980’s; Fortuny was also a designer of early electrical lamps, who was engaged by Toscanini to design lighting for a prodiction for La Scala which led to the invention of the Fortuny Dome that then prompted Fortuny to create the basis for modern theatrical lighting grids. At his studio in Venice, Fortuny later encouraged the experimentation with 35mm film projected on to textiles and paintings - surely some of the first experiments that questioned the notion of ‘the screen’. He seemed, given the analogue technologies of his time, to have no disciplinary boundaries.

Video Painting, a projection on textiles, 2009, by Artist Charlotte Humpston, who began her training as a Theatre Designer at Central St Martins

In all of the above there is also the issue of the relation of practice to theory, of theory to practice and the perennial question of which should precede which and which of these should be informed by the other. In each of these two practices there are two different languages used. Theory seeks to be as precise as possible in the revelation of the truth of the act, culture or thought. In so doing it utilises metaphors that are as precise as possible. For instance the term data-mining is concerned with data as having multifarious levels and so the concept of digging out meaning is evoked. However, dealing with data has nothing whatsoever to do with the act of mining. Coal and minerals are real and not virtual. Data up until recently, has been described by contemporary media theory as being immaterial - although this is questionable for a variety of reasons that are outside the purview of this article. The point is that those involved primarily with theory, pride themselves on precision yet because they have to rely on metaphor which must break down at some point, can be said to utilise imprecise methodologies.

I do not wish to bring down upon myself the wrath of academia and those who’s job it is to practice theory, to be overly concerned with this argument. I simply raise it as we do need at some point to deal with this issue. Those concerned primarily with practice, it could be argued, do not concern themselves with this viewpoint as, it can be argued by practitioners, that that which is evoked in the act of theorising, damages the ability to be fully involved with practice. Practice utilises a different language and approach from the act of theorising. Often the language is imprecise and purposefully not rigorous (having said that, teaching of craft practice is rigorous in certain ways i.e. the relationship between f stops and depth of focus for instance is a mathematical relationship and therefore by definition its teaching can be rigorous). However, I am here thinking of practice in a real world situation which is rigorous in professional terms but also requires - if the director of photography is to ‘say’ anything with his or her work - the courage to go beyond being rigorous and therefore being safe, to an operating space which allows for accident and unusual solutions which align more perfectly with the intent of the scene they are lighting.

In the introduction I was fully aware of the use of imprecise language: ‘the fledgling Director of Photography that intuits and senses the materiality of light’. The use of the phrase ‘materiality of light’ does not bother me. I know it to be true. In the job of DP you touch light every day - put out your hand, introduce a finger before your palm and produce a shadow. That is fully material. What I was referring to was the use of the word ‘intuits’.

I use this word and idea in the sense that the DP enters the space and must dismiss the use of logical beta-thinking, frontal lobe ratiocination that gets in the way of the evocation of the sense that then recognises and produces a comprehension of the state of the space, in terms of light. This is intuition or in-teaching - listening to what is being told to you inside of yourself - maybe by yourself if no other. Actually, this is precise in description because this is what happens if you do not follow a systematic approach as taught with contemporary educational film and video courses, which emphasise functions like ‘key, rim and fill’ as a basis for lighting. In truth these are simply starting positions to develop 'photographic lighting' as espoused by great cinematographers like Conrad Hall (his last film, Road To Perdition) and for 'craft' to flourish within academia, as it does within Hollywood, we must encourage a definition of the characterising functions within a developed sense that we hardly recogise as being of worth study, goes under the guise 'intuition'. It is said within the industry that 'you've either got it or you ain't', but that conclusion is in fact a descriptor of the condition of the students mindset after academic training in practical motion picture and media production studies.

Key rim and fill, or, Three point lighting

A HISTORY
I have been a Director of Photography in the UK and have been lighting since 1980. I'm currently an AHRC Senior Research Fellow at Bristol University. When I first took up the craft I was privileged to be working in the middle of Soho in London catering for a blossoming TV trade – it became important to learn the skills of lighting. Many years later, after numerous commercials, promos, TV dramas and four feature films I now try to give back what I’ve learnt, to the industry via teaching the incoming trainees that now flood into every educational institution around the world: Making moving images has an allure for young people developing within the digital age, sufficient to disable the call of the young to rock and roll a generation earlier.

When thinking as a DP, sometimes there’s a challenge to try to think outside the box to solve a lighting challenge – usually due to budget. Some years ago a friend of mine was directing a music show for Channel 4. His DP was about to be fired because he’d been asked to light the set low key, but to keep any presenters or acts lit high key. This conundrum blew his fuse and he retired. I got the call and said I could solve the problem. Then I sat down and started musing on the problem. After puzzling over it for a couple of days, suddenly a solution came to mind: fortunately for me I’d seen a documentary on Cuban cinema a couple of months before. They didn’t have many lights available in Cuba at the time and so they took to carrying them around on the ends of boom poles, so that when people moved the light moved with them.

That’s when I invented the ‘Ned Kelly’. I asked my partner who is an art director to make up a chicken wire cylinder about 15 inches high by about 10 inches in diameter. I cut out a slot about 8 by 10 at the front and put two layers of frost there, then coated the rest in black wrap. I hung a 1k lowell tota-lamp at the back shining through the frost and hung the whole thing off a barracuda pole or polecatThe English sparks weren’t too keen on a job where they get to carry poles around with lights on the end, but after a while everyone warmed to the task and we got a low key show with high key presenters. I mention this here because this article is about invention and how one has to look at the world to then invent either a lighting unit or emulate a lighting effect one sees happening – and also about two men who have changed the way we light: Nestor Almendros and Mariano Fortuny – both Spaniards.

Some years before I had to go to Russia and there was a neat little collapsible trace frame available that I took with me: a great solution for merging the output of several lamps and therefore having only one shadow. If you go traveling to shoot a documentary you don’t have many lights along with you. When I shot the Patriarch of all Russia (during Glasnost) the man saw a bizarre combination of two trace frames with blue gel over it and 4 lights passing through them: Double softness corrected to daylight.

When I got back I thought I could refine this idea somewhat: I invented something I jokingly called the Flaxbox – I’d heard a few years before that Jordan Cronenwerth had invented the Croniecone for Blade Runner – something to slip over the front of a 5k or 10k to get soft light out of it, so I figured if he could call his unit after himself – so could I. I took the collapsible trace frame that was roughly 36 inches wide by about 30 inches long. I again asked my partner to construct a black material cover fortified by art card with a 12 inch central square hole in it.This could be mounted on a stand. In the middle of the square the front protruded out by one foot to make sure that light did not spill around the subject. At the back of the frame I suspended a layer of trace, half way down the one-foot square protrusion I mounted another layer of trace. This provided double softening and a form of elementary barn door to specifically aim the soft light wherever I chose. It became a very beautiful portrait unit for various situations. The light was so soft you didn’t need any diffusion over the lens. You could put a small pepper light through it, a 1k, 2k or a 1.k2 or 2.5k HMI or any combination of lamps– whatever you put through it became one soft light source with hardly any shadow.I used to carry this around with me and if I got any difficulty from the star, including people like Mariah Carey, (who is astute enough to take her own DP around the world with her to make sure they were represented in a particular kind of way), then I showed them what I was going to do by sitting in front of my own lamp. Sometimes I didn’t light the star but the presenter and my presenter was watched by the star and embarrassing questions were asked: I remember doing a job for the BBC where a very big star had a full time lighter. I let him do his job then lit my interviewer and this particularly acutely bright woman saw the image on the monitor and demanded that she swap places to get into the presenters light. I don’t know what happened to the full time guy after this.

TEACHING
I sometimes teach one or two day lighting courses and I pride myself on an apocryphal history that takes into account all of the accidents that fill the annals of our craft that stem from low budgets but then provide the most interesting lighting techniques: i.e. low budgets on quota quickies produced film noir lighting – the thinking was, if you do a ‘proper job’ because you haven’t enough lighting units and crew, then create shadows for dramatic effect.

On these courses I tell my apocryphal history starting with the idea that everything in our world can manifest an image. If you leave a stone on another stone long enough then a shadow of that stone will be left. Of course that idea leads to the idea of ‘film speed’ measured in ASA or DIN, which at the very beginning were around half an ASA.

So, on starting my class I ask one student to sit in front of the class and in front of a camera and another student to turn out the light on the cue of the word ‘light’.
Then the classroom is plunged into darkness. I wait for a little while waiting for people’s sensory systems to settle down and move around so that they become aware of sound. I then turn on an angle poise and move around the subject aiming the angle poise at them and ask the remaining students to note what looks good and what doesn’t and then note where the light is.

I then talk about creating separation when you have hardly any tones in black and white, and the simple development of sets outside that can be slowly rotated to face the sun…. I speak about film speeds increasing and therefore having the development of a key light that replicates the Californian sun’s height and the beginning aesthetic awareness that offsetting its angle to the face to avoid direct to full face lighting creates modeling on this egg shaped object we have on out shoulders. I talk about how the Californian sun is low enough to get under the brows and show the eye sockets – but that when the key light is offset you need a fill light to fill in the nose shadow at lower intensity to the key light – and so on.

I talk about placing materials in front of lights to mitigate their hardness and about placing materials like stockings in front (or behind) the lens to affect the way the light gets to film. I talk about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo liking particular cameramen because they kept them beautiful for camera – I talk about the development of film noir – and eventually I come to the seminal moment of modern film lighting experienced by a Spanish cinematographer working in Cuba.

In my lighting classes I demonstrate the effects of all of these different things. I get the students to take on practical challenges to find out things – if this is how you light one seated person – how do you light two? I begin with the very first moment when I get a student standing by the light switch and on cue turning the lights off at the first mention of light and keeping the students in the dark whilst talking about the beauty of light and letting their sensory systems settle down into dark mode. All the way through I tell them that their aesthetic is what they must develop and that this is characterised by a set of likes and dislikes about what is good and fitting and most importantly with a discriminative mind that understands how what they like is produced and how to deduce how what they are seeing on TV and at the movies is produced.

But then the moment comes when after 50 or more years of hard, direct light (albeit greatly moderated by various techniques – and also the advent of 9ASA Tripack Technicolor after the war – suddenly the moment of transition comes. I show them a 100% increase in quality of light over all that has gone before and then tell them the tale of how it came about:

SMASHING THE MIRROR
Nestor Almendros was born in 1930 and brought up in Barcelona – a Spanish cinematographer. He immigrated to Cuba in 1948, where he began making amateur films with young Cubans friends, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. He later studied filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale in Italy, and supported himself in New York as a Spanish language teacher, while also conducting his own experiments in cinematography.

Nestor Almendros 1930-1992

Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he returned to Cuba, where he secured a job with the state film department, making films for the Cuban Government. One day whilst filming in the interior and because there was no electricity to be had, Almendros had to rig up a mirror, a techniques he had developed, outside the front door of the building, then aim it down the passageway onto another mirror which shone directly to a third mirror which then angled the light at the subject.

This alone should be enough to take the breath away in terms of invention. Yes we’ve all done this sort of thing but to be doing it so far back with film that was possibly only maybe 25 to 50 ASA – that’s stunning. But then something happened, Almedros heard a crash whilst setting up his first two mirrors and found that the third mirror had fallen and smashed but that the beam of light hit the white wall and created an almost holy glow around the subject. Almendros was transfixed at its beauty and proceeded with the work – transformed.

Director Terence Malik and Nestor Almendros' 1978 Days of Heaven, shot mainly at 'Golden Hour' - that mysterious moment after the sun has set, yet light is still in the sky. If you look you'll see that 'fill' light is bounced back into frame from the left.

His work was seen in the Paris documentary festivals of the next few years and the audience members, Goddard, Truffaut, Rohmer etc –saw that his work was great and by 1964 he shot Eric Rohmer’s segment of the Nouvelle Vague portmanteau film Paris Vu Par (1964; Paris Seen By). Then in 1967 he shot Rohmer’s feature film La Collectionneuse - he went on to shoot seven more films for Rohmer (among them, Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969; My Night at Maud's), Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire’s Knee), and Die Marquise von O… (1976), and nine for Francois Truffaut (including Domicile Conjugal (1970; Bed and Board), L'Histoire d'Adèle H (1975; The Story of Adele H), and Le Dernier Métro (1980; The Last Metro). Almendros’ invention of bounced as opposed to direct light was favored by the film-makers of the New Wave because of its realistic feel in opposition to the glamorous techniques of mainstream cinema.

Almendros then made his first foray into American film-making with the Roger Corman-produced The Wild Racers (1968) and Cockfighter (1974), but it was with Days of Heaven (1978), directed by Terrence Malik, that he made his name in America. In the film, shot in rural Alberta, Canada, Almendros abandoned the artificial effects employed by modern cinematographers in favor of natural light. The deliberate simplicity of Almendros’ technique led to conflict with the film’s technical crew, who were unused to such austerity, but the results were exceptional, bringing Almendros an Oscar for Best Photography. Make no mistake – though all inventions are a result of the development of the Zeitgeist and many photographers were heading in this direction – really, the invention, or rather paradigm change of that of mainly using bounced light came from Almendros.

At least that has been my apocryphal tale up until very recently. Here, by the way, I make no apologies for inaccuracies and inconsistencies in my tale save that the basic truth of it is right because it is a question of inspiration when teaching and pulling inspiration, intuition and creativity out of those you teach and if I have to get them into a more visionary space by creative inaccuracy – then so be it. But, just to set the record straight here is a passage from Almendros’s book, ‘A Man with A Camera’:

Working in the countryside and in places we had to use our ingenuity to film inside the huts of Cuban peasants. We had no artificial lighting because it was expensive to take a crew of electricians with us. We thought up the idea of using mirrors, capturing the sunlight from the outside, reflecting it in through the windows and directing it to the ceiling, from where it bounced and lit the whole place. Because the huts were rather dark and the walls dull-colored, we had to cover them with white paper to reflect as much light as possible. I should point out that around that time fashion photographers began using light reflected off white umbrellas. I knew about these methods, though as yet they were not much used in filmmaking. They were techniques I perfected later in France.

Well, the story I’ve been telling is near the truth, but here’s the thing, I think we can all agree that bounced soft light is what the industry is using worldwide – yes it takes more control, flags, baffles etc, but bottom line it’s where we are now. For a start, soft bounced light makes the hideousness of the live digital video signal feel a bit better – whether it’s a ghastly little Z1 all the way up to an Origin, Genesis, F23 or Red – soft light begins the cinematographic process with video – and film just loves it (of course film loves all sorts of light that’s why everyone just goes fluffy when using film).

Julia Jackson by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867. There is hard light source to the right of this picture, but there's also a soft bounce coming in from the left - just as with Nestor Almendros Days of Heaven image, above.

I think perhaps Julia Margaret Cameron may have known about bounced and reflected light and then later, when movie film became fast enough for interior studio use, the great banks of mercury vapor lamps might also have been emulating the kind of work that Almendros was to later come upon and develop.

So, though we need direct light to create certain elements within the frame we’re can all agree that soft light is useful and contemporarily dominant? Well, just to challenge this history I’d like to introduce a new idea: in 1904 there was a Spaniard (yes, that nation does have an edge on others in the invention of lighting techniques) called Mariano Fortuny. (I make no apologies in an article of this sort for my next point: Next time you go to Venice, go to the Fortuny Museum, which is Fortuny’s old residence of the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei – it’s a museum like no other in the world. This is a museum where the muse descends and accompanies not only the artist, but the visitor).

PRIOR TO THE MIRROR - THE DOME
Mariano Fortuny was born in Granada in the Fonda de los Siete Suelo at the foot of the Alhambra on 11th May 1871. In 1874 his farther died in Rome and in 1875 his mother Cecilia was induced to move the family to Paris. Fortuny copied a Velasquez at the age of 9 and he was sent to learn at the feet of Benjamin Constant. Fortuny frequented the studio of Rodin when he learned about liberating the form from the stone.

Mariano Fortuny 1871-1949

Fortuny was restless in his enquiries about materials and techniques and he was stimulated by the early technical innovations such as that of electrical lighting – this became a dominant idea in his mind as he discovered through a friend of the family, a painter named Boldini, the theatre. What really captured Fortuny’s imagination was a trip behind the scenery, where he saw what the magic of theatre was constructed from which is of course very similar to motion pictures – bar the medium of recording and inscribing the image of course. For Fortuny though, he began to build small models of theatres and sets and he then also became involved in thinking about the possible applications of electricity, physics and optics in the theatre. It was this period and being shown deeper elements of the construction of a theatrical event by a Spanish painter, Egusquiva, that were to stay with Fortuny as he began to invent new techniques of theatrical practice that will be recognized as being at the base of contemporary theatrical technique – as well as being at the base of cinematographic technique!

In 1889 Fortuny’s mother moved the family back to Venice where their house on the Grand Canal became a busy meeting place for artists and writers. Not only did Fortuny paint and etch and practice all of the traditional methods for studying art, he also practiced music, photography and set design. By 1899 he had grown enough to be commissioned by a Countess Albrizzi to design the set and costumes for The Mikado. He then obtained the top floor of a Palazzo where he eventually came to live and it was here that he began his studies of light and experimented with lighting systems finally developing his indirect lighting system:

In the attic of Palazzo Orfei where I worked, the sunshine fell across the floor in a clean slash. As I was arranging the paper for the stage backdrop, it fell exactly into this sunlit area. I stopped in surprise. There, in that low and dim attic, the light that was reflected off the paper was exactly what I had been looking for: not direct light, but reflected light.

In a production at La Scala with the orchestra directed by Toscanini, Fortuny developed sketches for costume and set and with some opposition from La Scala’s stage technicians, he also attempted to implement parts of his new stage lighting system. The technicians may have been suspicious, but the press was ecstatic with the lighting effects and he then registered his first patent for an ‘indirect stage lighting system’. He went to Paris in 1902 and dedicated himself to the construction of stage lighting equipment and to the creation of a device commonly known as the ‘Fortuny Dome.’ It was a concave quarter sphere that was used with his indirect lighting system to enhance the depth effect on the stage set.

With the help of my capable technician, I built my dome of out of plaster 5 meters in diameter. We projected reflected light upon it and added other colored lights, creating fusion and transition effects and a variety of hues that invariably impressed all visitors.

On 6th April 1904 he registered an invention entitled ‘Systeme de constituton d’une paroi concave au moyen d’une capacite gonflable’. Fortuny had created a dome for the Countess and added the following refinement: The walls of the dome were made of two parallel layers of fabric supported in a metal frame. A fan blew air between the two layers, creating pressure and making the surface toward the stage completely smooth. In addition to his complex stage lighting system, Fortuny had the chance to install other new equipment in the theatre. For the first time, he introduced a bridge and then a second walkway above the stage, used by stage technicians to mount the lights. Not only this but he created a system to raise and lower the stage and for the first time ever in the history of theatre, he installed a director’s booth at the back of the auditorium for the lighting operator, who could better direct the lighting effects to the stage.

I’ve used the term ‘theatre’ in a lot of the above description of Fortuny’s activities, but it shouldn’t take much imagination to see what effect Fortuny has had on contemporary lighting and also cinematic studio design. But – not only this. Fortuny created designs for fabric, patented carbon-pigment photographic paper, advised Klimt on the use of gold in his painting, created set design and lighting effects, photographed, played music, researched the history of fabric and created pleated silks inspired by Egyptian Design that later influenced Issey Miyake’s work in the 1970’s and onwards – and, invented many domestic lighting units that are now present in their modern day forms in every household. His wood and metal table lamp of 1929 is the ancestor to Pixar’s dancing lamp.

The three lamps other than mine shown in this article are designed by Fortuny - if you have time, search the net and have a look at the wit, intelligence and inventiveness of the man in his other design work in lighting, textiles and paintings.

Many distinguished cinematographers and gaffers create lights to do specific jobs – Jordan Cronenweth’s famed Croniecone used on films like Blade Runner are a case in point – but, can you imagine a moment perhaps in the 17th Century, or the 6th Century – or maybe way back in our collective pasts where some bright person noticed and became transfixed by the way light bounces, reflects, glows, or passes through a medium like water or smoke and has an epiphany that is then translated into a practical act: for those of us that work with light, that most insubstantial but most powerful of materials, I think it helps to know that we exist within a tradition that goes beyond the birth of cinema into the history of theatre, and should one cast one's mind back a little further to sixteenth and seventeenth century masques and their lighting effects and back further still to Roman, Greek if not Babylonian forms of entertaining one another.

At the beginning of this article I had said: ‘This article is concerned primarily with what constitutes the need to innovate due to practical and budgetary pressures’ but I also tried to foreground issues around the teaching of practice and the theorising of practice - as well as the practicing of the act of theorising. What I have also been interested in as an underlying motivation in the writing of this is to celebrate the different but similar modes of thought between the production of recorded media such as film and television and live media such as theatre or performance art. It is clear to me that there are shared ideas in creative innovation in any medium because that act of invention itself evokes the use of sensibilities that are outside of formal ratiocinatory thinking. One is essentially looking for everything that exists outside of the acts that lead to thought that easily enter language or more specifically, text- and in contradistinction to the spirit of that idea, it has somehow found its way here.

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu

REDaesthetics and the Art of RAW

2010-04-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

A Spring declaration of the Death of Film

2010-04-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

High Definition, High Resolution and Electronic Cinematography

2010-02-15T06:44:00.000-08:00

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu‘

New sensors scheduled to deliver in the coming year from both Red and Arri are even more promising. Despite my nostalgic love for film, I fear it may soon be a fond memory on all but the most specialized productions’. Johnathan Flack cinematographer, Cinematographers Mailing list, 18 january 2010.

I’ve been minded to try to summarise what has happened in High Definition technologies for a while now but it was only having to answer the mistaken notion in a recent document that went under peer review that made me realise that the general understanding (of academics at least) is still back a few years in origin. People often talk in terms of High Definition - yet this term alone creates a huge confusion about what is actually going on.

One of the two reasons HD was called HD was to combat Film’s hold on image generation for feature films. Sony and various other electronic corporations needed to rebrand what they were doing to successfully challenge the corporations such as Kodak who dominated production of professional and consumer materials in this area. The other reason the word ‘High’ was used was because the new format was to replace standard definition equipment in one of industry’s new-broom maneuvers which allowed them to sell a lot more product.

I want to cite a distinction that we shouldn’t waver from: High Definition is proprietary in form - that is it comprises of data that is packaged in a particular file system, generally with a pixel count of 1920 x 1080 or the other popular system 1280 x 720, under a certain amount of compression that make is handleable by the proprietors other equipment. In other words when you use High Definition you’re buying in to a group agreement about a set of easily handleable functions that capture an image at one end and and display that image within certain tolerances at the exhibition end. A particular system of compression that is best suited to streaming video, or compressing for DVD or Blue Ray is that of creating Groups of Pictures - say a set of 7 - where the first frame and the last frame have a set of common reference points and the frames in between throw away that information and only update the elements that change. This system is particularly bad for depicting morion as practically everything changes in each frame, but the tolerance of the system is set to limit information - that’s a contradiction. A short Group of Pictures is therefore less qualitative than a 15 picture Long GoP structure.

On the other hand, High Resolution technologies, such as most Electronic Cinematography forms do use a package, but this is for convenience, it’s intent is to retain as much data, or information generated by a photosite as possible. Photosites are locations where light is turned into data. Pixels are not photosites - pixels can be an aggregation of the information generated by several photosites - or just representative of one photosite. The point is the idea of a pixel is really of a value which may be generated by one or more contributing elements.

Compression still exists in this form, but it is limited because the central thrust of this technology is to retain as much data about tonal latitude, resolution and colour from the natural world as possible. Also, ownership exists in this form - Red’s R3D file system is owned by then and no one else. Also it is compressed - maybe to one tenth of the data that was available to the sensor - but, being wavelet driven as opposed to DCT driven (where DCT means Discrete Cosine Transform as opposed to the rival Wavelet Transform version) it is less destructive of the data and information can more easily be retrieved or simulated from this form of compression.

Data cameras utilise logarithmic (log) as opposed to linear colour space. ‘Linear’ is a product of preparing an image to travel through older analogue technologies (phosphorus screens) and therefore has limitations placed upon it to work in that domain. Linear utlised 8 bit Colour and nowadays we are looking for 14 or even 16 bit systems. Log maintains a higher level of data but tends to look not so good on contemporary display - so we introduce ‘look up tables’ to treat the monitor with to make sure the image looks ok on set.

Lastly - data recording means that changes are made to the image after the data is recorded unlike in proprietary systems where treatment are made at the time of recording. Sony was famous for throwing away around 500 pixels in its HD cam system which recorded only 1440 of the 1920 pixels it was trying to represent.

For a masterly description of the discussion around colour space, see Douglas Bankston's article In American Cinematographer, The Colour Space Conundrum. Or my own paper on colour space: The Concept of Colour Space from the Practitioners Standpoint.

So - since beginning my fellowship in September 2007 there has been a fundamental change in the thinking around high definition technology.

Before this time, development of the technology was in the hands of large corporations who employed specialists in various areas to create systems that handled data or information that assembled 25 frames per second into a moving image stream.

Opinion about what was good and what was bad, correct or inappropriate to the process was derived from a cultural attitude assembled through 100 years of corporate development. Research labs, product labs, customer testing and so on assembled and produced the products that industry and then consumers had access to and were encouraged to demand.

From early experiments by John Logie Baird, Vladimir Zworkin and Philo T Farnsworth, modern analogue technologies developed finally via Bing Crosby’s Ampex Corporation into what we now know as standard definition analogue broadcast tv in all of its variants, Pal with 625 lines and 25 frames per second (due to the 50 hz electrical system), Secam with 819 lines, NTSC with 525 lines 30 frames per second (due to the 60hz electrical system) and no colour reference signal, Brazilian PAL with 525 lines and so on, all of which lead towards early analogue HD systems such as NHK’s 1125 line system and Philips Mac 1250 line system.

Due to the persistence of vision factor, where in early film 18 frames per second needed to be held in the gate whilst a circular wheel with two or three slits in it span and allowed two or three flashes per frame (i.e. 18 frames flashed three times was 54 times per second), analogue video needed its 25 frame structure split into two fields to achieve enough flashes per second. Pal with 25 frames, split into two fields of 325.5 lines flashed 50 times a second to create persistence of vision and NTSC flashed 60 times a second. Splitting the frame into two fields is called interlacing and the resulting resolution is half the line structure. 625 lines is 312.5 lines in resolution.

The reason that television as a form developed the idea of interlace (besides the persistence of vision factor) was that the lowest link in the chain was display. Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT’s) worked by having an electron gun fire electrons to excite phosphor on the surface of the screen. Magnets pulled the beam left to right (because were in a society that values that direction more than the Japanese or Chinese), then the beam switched off, another set of magnets pulled the beam fractionally down, the beam was switched on and pulled left to right again. Glass technology was limited to a certain size and electron beams could only sweep so fast before their accuracy was lost. 625 lines was close to the limit of these technologies at the time of invention.

Meanwhile early digital video was developing into digi beta where the remediation of the incoming digital signal imitated and developed into something akin to a line system of 625 lines in Europe and 525 lines in Japan and America. However, there were no lines, only pixels: 720 x 576 in Europe and 720 x 480 in NTSC. Anamorphisation was used to take the European digital system into a 16:9 aspect ratio as it was naturally 4:3 originally. Cathode ray tubes were the main display system and so early digital video used interlace to display the image.

Having established a pixel count the way forward into ‘High Definition’ was established. HD was so-called because the manufacturers were interested in creating a product to rival film and therefore enable them to come into the film market place - they wanted a system that had more Kudos than old analogue terms suggested. Sony still calls its HD system Cine Alta. Due to the financial might of America and Japan. Due to electrical system frequency (50 or 60 cycles a second) a relationship developed, (as it had already done in analogue calculations to derive first 408 then 625 in the European system and in 525 in the US and Japanese system) between it and the ‘natural’ amount of pixels that might easily be recorded and then displayed - From capture through to display is, after all, a chain where the lowest level of information at any point is the determining factor of what the viewer sees - this is the modular transform function of the any system - it’s weakest link in effect in the chain.

So we come to the technology that was prevalent prior to 2007. Having won the frequency battle (50 or 60 cycles per second) Japanese and American manufacturers offered proprietary systems of image capture and display that was sympathetic to the outgoing interlaced paradigm. This meant that we still had lack of a reliable standard between manufacturers because on a financial level - to the victor goes the spoils. This was seen in the early analogue battle between Sony and Mitsubishi who were proposing VHS and betamax. At that time it became clear that the best system might not necessarily win (by best I do not mean most reliable, just best in the sense of image representation - it is arguable that betamax was more fragile on a mechanical level).

What was evident from the start was that film recorded a progressive image and needed many flashes to create persistence of vision and digital video might do this but the forms of display were just developing - so interlace still persists - but it must be remembered that a 1080i picture is only 540 lines in resolution!

At that time computerization and storage was not as developed as it is now and so manufacturers were recognising that though they basically had a standard they could comply to much data had to be thrown away to record an image on tape. The argument about whether 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 was the right standard were still being argued about - where due to simple maths the lower level pixel image could have a greater recording of colour information than the higher level one (also the 720 line system was fundamentally higher in resolution than the prevalent 1080 i signal - it’s only today that we have 1080p in such amounts).

In recording an image the issue is always of how fast your data capture, transfer and recording is (until we pass through the barrier where we can capture and record more data than the eye and brain can see). For me its a question of plumbing - how big are your pipes and your tanks. The manufacturers were using systems of compression and decompression - that is trying to keep as much data as was necessary to fabricate an image that was seemingly high definition.

It would pay to look at the difference between Fouriers’ Discrete Co-sine Transform and Fouriers 1807 innovation which is now becoming the compression system to use - Fourier’s Wavelet Transforms. I refer you here to Astrophysicist Amara Graps work on Waveforms: http://www.amara.com/current/wavelet.html

As Amara says: The fundamental idea behind wavelets is to analyze according to scale. Indeed, some researchers in the wavelet field feel that, by using wavelets, one is adopting a whole new mindset or perspective in processing data.

Then there’s the issue of recording Groups of Pictures or GoP’s which seek to only record the changes in the pictures as they proceed rather than the whole picture and this eventuates in artifacts, blocking into squares that the developed eye finds so painful. This is the system of compression beloved of the internet, DVD’s Blue-ray, streaming etc.

If you have a long GoP of 15 frames where the image is refreshed every 15, it stands to reason that it’s an image of less resolution than a short GoP of 15 (in a nutshell Sony at 15 and Panasonic at 7). This is the basic system in streaming across the internet which is fine in that form (for a while) but there’s no place for it in image capture any more.

Then Red came along to make the data argument public. It’s not that Red were the first, others had proposed systems that did not throw away data, or rather recorded information in packets of data that were less lossy than the proprietary systems (HD cam for instance throws away 500 lines, just like that, so that there’s 1440 lines left to compress to record)

So - the basic change that’s taken place since 2007 is the cultural change that no longer accepts image compression as a de facto stance in image capture and display and would rather have all of the data captured so that choices could be made at varying points along the pipeline about what is kept and what is thrown away.

Cinematography ?

2010-01-16T04:06:00.000-08:00

Late in the year thoughts...

2009-12-26T05:19:00.001-08:00

I make art to explore my subject, which is high resolution image making - or, after several years of looking at the subject area, where everyone is now experiencing something of the high resolution form, I feel that I should now just refer to the area as simply, image making.

Yes there is a high form and a low form of high resolution and very much of what people are experiencing is to my mind very, very low. But then I’ve had the luxury of circumstance to experience many levels of resolution. Like Blake.

Art like everything else turns to dust in time. So, if that’s the case why do it, if your rationale was to make something that was about connecting to the eternal? That was after all my rationale as opposed to having a project that was about shape, form, structure - all that old, old stuff. I certainly have had no interest in recent yet profitable exploits of the artist/charlatan state where the kings new clothes are worn de rigueur - and with pride. Always by very very stupid people with everyone else wondering what the fuck it is all about. Well I’m here to tell you it’s about nothing - nothing at all.

I’ve come to the point (once again) where I’m standing looking up at the cosmos and thinking about my own existence. There it is and here I am. When I’m absorbed in looking at it then there’s no need to do anything - when I come to the end of my looking then there’s a need to sustain my self, food, heat, light, exchange with others and making marks which speak about the absorption I’d previously experienced whilst contemplating the immensity that we are placed within.

Why reprise that - why not just go stare at it again? For one I don’t just want to repeat myself because in that repetition are the seeds of hedonism - self-pleasuring. So I realise that a return to that contemplation can only happen once again when I’ve been refreshed or remade or changed sufficiently for that experience to once again mean something - all of which can come from sharing the experience. In that sharing comes further enlightening moments as once articulates what it was that transfixed one in the first place.

‘Transfixed’.

That’s a word that refers to the crucifying of the human spirt on the cross of matter. Yet actively contemplating the infinite relieves that state - and sharing that relief propagates renewing the self. It’s a circle - but then most of existence as experience, from the human point of view, is a series of circular movements and wisdom tries to speak about that - ‘there is a time for hope, there is a time for grief, everything has its time’ - say the psalms.

Art has been commodified by a value system that has fetishised commodities and so art itself within the limited and local zeitgeist has also been commodified. But we know the earth is in some kind of trouble and so we need to make art that relates to this condition. I’m not proposing a lot of eco art that will be just as local as the prior form, - rather a making of art that speaks of the eternal, right here, right now. People have found that they want to express themselves as being alive in an important way - ordinary people have extraordinary selves inside them and commodification will no longer be helpful in defining the extraordinariness of that self.

So to me it seems that we the artists must speak to that need for articulation in the ordinary person and so we must speak of the eternal - the most difficult of subjects to be clear about - and for all of those reading this with lack of understanding at this point someone else once said - if you’ve got the ears you’ll understand the message.

The Italians say: Few are called, but many answer.

Though the commodification of the world eventually implies that anyone can make ‘art’, by reducing what art is to a commodity, therefore it’s re-produceable easily- the truth is only a few can make worthwhile art and at a time when everyone is answering that call, it’ll take some time to be clear about what is good art and what is bad art. But then again one can simply see what’s there with intuitive eyes and mind and respond to the work knowing that it’s good if it speaks of the eternal and frankly, no-good if it speaks of anything less.

Time to make some good work

2009-12-15T01:37:00.001-08:00

For an assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

So a young artist, Eugene, wins ‘School for Saatchi’ - well, someone has to win - but truth to be told, Eugene’s piece was by far the best work - if you judge the idea of art within contemporary ideas of art: that it is impactful, easy to read, understandable, interpretable and also at the same time, enigmatic. The enigmatic element is what keeps the art market going. If it were not enigmatic then it would be hard to make a commodity of the work - which doesn’t fit in with the decadent end-of-civilisation stance that those who broker the value of art within the contemporary zeitgeist require. (For those unfamiliar with this TV programme, 6 artists make work week by week then get eliminated until 1 wins an exhibition with Saatchi in Moscow).

Saatchi is an ad man - he shapes art in his own image, his own understanding. In McLuhan’s world in which he grew up, things need to be impactful to get through in the global village, they have to be fairly direct to be able to sell the moment where everything is clamoring for your attention. No blame - it’s just the way he is and because he had money he could shape the work of artists by functioning as the demand element of the supply and demand equation. Artists cannot be blamed either. They had to eat. Some of them engorged, but some of them are trying to make amends (if they truly understood their acts in the past) and Hirsts paintings for instance are creating opprobrium amongst the critics and curators because they of course, are behind the wave.

It’s a problem we all have to deal with - the intervention of the artist, the relationship to an audience of a work; the relationship of ideas to objects.

As an artist I’m of course interested in all of that and it is disconcerting to be ‘unrecognised’ and probably were the contemporary curator to consign me to oblivion as an artist then it would be affecting of my confidence - however, all of that must not matter in pursuit of what art might actually be in relationship to the Mammalian/Homo Sapien project - which of course may or may not be existent - but I like to think that it does: that we are an improving species and that ‘art’ is in fact a galvanizing and improving force in relation to the goals of the project - that the artist is in cahoots with the project to make work which reveals something about the truths of life for those that are busy living it.

I’m pretty sure that when I exhibit, I exhibit in some kind of vacuum. The vacuum is my own set of beliefs - see above - and that though I understand about the space in which a young artist is dealing in, the assets and the real estate and the property bonds, the stocks and shares of art, the determining concepts as raised by Duchamp, outlined by Magritte and articulated by Warhol - then utilised by Koons and Hirst - etcetera - I have a responsibility to do more - and I also have to accept my own pre-disposition to the cultural and historical continuum in which I have been placed - but, within that understanding I use my chosen form, video - electronic cinematography - which has a relationship to single image, single frame photography, to photochemical forms... I still have to take the space as did Eugene with impactful work, but then create work which has deeper meanings and resonances for the public, deeper than the flimsy, frothy expressions of concepts (as being as weighty as materials) and going beyond those concerns reveals the deeper empathy of people made sentient within a human frame.

I’ve played with ways of getting at that state and sometimes made work that resonates with that inner tension found in a ll sentient, conscious beings. Now, however, I have to challenge myself to be bold enough, creative enough, brave enough to go beyond my own form and thoughts, transcend my own condition to reveal work which itself reveals everything said above and more.

That’s my manifesto - I have intimations of things that I have to do. I have first to make ‘The Way North’ which I’m part way through making, then I have to make The Crucifixion and use the symbolism in that mithraic and christian idea (and Babylonian and Egyptian come to that) to demonstrate where we stand in history - which as usual, is crucified on our own lack of ability to see beyond our own state - the cross is usually the cross of matter - but we now have to face the fact that the cross is made of everything that constitutes our own blind spot.

‘The Way North’ or as it’s subtitled ‘Until I’m Gone’, is about my own passing on the basis that we really should get used to the idea of death, that just as we were born so shall we die. The Crucifixion is the crucifixion of an ape - because that’s what we are in terms of genus - seen as Dali saw the son of man, from above. At the apes feet there will be the carcass of a cow in a vegetable plot, because it’s time to stop eating living sentient beings, turn the planet over to the production of vegetables, limit the amount of people on the planet and find pleasure in doing real things and stop consuming experience (and things) - because it’s now time. We don’t need ‘The Age of Stupid’ to know what we have to do. True there are a lot of men attached to the idea that they need to eat meat to be a man and carry along their womenfolk in that belief, much as grandmothers commit the actual act of circumcising the young women for the culture - those who should least be involved - but it’s time to stop or terminate the planet (as we now know it to be).

Not that there isn’t a zillion earth-like planets out there and we should also get over our own ‘specialness’ - but our own particular backyard needs tending simply because some of us do not want to be wanton, some of us always wanted to care for the environment, some of us knew from the very beginning that animals should be spared - not just because they too feel as we feel (in every respect), but how could we look ourselves in the mirror if we committed an act of cannibalism ? It’s just time to change, that’s all - and art has to reflect that decision to mean anything to anyone in a world that just might seem to be dying.

A friends questionnaire

2009-12-10T02:32:00.000-08:00

Bristol University 1921 - from a a recent Portraits Project

A friend asked me to complete a questionnaire on the subject of 'Art' and I realised I've been thinking about this subject area a lot lately and needed to commit myself to 'paper' no matter how pompous it seemed. I write this just having examined the latest thoughts on exposure and compression in wavelet transforms (as used in Red One). So though there's not a technical note at all in what follows, it's written with a mind to the technicalities of producing moving image art with todays digital media.

1.How did your recent Portrait project come about?

I began in photography when I was a student – so the still image is my starting point (in some ways). Having made many documentaries which examine ‘real issues and real people’ and having come to the conclusion that the only thing a documentary documents is the attitude of the maker at the time of making to their subject, I put the documentation of the real on the back burner and became more involved with fiction and with art in the moving image. Having gone through many ideas over 20 years I became interested in doing the opposite to what you should do with moving images – move the camera and change the shots: so moving image portraiture became of interest because you neither moved the camera, not the shot. Portaits iof the Somerset Canivals is my fourth portraiture project and there will be more of these plus developments of the form – Monumental Portraits of the working people of the Somerset levels being the next. In this I’ll turn the screen portrait at 20 feet x 10 feet to aggrandize the subject. It’s a socialist perspective.

2. Where would be the ideal place for you to show Portraits of the Somerset Carnival?

Tow ideal places: The Rural Life Museum because it contrasts the past and contemporary technology and the second would be any foreign environment because using the ‘strangeness of others’ is a useful and impactful staging of work. When Portraits of the Tor was shown in Venice, the Venetians loved it – and – when Ritratti di Cannaregio (Portraits of Cannaregio) showed in Glastonbury, Somerset people love that too. Therefore ‘difference’ works as a staging tool.

3.Do you think the location of where your films are played makes a difference to how people think about your film?

This only appears to be a film – it is s movement of light and a movement of sound which we choose to see as an ‘image’. So I reject ‘film’ as a description – also it doesn’t describe this technology but the late 19th century invention of celluloid. As for the place where people are exposed to this play of light and sound, it is as key as where it was shot and what was shot. The artists selects the subject, the form, the description and where the audience apprehends all of these. Sometimes the artist has to randomize their own preconceptions (as above with the use of ‘the other’). However all you’re trying to do as an artist is to display, depict, transmit your own intuition about the work as clearly as you can – I don’t mean intellectual clarity – that’s an academic position which is explicitly centered on how we apprehend via the frontal lobes of the brain. I’m more interested in the whole or gestalt experience of the audience. If the artwork is ‘true’ to the artists original intuition and realized without too much personal baggage attached, and then staged knowingly, then the audience will receive the ‘transmission’, the artwork, as the artist originally intended (baring in mind that the artists intentions are very wide of the mark in terms of what’s good for their own work – it’s a minefield)

4.What do you think when choosing an angle to film?

So far I utilize western aesthetics – ‘the golden mean’, said to derive from our sensory condition and how ‘beauty’ is derived from the fact of photo-sites, optic nerve weave, data rates of transmission, receptor cells, brain capacity – all that western stuff which like everything else is simply a narrative to tell ourselves how it is for us within the human form. For 30 years I’ve been pointing a camera in professional situations and therefore have experienced the norms of depiction. If you’ve done this enough you can frame with your eyes closed, just listening.

Having said that – I go for pure and direct naturalistic framing with a balanced frame simply to acknowledge the above and not be mired in any of the various ‘problems’ of alternative framing choices.

5.Which is more important to you, the subject for your film, or how it was filmed?

These two are one.

6.What moves you most in life? (Inspires or upsets you)

Art is the only important thing in life. It is the eternal in the now. This very moment, the acknowledgement of which, is the art of the moment. Whether contemporary art school training is turning out artists or ‘noticers’ of the fashions of the mammals and the apes is another question. For those that have managed to not be bogged down in that question – everything is possible. The collegiate of artists, greater or lesser, are people I understand. Anyone who has realized that this is not all that there is is moved to speak about that – and ehat they speak about is art, with greater or lesser talent. The rest are the ones that didn’t volunteer for the job, for one reason or another. Art is a painful route sometimes – as you’ll no doubt know.

I should’ve written this up as a blog…..

End-

On Making a New Piece of Work in Bergen, Norway

2009-09-22T23:58:00.001-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

What follows are some musings on the motives behind creating a new piece of work. This is a blog about high definition but I am also concerned with making art within this form and for a long time now I’ve been concentrating on the technology and then aesthetics, but my recent trip to Bergen to teach a workshop on the subject of HD to MA and Phd students and staff of an art school (not a standard academic institution) has altered my view on what I’m doing. This visit has opened up some issues for me and I wish to discuss how and why I make art so that I might articulate (also to myself) the process, so that I might better improve what I’m doing. This begins with the naming of the work and certain titles have arisen that say something about this project:

Self Portrait
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The Way North
Nor Way
Until I’m gone

I might use one or none of these. They come from the fact of Norway itself – known in Norwegian as ‘the way north’. ‘Nor Way’, because there’s an element of ’no’ way forward. Matsuo Basho’s ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’ was very influential on me. Beautiful and sometimes comic travel descriptions of late 17th century Japan, sometimes encapsulated in haiku form – the use of the title would be an homage. ‘Self-portrait’ because that’s what this is at this stage of my life (a nod to Rembrandt here and his persistent and useful self-portraiture). ‘Until I’m gone’ is the subject of the text – who am I whilst here, how will it be when I’m gone – does the world stop – or just me. Was it here before me and how was it/will it be.

I took a trip into the fjords and of course there were a lot of people on the boat – but you will not see them – only me and only what I saw. I couldn’t help but abstract images of water, hills, of reflections. There’s the issue of what the artist notices – what’s in his or her eye and mind and therefore aesthetic – is it worth looking at ? I’ve seen so many small works of art in museum’s and galleries that really are just neurotic responses to the world, that were not worth making (or at least worth it to the artist to get something out of their system but actually insulting to an audience who had travelled to see it.

Moving image works occur in time – generally starting at one point and ending at another. Point A leading to point B. The use of narrative in video art has been frowned on in recent years because entertainment uses this strategy to entertain the audience as its primary force and the art system here doesn’t want to associate with its strategies, as if art will become contaminated by that association. Artists tend to think of narrative as candy floss – a means of overwhelming the audience into submission. Then various strategies within narrative capture the audiences attention and others deliver fulfilment – narrative resolution being a strategy that sends the audience home happy. Except of course, its now been so overused that even Hollywood is faltering in its stride.

So I wanted to think about narrative – about whether art should not use this strategy about whether the use of it automatically disables the art and turns it into entertainment. About whether things do not need to have a story – a line, a direction, about whether art can use narrative in its palette of expression – or whether narrative is too heady a strategy and will in fact take over a work that the audience is then left entertained by, rather than going through that more subtle of experiences that we call ‘art’. Through looking at this I also wanted to look at the nature of what that more subtle experience was, about whether when looked at too closely it comes apart as you examine it.

Entertainment makes an audience read a work. Assumption, expectation, congratulation (for having realised a point – but then modern art uses that strategy invariably), various ways of reading the information you have before you – and one very dangerous way: Interpretation. Much modern art requires approaching something that has disguised intentions – disguised because that strategy is considered allowable by the 20th century modernist project as it grew into conceptual form – if an intent or a concept was disguised or withheld then its revealing, the revelation of the point of the work, would come with added impact. So many works are a simple juxtaposition of two ideas where a frisson is generated in the viewers mind – how much more powerful if this frisson was ‘revealed’ rather than seen straight away. To me this is as disingenuous as a bad use of narrative form. Equally the pointless work, or the work that is solely concerned with form gathered weight in the curatorial mind, then a series of strategies that involved the use of irony – to show how we are now beyond being affected by the qualities that used to be paramount in renaissance and enlightenment works. These two are different of course but share common functions.

But irony is the work of the cynic and the scoundrel, the craftsperson who avoids the point that comes when ideas like ‘beauty’, carrying a terrible relativistic edge to its meaning and appreciation. In this sentence I’m calling the artist a craftsperson because that person is avoiding ‘the matter of art’. Of course the contemporary theorist is having terrible shudderings at my cavalier attitude to this well thought out area. But I make my comments because I am mindful of one important thing – that the artist is above all, a practitioner and needs be true to practice rather than theory, value, the market, the dominant curatorial project or any set of values or ideas that might sway the embodiment of the urge that makes people create art works as pure transmission from the deeper psyche.

All an artist does is ‘know’ something, perhaps dimply, then follows their inspiration and intuition towards an expression in some kind of form, for display and exhibition to their fellow men and women. This gesture is the childlike gesture of finding something interesting and saying to ones fellow children in the play area – come, look see what I’ve found – what do you think of that.

The artist show the audience what they are about to know and become familiar with, the artist journeys ahead to the horizon to see the landscape that lies beyond.

Earlier in the dim light of early morning I awake and began to think about staging my new, as yet unmade work. I knew pretty much how I would formulate the images and sounds and the general direction of the work.

Over the last couple of years I had made many installations that were to be experienced in part. One could enter a space and come upon a work that would simply continue before one entered and after one left. That way, my theory went, the issue of ‘narrative was diluted and people could approach the work which involved a ‘going’ and leave without the addition and complimentary act in narrative of ‘coming’. The narrative journey of moving between ‘A’ and ‘B’ was interrupted.

I had taken on the issue of staging – moving the screen from the wall and perhaps suspending it above the audiences heads, or laying it down upon the floor, or doing away with it and projecting images on to objects. But now I realise that I have to go even further because all of the things I’ve tried are simply strategies – some very effective and to be used again. But now I wish to go more deeply into the form itself and I no longer mistake the material of the form, video, electronic data, digitality etc, as the form. The form is the concept, the idea of moving image itself. The idea in fact of ‘image’ moving or not. The idea of ‘art’ embodied or not, concept or form, material, displayed or not.

But with all of this remaining true to the original engagement – I’m not talking here of my fellowship, but my original engagement with the act of making. I have spoken before about a compulsive inner urge to make inscriptions. I have been challenged on that through the argument that all that you do is chosen and so I am not free from responsibility towards choice at all points; but if you practice, you know that deep down beneath any set of intellectual constructions about what art is or why we do it is for want of a better descritption, the ground of the human condition.

By this I mean that which moves us through the world – not as individual personas, but as the human species upon the human project. And here I use the term ‘human’ as descriptive as a local state, in our case biped, primate, carbon based. To me, ‘human’ means sentience embodied – and I don’t care if that sentience is in carbon reptile, carbon mammal, silicon, gas whatever. If sentience is present then I call that ‘human’.

So, in the early hours I began to think of this piece I was upon in terms of its possible outcome: single screen, black box installation, multi-screen performance etc. I was trying various outfits on to my idea, my tailors dummy, to see what clothes best suited it. Of course it became relative – but that’s part of the condition.

I have various thoughts on how this will come about, but I do know that the act of making will begin t change what the work is, what thoughts I had had, will change and the material will start to ‘speak’. I will apply simple conventions to the use of the footage I’ve shot and they will either enhance or deplete its power. My set of aesthetics gathered through many years of making will come into play and start to determine the relative use of these aesthetics and what you now see and hear before you will be one outcome of this act – one outcome because I now know, whatever I think this thing is, it is also many other things and can be displayed and exhibited in many ways.

The artist must lead the curator and not the other way around. Most artists are within the zeitgeist and of course should be lead by the curator – but some artists must go ahead. As the Italians say: “Few are called, but many answer”. So it gets harder and harder to find the work of the people that innovate, because innovation is not just something different from what you normally see. Sometimes innovation is very hard to see because it is in fact so different.

But – importantly, I have begun my work and it excites me, makes me want to come back to it and develop it because I sense that it is a way through this conundrum. I am asking a Norwegian friend to translate my work into Norwegian and speak the voice part, my text will be in English – I have used this technique a few times now. It’s necessary because we are in a global situation and the voices of the many languages will speak a common truth.

The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners standpoint

2009-07-23T04:13:00.000-07:00

Colour and the Moving Image

Colour is a phenomenon of mind and eye - what you now perceive as colour, is shape and form rendered as experience. Visible light is electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. It is remarkable that so many distinct causes of colour should apply to a small band of electromagnetic radiation to which the eye is sensitive, a band less than one "octave" wide in an electromagnetic spectrum of more than 80 "octaves." When thinking about the issue of synesthesia, remember that it occurs in a very limited sensorium.

Above are two representations of colour space. In each, the coloured area represents the visual field that evolution has endowed us with. This is one octave of possible experience.

Trying to systematize the idea of colour and naming that understanding ‘colour space’ has historical precedents which I’ll discuss later, but the notion of systematizing the concept grows out of ‘Enlightenment’ desires to know the world in a material way by mapping and planning, then proceeding into Victorian methods derived from, indexing and cataloging – which comes from a desire to create the experience of understanding from methodology, an idea who’s dominance is still with us.

Colour has been formulated by intellectual cartographers but is not a map – colour is experiential as the cinematographer well knows. In photographic terms colour as a function of seeing and meaning came late to the form. Because of this, notions of areas of containment of colour grew – as if colour had been graphically applied to an area - thus denying its inherence in form. This is in fact true in terms of late analogue televisual forms – but not true of digital electronic cinematography.

Film is exposed and latently holds an image, then is developed to ‘reveal’ that image. Film was and is a medium that had and still has many intricate and alchemical processes before its exhibition and revelation of a captured reality in the cinema: a temple built for the purpose of ritual display, where all who enter are required to suspend their disbelief. Film asks us to deny the actual material reality of the environment we are in and also to deny something of our own self.

Colour in this environment too was to be a function of the act of belief in the unreal. The generation of the idea of Colour space is an umbrella concept under which sets of ideas coalesced around the organisation of that function and as such took on various methodologies for its assemblage.

Because we are the ape that we are, mathematics quickly becomes for us a key organising factor in the description of this functionality.

“A colour model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colours can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or colour components - for instance RGB and CMYK”.

“Most colour models begin as three dimensional forms because when you distribute the values in 2D space, that space cannot hold all the necessary axes relevant to the distribution of those values”.

In one of the examples above, there is a simple distribution of values that charts how a display from a computer is related to a display from a printer - in other words what the computer can display and what a printer can display.

The other example of colour space seeks to demonstrate the relationship of the visible spectrum to film, print and the computer.

“The range of colours varies enormously across different media. Of the billions of colours in the visible spectrum, a computer screen can display millions, a high-quality printer in the order of thousands, and older computer systems may support only 216 colours across different platforms.”

I could elucidate further on variations of description of print colour space, film colour space and computer colour space, I could elucidate further on whether those spaces are best displayed in their respective display co-ordinates of RGB or CMYK.

I could try to tell a history of film space and how electronic space addressed that, of how Kodak generated the cineon file system which was created for electronic encoding of film colour space with later developments of Digital Picture Exchange (or DPX), both of which generate a set of separate files each of which is one frame of film taken over into one digital frame of display - of how each carried meta-data about the conditions under which the image was generated in - and so on and so forth - but I won’t because that is for further reading - if you are interested.

What I will do and I’m trying to do it right now, is to indicate that simple technical terms that are understood by ‘the industries’ are replete with not only cultural and social meaning - but also exist within paradigms of understanding that are now changing – primarily due to the advent of the digital.

The Practitioner

I wish to turn now to the practical act of the cinematographer entering into the concept of colour space and how that can be achieved.
The early issues of video and film are now behind us and in some senses a rapprochement between film and the latest representative of the electronic – digital electronic cinematography - has occurred.

Original electronic imaging was analogue in form – as was film – yet the formulation of the capturing of an image was different from film.

Film has a large latitude – one could make an intelligent ‘mistake’ and rework the material and formulate a sense of ‘atmosphere’ within the image. This is commonly known as ‘the Look’.

Analogue video was clean and clinical and you had to get the exposure right – in the early days, if you didn’t get exposure correct then you didn’t get focus. Colour itself was grafted on to an already set formulation of image capture – PAL - it was effectively an afterthought: Phase Alternate Line.

I shot one of the first features, generated on video and transferred to film for theatrical distribution; this was Birmingham Film and Video Workshops production ‘Out of Order’. I approached the task by imagining video as being like a reversal stock – with very little latitude for mistakes in exposure. The transfer to film was adequate, but when compared to today’s digital transfer techniques, was not good in terms of colour.

With the advent of electronic cinematography something very important has happened in the capturing of the image. In both photo-chemical and electronic cinematography until the image is developed, the image resides in a latent form in both the silver halides and the un-rendered data. Development, the bringing forth of the image in film is similar to the rendering of the image in the digital and electronic domain – and importantly, colour is within the bit-depth of electronic data and is therefore an integral part of its material form.

This developing practical understanding in the professional realm is counter to arguments that circulate within media theory – for instance: New Media A Critical introduction latest publication 2009, Lister, et al, claims an essential virtuality to new media where the precise immateriality of digital media is stressed over and over again.

However, industrial and professional expertise now challenges academic convention by seeking to re-inscribe digital image making as a material process.

One of the first films that took a material film base and dealt with colour in the electronic realm was ‘O Brother Where are thou’. When Roger Deakins was asked by the Coen Brothers to shoot this, being a creative and intuitive cinematographer, he knew that he was being offered a chance to cross the bridge between the ‘convergent’ and the ‘integrative’ paradigm. Deakins job as he saw it was to enact the kind of colour space seen in the faded, poignant, postcards of the twenties. Deakins knows his film colour space. He’s had enough practice.

I want to tell you the kind of method that a practitioner like Roger Deakins employs to understand the function of colour in the world when faced with a multi-million dollar set of technologies - also adopted by a friend of mine when shooting a quarter of a billion dollar production recently.

If you decide that you’re going for a certain look, because intellectually you’ve justified to yourself that this look in some way underlines the intention of the director - and after you and he or she has toured the galleries, looked through the books, seen the movies that seem to relate to the project – and after you’ve jettisoned all of that because you know that referencing is mostly an act of creative failure and after every residue of resistance has gone, then and only then you turn to your intuition about the way you must proceed.

It might be that that intuition is to evoke green as a colour - or maybe it’s a magenta cast - or it has a warm glow which at the dramatic end you feel has to be taken away from the audience and supplanted by its opposite....

Which ever of these tactics you decide to embrace to achieve your goal, you accept the fact that you have to enter a colour space and live in that space until you know it fully - so fully that you can reveal its nature to both yourself and then the audience.

So you buy yourself some sunglasses.

If the world you need to reveal is green, you find the right colour green and wear those sunglasses for a month or for however long you need to wear them to know the world that has that particular shade of green.
Conversely, but with a little more risk, you can take the opposite approach and buy a pair of sunglasses that are the complimentary opposite colour of the world you eventually wish to invoke.

In so doing you exposure yourself to the opposite world of colour so that when you take the glasses off, the complimentary opposite of the world is revealed with even greater intensity – more so than the continuous appraisal of the world by seeing the correct colour continuously. That moment is a moment of incomparable intensity.

HISTORY

I now want to give you a brief idea of how we began to systematise the idea of colour:

Aristotle developed the first known theory of colour. He postulated that God sent down colour from the heavens as celestial rays. He identified four colours corresponding to the four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to suggest an alternative hierarchy of colour. In his Treatise on Painting, he said that while philosophers viewed white as the "cause, or the receiver" of colours and black as the absence of colour, both were essential to the painter, with white representing light, and black, darkness. He listed his six colours and within this is the age old symbolic system of alchemy.

The Enlightenment project then later stimulated a material examination of our physical state so that eventually theories developed that began to mirror and explain how we next believed that we ‘really’ perceive colour.

Isaac Newton created a colour wheel of perception in response.

Moses Harriss wrote the Natural System of Colours in 1776.

J. W. Goethe developed a colour harmony theory on the basis of his hue circle. In this circle, colours are categorised into two sides, the positive and the negative.

Ewald Hering (1834-1918) devised the first accurate theory of colour vision. And so on and so forth until we truly enter the physiological description of ‘reality’:

“Colour is a response of the eye and brain to data received by the visual systems evolved from the immediate environment. Objects emit light in various mixtures of wavelengths. Our minds perceive those wavelength-mixtures as a phenomenon we call colour, and this perception creates questions that current colour theory tries to explain”.

Vertebrate animals were primitively tetrachromatic. Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying colour information, or possessing four different types of cone cells in the eye.

With the trichromacy normal in humans, the gamut of colours construed by our perception will not cover all possible colours. Human trichromatic colour vision is a recent evolutionary novelty that first evolved in the common ancestor of the Old World Primates. Placental mammals lost both the short and mid wavelength cones. Human red-green colour blindness occurs because the two copies of the red and green opsin genes remain in close proximity on the X chromosome.

So we humans have a weak link in our chain with regards to colour - we are not 4 cone tetrochromats, we have three and in some cases only two - in extremely rare cases we have one!

We are now within a profoundly material description of our experience, yet this is incomplete, especially in terms of emotion and intelligence as has been brought out in other papers - I want to bring in another idea that relates to this description which is called: the Modular Transfer Function.

MODULAR TRANSFER FUNCTION
We humans value detail and sharpness more than resolution in an image. High resolution is synonymous with preservation of detail and sharpness, but high pixel count - which is generally regarded as being a measure of how good an image is - does not always translate into high resolution.

“As you try to increase the amount of information on the screen, the contrast that you get from a small resolution element to the next smallest resolution element is diminished. The point where we can no longer see contrast difference is called the limit of visual acuity. It’s the law of diminishing returns, and a system’s ability to preserve contrast at various resolutions is described by the modulation transfer function (MTF).“

The point of this technical description is that, as Alice observed on traveling through the looking glass, the smaller you go, the rounder you get. As Ivan Illych noted in his analysis of the creation of systems, there are drawbacks within the actual material construct of the system that you design. And this is especially so with colour: for instance a camera might be at 4k resolution in red – but it might only be 2k resolution in blue.

What I’m trying to come to here, is that I regard the area that each colour space covers as being a footprint of understanding, demonstrative of a world view - and world views, as we know, have many ramifications.

COLOUR AND CULTURE

In film alone, compare Technicolour of the '50's with Colour film in the Eastern Block in the 80's and Chinese colour film in the 40’s. Surely a statement about national psyches and all existing within different film colour spaces.... The dominant colouration of these spaces speak about the state of the nations zeitgeist at the time of production.

The recent electronic and data based colour space is a statement about this particular time and the new possible epistemologies of understanding that are developing beyond the simple systems of materialist thought and materialist theory.

BRINGING CONCEPTS TOGETHER

Using the metaphor of ‘modular transfer function’, that a chain of information and in this case a chain of understanding, is only as wide and as deep and as strong, to mix my metaphors, as the weakest link in that chain. Then only in the narrow optical region, just that region to which the human eye is sensitive, is the energy of light well attuned to the electronic structure of matter from which colour derives.

But we must not confuse this attunement as a metaphor of complete meaning - there are many meanings to be obtained within the concept of colour space, many emotional spaces, many spiritual and many intellectual spaces – and above all, many experiential spaces.

We see within a matrix of words when considering the subject, but when simply experiencing it, we do so on a different level of comprehension.

1 With the advent of the digital and our necessary remediation of it via older analogue understandings, we are upon the brink of constructing new concepts, to utilise the metaphor of colour, that will enable us to see outside of our current visible spectrum and therefore gain understanding to illuminate our intellectual world with greater intensity and detail. In this ‘seeing’, new language will be generated, new ideas, new uses of light and new concepts of colour and understanding that will begin to match what is now intimated through the development of digital colour space.

To effect this change at a more rapid and experiential pace – to achieve revelation: let us all buy a new pair of sunglasses.

Making HD Work

2009-07-23T03:48:00.001-07:00

In May 2009, though having shot quite a few times before on 4k, I spent a week on a 4k camera - here are some thoughts written immediately after shooting about the process in relation to the idea of art history:

This week brought into focus some issues around High resolution imaging and art.

The camera per se was invented to ‘capture’ ‘reality’ (as if it needed catching and like all wild things did not want to be caught).

Contemporary art seems to have long passed the idea of configuring reality through brush strokes or forming matter as simple representations of what seems to be before the artist and then exhibited to the public as an act of art. The last century discussed the idea that the artists conceptualising of an issue was at least as important as the materials he or she was using, until only the idea mattered and the form that was being used was some kind of barrier to that act.

But the camera relentlessly presses it’s two dimensional representation, whether photo-chemical or analogue video or latterly data, as the formal configuration of what lies before the person ‘capturing reality’ at a chosen moment - and yet this act is in contradiction to the dominant mode of art, including its exhibition at this point in time.

It seems to me, that in ‘the matter of art’, art historians are as important as artists for it is they who set the cultural value system that society’s dominant modes of reading of art lies within. The current mode of understanding of art within late capitalism is of course the commodification of art - giving it value so that it can be traded in the market place - whether that market place uses currency or tokens of value.

In the late 1930’s the Frankfurt Social Sciences research project moved to New York and in a moment of pure modernity, art historical appreciation of their own project changed. Two cultures, the continental and the American met and exchanged and entrained to produce the project we now make art within.

This collision produced a set of relationships between Theodore Adorno, Meyer Shapiro, Claude Levi-Straus, Herbert Marcuse, Arthur Porter et al.

Meyer Schapiro wrote a text on the appreciation of a sixth century church doorway that differed from other early sculptural works in that it was principally asymmetric - it depicted a sleeping figure, not a figure doing something - as well as many other features.

The contemporary project was examining an issue in a sophisticated way. If producing the idea of a biography of the artist to produce a reading of that artists art was bankrupt - i.e., the projection of a closeness felt through understanding of a life lived, then re-projecting that understanding on to a painting as if that projection in some way made sense of the painting was incorrect (after all, that life lived and understood by a contemporary mind was a fictionalisation) then ‘understanding the work through that fantasy was false.

So the project of the art historian became about finding the anonymous artist to study, then there could be no biographical projection. Also, the project had been up until Shapiros work, a looking at the general early romanesque work where certain fashions of representation were consistently used - Christ and the Saints in their place - as was that fashion. Shapiro looked at a trameu above a doorway that did not fit this because it was asymmetric and had representations of man and devil that were different. Shapiro worked out that prior interpretations were a reaction to the artist as biography, its opposite in fact, so what if the artwork were a description of the world that it was produced within.

All of this is tracked and beautifully described in Thomas Crow’s The Intelligence of Art, (University of North Carolina Press)

After many years and waves of fashion, through the sixties and the french intellectuals - Barthes, semiology, semantics signs and signifiers, through the post modern project until the present - what the art historian has been doing is paramount to the way the contemporary artists work is valued and therefore a conditioning factor in what they produce in the first place. It is what art history and what it considers to be worthwhile that determines the surface motions of curatorial practice that then determines what its extension, the art market, values and therefore the notion that the artist is an heroic adventurer in the new continent of meaning as a creative force that is wrong. This individual is no individual at all but a simple clone of a value system that is prevalent.

The YBA for instance simply is a tool of dominant values to challenge those least sophisticated of societal values. Even in the 30’s modern art was seen as froth. Right now, when the currents of the modernist project have become weak and are flowing back on themselves, as can be seen in a piece like Hirsts Diamond Skull, begun over 100 years ago, that is coming to its end.

So within all of this is someone like myself, raised above the general project of recording the world through digital media and presenting it back to itself through digital media (i.e. access to the more refined end of capture - that is hi resolution imaging). I now find myself having to enquire about the values of the project that uses the energy of current technology and the meaning that the ape that we are has successfully presented back to itself, so that I can realise my own internal needs to make a mark in the sand.

But given all of that, that we have a need to make work, (which needs questioning as it might not be an internal need but a demand of society for some individuals to be utilised like workers in a bee colony) - then if the project is about meaning and not representation, then the camera is the least best way of doing this - and yet intuitively I feel it is the only way for me at the moment !

So, during the last week I shot several new works not the least of which was one of my portraits projects where I use the moving image to capture someone being very still - like a statue, like a tableau vivant. All the time I’m asking people to be conscious of the power of their gaze. That it is energetic at the least and that at the most, they are actually emitting energy in that gaze that is met by a similar form of that energy by the viewer and that the screen is the liminal boundary where the two equivalent gazes meet, displaced only by time. Portraits of Bristol Universities Centenary captured the life of the university from the cleaning staff, via students, via professors, to the chancellor. As a work, this is more towards the corporate end of things, in that it is of an institution, but I see no barrier here to making the act as it sits within my general portraiture project.

However, photo realism and the problem of transposing the gaze of the viewer into a location he or she could not have been (except through luck) is not a problem in this piece as that is the ‘operator’ that works. Familiarity and unfamiliarity, stillness and movement, recognition on a universal scale, issues of size and display all come into play. The public recognises this stream of work and can place it in their value system, their interpretation and translation system and in terms of the overall social project the boat is not rocked but in fact, reaffirmed.

But of course there is no boat, no project, ‘no such thing as society’ as ‘that woman’ has said (at least in the uk) - there are only us sentient chickens. Yet that of course is another reading. Late capitalism requires us all to feel as individuals, in contradistinction to a 4th millennium BCE Egyptian slave who might have been more bonded to society and might have felt it their duty to sacrifice themselves for the whole. Nowadays that will not happen in action (throwing oneself under society's train so to speak), but in terms of the value system - it is the only game in town.

So for the artist interested in the nature of the functions that determine their activity, one of the first questions that the art historian has now to ask is: what is the viewer engaged in doing when meeting a new work of art (be it in image or sound or performance or whatever the artistic flavor of the month is)?

Picture this: You enter a gallery and there ‘it’ is (the artwork). What is it? What is it doing? What did the artist intend in segregating these elements and placing them before you? If it is recognisable then one simply marks it out of ten: It’s one of these and its a six. The curatorial elite requires that it is disguised to do its work so therefore it has to veil it’s functions. The more veiled, the more ‘unreadable’ the better. It’s very good if after a period of enquiry you recognise something - a material, a juxtaposition of materials and ideas - whatever the means - that finally something adds up and a little epiphany occurs and you ‘get it’ or recognise what the artists was up to in doing the work in the first place.

But all of this is a desert wine - easily appreciable. The connoisseur requires the wine to taste foul, then that is beyond public taste and because the function is then that only a few very sophisticated people can appreciate, it enables then to feel part of an elite. There are two readings here: that this small grouping lies directly in line after the art historian and controls the worlds museums and galleries and the second is that this elite just can’t see what the child can see, that the king is naked. Either way, you can’t win because philistinism is the highest charge that can be made against someone and you have to go directly to Coventry and not collect £200 (sorry, mixed metaphors).

The above is a Philistine description. But the Philistines were a cultured people who appreciated art and sculpture, who were militarily crushed by the incoming invaders and so necessarily as beaten people their history had to be propagandised and distorted.

But the questions have to be asked because the ship of art must not run aground and the dominant aesthetics and readings are driving us towards the rocks.....

The artist when faced with photo-mechanical, photochemical or photo-electric means of making art, which in itself denies the long project which is not simply recording the world, has to go further.

In pointing the camera towards the latter end of this week of production, beauty and pictorialism, the twin evil sisters of the figurative representation of reality, plagued me deeply.

As it came to me, everywhere I looked was full of beauty and yet when the camera presented it, it mostly deteriorated into pictorialism, a chocolate box version of the the world which on one level, in itself, was replete with the divine in the act of being. Every time the divine was captured as being without its divinity I did not shoot. Equally, when the divine was captured and was present, I turned off the camera - because that was not my project either (though it was good enough for most practicing artists prior to the 20th century). So I had to push on and try to interrogate the urge to make the mark in the sand.

What is this about ?

Everyone when looking at a work of art, through either ignorance or knowledge, is an art historian. Every artist who looks with the gaze of art is an art historian (albeit all of us better or worse informed about that history). But the artist has to reach beyond the project - surely?

Thursday morning and we take the 4k red camera into the somerset countryside. All day we point the camera at a set of pre-set scenes. All day I try to break the chains of intention.

Ideas kept hitting me: “It’s not the job of the artist to copy the world badly. Neither is it the job of the artist to try create a world ‘better’ than this - I surely can’t as it’s a fools errand in that they are created and can only make gestures towards their creator”

So what is the job of the artist ? To make nice scenes for people to put on their walls? To challenge the views of the populace about their views (doh) that’s really not hard as the public is way down the food chain. Is it to challenge the curatorial elite - more food chain issues. Or are both strategies about representing the world and then challenging ‘the local primate’ of any value at all? Is there a better way forward ?

Cinematic images can stun.

Art can stun.

Why isn’t being stunned enough?

Should we also be moved?

Is being ‘moved’ another diversion (Bertolt Brecht thought this not enough).

What is our sensorium and our psychology? Should we look more deeply at our make-up ? What’s is going on with us that art is important anyway?

As a researcher into the visual image, I am enquiring into its the formal and material nature: What it does and how it does it.

As an artist I have two enquiries: i) I am also enquiring into it’s formal nature and like all artists that are operating within the contemporary paradigm, issues around truth to materials is dominant - by this I mean that whatever the nature is of a material, taking wood as an example, it’s best to work with its ‘grain’.

Equally though, the pictorial aspect of image making is a large and thorny issue. What is an image best concerned with? The way it depicts the world for instance? Or equally what is the images symbolic use, or it’s conceptual, or ironic use?What are it’s cultural meanings, its societal meanings and the ideologies that lay behind these choices?

And also, what’s the history of use and where might that use be taking us?

So at root, I make work that points up something that I have gained insight about and so I take a position and a strategy in this act of unveiling and sometimes the effects are either beyond what I have gauged and sometimes the results are completely unforeseen.

In terms of High resolution imaging at the moment, as you can see - for me there are only questions.

To Be Continued...

I just couldn't resist

2009-07-23T03:01:00.001-07:00

This is off topic of course, but occasionally you simply have to write what's on your mind. In my last post I noted that there's a movement to create an economy for HD that makes it cost as much as 35mm - what I've written below, I suppose, is in contradiction to that.

There is now a movement to promote a 'Free Economy'. An economy where all the normal functions of exploitation exist, but hidden beneath the surface. As artists we are the guardians against the hidden atrocities of social form. The owner class requires profit to function. The artist class, sadly, has joined in this production of wealth. Artist - stay awake. Google that fine line from the poem and u get a u tube video of a baby trying to stay awake.

Ha Ha.

'The situation is nicely summed up by' - if the situation can be nicely summed up, we'd better abandon ship, derail the train, blow up the building, set fire to the symposium - Freeconomics.

But free - what does that mean?

This idea, without context, is almost worthless. It's worthless because it like all ideas sits within the social and economic context of the production of meaning.

When each young artist constructs a work, are they mindful of the context of that production? Do they know, for instance, why those most beautiful of medieval artifacts, the Limewood Altar Pieces of Middle Germany and the Netherlands are disfigured by the context of their own production? That they served as ego enhancing commodities for the owners? Whoever owns the biggest, finest, altar piece has the biggest cock. That’s why the religious system effectively banned their production. They were a statement by Mammon about Mammon. Do the new young video artists understand where they stand in terms of the stream of commodification that is now prevalent in the selfs' need to be an 'individual'? Do they just want to say something - loud. Do they just want fame?

Is the 20th centuries grand modernist curatorial project finally bankrupt - running on empty - or to paraphrase Pete Townsend, ‘drawing energy from a pyre of burning artists?’

In terms of Wired and it’s push towards marketing its editors book on the idea of Freeconomics (what a Bush-like word!) big thinkers bore me as they offer off-the-peg-solutions to difficult problems that they themselves not only identify, but promote. That's when the bullshit detector rings loud. It's an industry.

We, 'artists', have to enquire much deeper than the theorists who simply respond. We 'artists' are mining at the coal-face of reality. We 'artists' trace our lineage back to the mind in the cave that drew the first cave painting, or carved the first flute maybe some 100,000 years ago. We the artists trace our gaze back to the ape looking across the tree canopy and wondering - just wondering - and possibly 'responding'.

To respond is not a freedom - its a biological act. To respond intelligently, is also an accident of evolution. To respond with a conscious gaze - which may determine that no response should be made at all - that is the issue within freedom. The rest is just commodification at a late stage of capitalism.

Fortunately, there is a new paradigm arriving shortly at another platform.

You heard it here

2009-07-23T02:06:00.000-07:00

In my very first post in May 2007, High Definition, Web 2.0 and a Growing Aesthetic (click to read), some six months before taking up my fellowship, I laid out my understanding of the then current sate of High Resolution Imaging. I call it that rather than High Definition because for me its like calling a vacuum cleaner a Hoover. High Definition was a group agreement amongst a group of manufacturers to promote the next consumer development – High Definition. It soon deteriorated beneath 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 720 then much worse most of the HD that people see is within the GoP structure of HDV formats and streaming (Group of Pictures, where the image is refreshed every 7 or 15 frames, short or long GoPs, and a lot of info is left out in between). High Definition as a title suggested something above and defining, a title which spoke about what you had come to accept as not being good enough.

Some artists work with a tenth of the pixels of standard PAL or NTSC and make more defining images that 10,000 HD productions.

So currently we’re at the intermediate stage –announced by the recent tests in LA and London that compared Film and Data stocks. These tests were weighted by a process of remediation: that of seeing the new media in the old medias terms and so the new media simply can’t match those terms. Yet the fact is – to my eye – the new media is now adequate to the task, with some reservations.

This is very convenient for me as I can predict that by the end of my Fellowship I’ll be able to announce the fact that Electronic Cinematography has come of age. That also fits my Verbatim History project where I am interviewing a group of practitioners about the Hi Res form. My original argument that as there are hardly any verbatim reports from practitioners on the early history of photo-chemical photography between 1890 and 1910 – I really can’t allow that to happen between 1990 and 2010 in Electronic Cinematography.

So – watch this space for confirmation.

Contemporary Portraiture and the Divine Being

2009-06-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. An amended version of this is published in the Journal of Media Practice, June 2009.

I sometimes have to stop and ask what is it that I am doing whilst being engaged in making images. last night someone asked me why I do it and I referred to the phrase ‘the creative urge’ which I coined for myself whilst a teenager (and later found was current in most artists vocabulary). I went on to say, it is like breathing, I have to do it. Not as an urge actually, but as a demand of my existence, like breathing, something that is necessary. My commitment is to the gaze that we all have and the only thing that is actually yours in life - and here I am avoiding saying ‘the only thing one can own in life’ - you can’t own something that is inherent within you - like eyes, or hands (if you have them). Making images is what I choose to do, to be.

I have become interested in portraiture yet I realise that most of what a photographer can do has been done, and any iteration of the act of segregating one person in a frame to say: ‘here this person is’, has either been done or is reminiscent of having been done. Not that doing something new is the be all and end all of art - more that one should be cogniscant of what it is that one is doing and that replicating things means replicating their cultural content as well, either as direct quote or via some function - like using irony for instance.

If you stand someone in front of the camera, in isolating them from the mass of humanity you are saying: ‘look at this detail of our existence, this representative of ‘us’’. The detail itself to function well, has to be so microcosmic in order that it evokes the greater macrocosm of the human condition. At least, that has been the strategy of many a photographer.

I don’t take photographs though - I take ‘cinematographs’. High resolution still yet moving images where I ask the subject to pose as a reference to the early days of photography, where it took some time to actually create a latent image for later development. I like the idea of it taking time as the contemporary gaze is more and more momentary in its relation to contemporary media, and what one learns from maturing is that anything worth having takes time to obtain. So my strategy is to ask the subject to wait and stand and gaze and exchange energy with an audience that I’m also asked to wait and stand and gaze and exchange energy with the original subject - the two displaced only by time in their energy and gaze.

So - given the above and the developing form through my portraits series (Portraits of Glastonbury Tor, Cannaregio, the Somerset Carnivals and Bristol University’s Centenary) and given further enquiries into the area (A Moving Portrait of the Poet Elisabeth Beech, the Window-cleaner Alfred Glasspole and the Artist Charlotte Humpston), I’ve come to the conclusion about what I have to do. Or at east I’ve found the impetus for the next strand of research, that it is changing the form a little, especially in its display, that will render some extra insights into the act of portraiture - because, ‘the subject is the subject is the subject’ and ‘the strategy is the strategy is the strategy’ - so to speak.

In the portraits of series I projected life-sized high resolution images for the audience to scrutinise and then be surprised that this wasn’t a photograph but a moving image.

In the Moving portrait series (playing on notions of poignancy about the human condition in the title) and also the isolation of the head where the windows of the soul are contained together with the complex musculature of the mouth where the knowing/anxious/happy/worried/reflective expression might play. Display is on a 42 inch plasma screen plus a still photograph of the same size next to the plasma screen, extracted from the flow of frames that creates the moving image, plus a 20 foot by 10 foot image suspended above the audiences head, plus a 8 inch video enabled photo-frame on a plinth (a gesture of isolation) - all of this contributing to what I hope would prompt the casual viewer to examine their own notions of what a portrait is....

Equally and at a tangent I am working on other pieces that isolate and create pause by that isolation. ‘The Divine Being’ is a moving image of a rose - but framed as a photograph - that is its one shot isolation is the photographic element and the fact that it is a number of frames per second which simulates movement by persistence of vision is the cinematographic. The title is both ironic and yet true. This small focus on one thing that is culturally accepted as exquisite by poets and painters alike, is clearly ‘divine’ - that is given its two possible definitions:

Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity

or

To conjecture or guess; i.e. to divine rightly

Equally though, I note that divine and define are only one letter apart, so defining, divining and to confront that which might be divine are all similar activities, in that an isolation of form or presence is necessary.

So the use of the word ‘being’ in the phrase ‘The Divine Being’ is both a a noun and a verb. It is a thing (a godhead) and a state of being the divine in manifestation before your very eyes and to me this is the principal currency of the portrait - the divine being, sentient consciousness before ‘your very eyes’, coming to you as energy through and the gaze of another as you yourself, being that other to them (albeit displaced by time), return that very gaze.

ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL - A HISTORY OF BRITISH INDEPENDENT VIDEO ART

2009-05-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

A HISTORY YET TO BE TOLD
What follows are some notes for a proposal to celebrate through a series of screenings, Analogue Video and its transition into Digital Video during the late seventies, the eighties and the early 90’s. There are some video links in here but do let me know of other works online and I'll connect the dots...

I may have misremembered some facts and would welcome correction on anything I’ve said during these notes - also healthy disagreement. Meanwhile however, you are going to see some details that differ from the books on the subject that have been published since 1980. There are many incorrect ‘facts’ stated in most of the UK output in the area because they have been coloured by a revisionist thinking that this history sets out to redress. There are some simple untruths and incorrect things written such as in ‘A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain’ by David Curtis, where for instance my own 5 part series on UK and European Video Art is said to have been selected by myself and Sean Cubitt. Though Sean was interviewed by myself, he did not select any of the work. It was selected by Rod Stoneman and Triple Vision together.

The question then arises: ‘what else is incorrect in these histories’ and the further question arises concerning whether or not they leave out much of the ‘intent’ of the period under review and concentrate instead, on a history that fits a world view that was then dominant. For my money of course, the last question is its own answer. This history no longer needs to be as dominant as it was (and to some of us this history is destructive). As a documentarist as well as artist at the time, I found myself described in one book as a ‘sometimes psychedelic artist’. I directed some 20 hours of documentary, some of it very socially concerned at the time - perhaps I was moonlighting too. So much for documentary 'verite'.

ARGUMENT
Though the Seventies and Eighties many makers dealt with the question of ‘ubiquity’ that analogue video had presented them with by engaging with the television form. Following on from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay these makers celebrated the fact that the aura of art could neither adhere to the original nor the replication of the original. If all were ubiquitous and re-produceable where could the aura of the art object lie? Therefore the strategy HD to be to adduce value in other areas - in the aesthetics of the work itself whilst the electricity was turned on. This was the earliest gesture toward the digital which itself has no material, only a set of processes to describe itself.

From the beginning makers decided to intervene in the dominant hegemony as represented to what people felt was the central value system of society: Television.

One of the earliest engagements was David Hall’s Television Interruptions in 1971.

Click here to see Television Interruptions.

For me these were the products of a film understanding and derived from an attitude evinced from the modernist project of truth to materials and remediated the new form in the shape of film and its working practices. Hall engages with the TV set in the sense that he occupies it with elements such as water. In one intervention he focusses on a tap dripping and eventually the TV set is filled with another medium. This is reminiscent of Viola’s more spiritual installation where a camera looks at the drip on the end of a tap as it forms - a buddhist statement of impermanence as the image is projected on a wall and the world comes into being and out of being periodically. The British material reading of the form at the time was more concerned with the material of the medium itself - in my opinion, a lesser study. Later taken up by conceptualists like Hirst and co with their evaporation out of art into concept. True, Viola had a material concern too - but over-ridden by the act of the artist concerned with our place in the world as opposed to the artist concerned with his or her materials.

The excitement these makers felt was limited as many film practitioners were bound by a love and loyalty to and of the material of film and therefore their excitement was derived from the fact that some of videos process were ‘improvements’ on the problems of film. With video you didn’t have to wait for development and printing; with video you could shoot for longer than a standard roll of 16 mm which lasted 10 minutes at most and 4 minutes if you used a Bolex 16 mm camera; with video you could erase what was unsatisfactory aesthetically and marvelously, re-record over that to make a new recording. But these virtues were not the aesthetics of the new medium, they were simply improvements over an old medium and therefore constituted a re-mediation of the new medium. The film-makers were busy re-inventing themselves in their own image.

What came next was a new generation of makers that were not bound by the aesthetics of the material of film or busy with an anti-establishment view on a material level. However they were intensely political and carried with them antiestablishment political views.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EARLY ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL MEDIUMS
Prior to describing the history of what came between 1976 and 1992, the period where the exploration and investigation of a set of ideas that amounted to the birth of the digital age via aesthetic concerns it is important to situate what the author believes to be the actual condition of the digital realm as it currently stands. On element that can be identified about the digital is its dependence on electricity in some form. When the power is turned off, the digital ceases to exist. Another condition of the digital is its requirement that everything that enters its continuum is first encoded into some form of data. Also, the use of a term like ‘continuum’ identifies something about its state and its material condition - or rather its lack of a material condition.

If the digital is not a medium, or has no medium then one must describe it in other terms, that of process. Lev Manovich described this in ‘The Operations’ which are basically threefold in nature: to gather, to compose, to publish. One gathers on the net via software; one composes on a ‘site’ like on the computer via software; then one publish on the net via software. To extrapolate backwards into a prior art form such as sculpture, one conceives the work, chops the wood, sculpts the wood, display the wooden sculpture - now substitute any object of art and its materials. The is a description of various material mediums via the processes that describe their operations form inception into materiality. Loosely though, the project is the same: gather, compose, publish. The difference is the prior conception and origination of the work in the mind.

The process begun by Duchamp where he argued that the patron no longer should determine the nature of art by commission, but the artist should choose what the work should be. Magritte question notions of representation in a prior representational medium - ‘ceci n’est pas un pipe’ - the use of text under a picture of a pipe to demonstrate a loosening of pictorial form in relation to concept. Mid 20th century art recognised that one could begin with the material (or the process) such as with Jackson Pollocks' paintings and then eventually came Warhols' project, that of demonstrating that not only anything in our world is art if the artist so chooses, but all of us, artist or audience member should open our eyes to see with this understanding.

With Digitality we now transcend and end the conceptualists project. Hirsts final statement about form and value, the platinum skull, demonstrates the end of the material project and also the end of the artist as selector. An Absurdist gesture prior to the ubiquitous event of everyone as artist maker which is demonstrated daily on utube. But again, current digitality is simply in a moment of change toward what digitality will eventually become, so even these articulations and insights are remediated by what has gone before and do not fully describe what is truly happening. That will only come when time has revealed what the birth of digitality truly was.

Where we currently stand is as ‘flatlanders’, the Victorian 2 dimensional creature that when witnessing the passage of a sphere through their world, first see it as a point then an expanding circle which then contracts to a point. They have been in the presence of three dimensions but not understood its nature. Our state of understanding is remediated by the past, our historicisations are naturally via the hindsight of the last understood era, our theories are equally derived from what has past, so the perception of the present is veiled through the absence of a language that will develop. The mistake is in trying to label it through the medium of the victorian project which is about categorising and indexing each element into a separate part which of course is analytical and part of the enlightenment project which does not understand that we now have to develop theories that are underpinned by a gestalt approach, rather than an analytical approach.

THE DIGITAL AND ANALOGUE IN PERSPECTIVE
The period of innovation beginning in 1972 with the first edit that was constituted of a re-recorded image transposed across portapaks as opposed to that which was executed by a razor blade and glued together with sticky tape, ended around 1992 - and the world wide web was on the horizon via the early patterns of encoding of the analogue and now digital video signal. With the advent of wavelet transforms as opposed to discrete cosign transforms (both originated by Jean Baptiste Fourier in the early 1800s) a transformative period occurred during the ’90’s generally referred to by the term ‘convergence’.

This period was he tail end of a paradigm which began with the descent from the trees of early anthropoids with their gesture towards standing upright as the essential use of technicity and other uses of technology eventuating in the use of tools or implements, the first being the use of flints the last being the use of the stand alone personal computer.

By 2000 the modernist project had been superseded by the digital project, which still leaves many people confused by what it actually is - mostly because they try to understand it via modernism and its bastard child, post-modernism, a rehash of the analytical imperative with the bells and whistles of a non-rigorous gung-ho attitude. But convergence was simply the antecedent of the integrative as opposed to convergent moment. The integrative is digital, is no longer concerned with tools and implements to affect the world - the world as we now know it is digital, is immaterial, is not concerned with tools because the whole world is both tool and arena of experience: the medium is completely the message and the message and the medium is the world.

Integrative technology is the height of technicity where technology is the ontological state of being of its inhabitants, where the stand alone computer and its predecessor the flint tool gives way to a complete 3 dimensional real time mapping of the world inside the grand computer, where the ideal state is continuously held and updated waiting for perturbations in its fabric, created by its inhabitants which it intelligently and virally reacts to. The world is truly the suitcase, the suitcase is truly the world.

To situate the series of screenings I’m proposing, it is now necessary to elucidate the history of analogue and digital video with reference to the state of digitality we find ourselves in. The screenings themselves are intended to lead towards the propositions I’ve made in a discussion format at the end of the run with prominent makers (that are still active) from the sector.

HISTORY
It is important to note that the first gesture towards digitality via the analogue was accomplished by Frank Zappa using 2 inch video to ‘film’ the feature, 200 motels, in 1972. Here, 2 inch quadraplex machines were taken on site to to the studio to facilitate the recording of the film in apparently portable mode. The cameras however were connected to the recording machines via cabling.

In 1972 Hall and Le Grice made their interventions which were undertaken by film makers who were excited by the specific aspects of the new medium that speeded up the slower processes of film had coalesced into London Video Arts - this kind of film remediation of video was to hang around long into the early history of video.

Other film makers took an oppositional position and remained engaged with the material of film and its timeline whilst their colleagues more deeply immersed themselves into a remediated position with the new video medium. The concerns of that group and that period were of the academy: a concern with aesthetics of time, space, location, gaze etc that had developed from the work of the futurists, Vorticists, Fauves and so on who were a product of the acts of socialism and marxism at the turn of the 20th century. The influence of Kuleshev, Vertov and of course Eisenstein could be witnessed daily at the film co-op in the early seventies as the project continued and the light burned brightly.

The first portapaks entered the UK around 1967 and were instantly celebrated by a group of creative people distinct from the film based experimental moving image community located at the Film Co-Op. These however were more interested in ‘the happening’ than ‘art’. Yet of course, there were others less bashful about calling random experiments with light and colour by the term art, as was seen in the symposium on Expanded Cinema in April 2009 at the Tate. Early portapak video was a playful form which morphed eventually into ‘Community Video’.

As the middle of the 70’s passed, the community video makers jumped from out of the back of their vans in the derelict housing estates, they cried, much the same as that of the workers on an Agit Prop train during the 1917 revolution in Bolshevik Russia ‘We have the means of production - workers, let the revolution begin’. As Tony Dowmunt of Albany Video noted some years later: ‘Not many people came out to join the revolution and if it were raining then we’d be howling into the wind and rain’.

This socially active work was more related in some ways to the aesthetics of the post marxist experiments at the film co-op due to the simple common fact of a desire to change the society that the makers found themselves in. However, instead of examining the medium in a structural way as the filmmakers of the 20’s and 30’s had done, the community video makers were pleased that they finally had the means of production and it somehow echoed their lives. Film had to be sent away - video stayed right where you put the portapak and played back when you pressed ‘play’. This was instant and instantly affecting - it was of the period of now - a time period made popular in the sixties.

On the other side of the city however, painterly and sculptural concerns and the aesthetics that governed the academy and their work as derived from film practice grew and was sponsored by the Arts Council and became early video art.

Throughout the next three or four years new makers were engaging with the educational system and the project as espoused by the arts council sponsored video artists was falling on deaf ears. Punk was beginning but not necessarily in moving image terms (that was to happen 5 or 6 years later). But the strength of passion against the old school academy system was breaking down attitudes towards what video was and how it should be used. An early group thoroughly engaged in the struggle was Vida, coined from Video, to see. Vida meant, ‘look at this’. An imperative cry. Vida cut their teeth on late film style experiments with colour and flashing and actually shooting some film before abandoning the older language and engaging in the documentary form. By 1980 Vida had given over 250 shows.

Nothing was sacred at that point and whilst working through the ‘veracity of documentary’ Antony Cooper a founding member of Vida declared that ‘the only thing documentary documents, is the attitude of the maker to their subject at the time of making’. Hence documentary itself was under suspicion as not being truthful.

Elsewhere many other experiments were going on via the work of West London Community Video, Moonshine Community Arts, Fantasy Factory and Oval Video. Their film equivalents were Four Corner FIlms, Concord Film and Video, Circles Film Distribution, and the Film Co-op.

So the landscape held a series of separate and sometimes antagonistic artistic and political communities, split by aesthetics and intent. But then, with the advent of basic computers in the latter part of the 70’s, the new medium of analogue video was instantly in transformation. Mores Law, that stipulated that there would be an exponential increase in capacity accompanied by an exponential decrease in size, was having its effect.

By 1981 a group of interested parties, including London Video Arts. the Berwick street film collective, Oval Video, the Film Co-op, gathered around London Video Arts and formulated the idea that video should have a festival and the First National Video Festival was held at the film co-op in 1981, the second was at the ICA in 1982 and a dwindling 3rd festival at South Hill Park in Bracknell.

The altercations between the two media were overcome when the Independent FIlm Association allowed Video into the hallowed film ranks and the association became the Independent FIlm and Video Association - mainly because the language of video spoke to the new CHannel 4 initiative and film production was struggling both aesthetically, materially and financially with television as a display and distribution medium. Film sought to engage the video makers as allies in the cause.

Vida, who had originated in 1977 were responding to the transformative phase between film and video, then transmogrified into Triple Vision by 1980. Documentary experiments were still ongoing but now accompanied by experiments in narrative and non-narrative work. Some of the members of Vida had joined a commercial company called Videomakers in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue and the owners turned a blind eye to the exploits of this small team who then made equipment available to video artists and documentarists alike and began engaging in changing industry working practices by employing camera women at a time when there were only a few professional sound women in the sector.

Many Video makers had circled around London Video Arts, Oval Community Video, Albany Video and also Triple Vision who were working within the Framework of the Soho based company called Video Makers who worked in both the commercial realm and the arts realm. Videomakers distinguished themselves by engaging camera women and began to break down traditional working practices directly in the belly of the beast. Equally Videomakers allowed artists to come and use their equipment such as George Barber, George Snow and Gorilla Tapes. The Duvet Brothers were working at Diverse Productions at that time. Founded by Peter Donnebauer who had eschewed the cause of the Academy and its form of sculptural and painterly arts practice for the commercial realm. However, Rik Lander as part of the Duvet Brothers was given access after his working day to high level editing equipment, which allowed him and Peter Boyd McLean to creative distinctive forms of editing only glanced upon by traditional avant guarde film making. On his return form Australia, Jon Dovey who had worked with Oval Video brought back the australian fast cut form, a kind of montage of attractions on methedrine, which created a great furore at London’s Cinema Action when shown to a traditional film making audience. This was an avant garde of the electric cinema - not photo chemical cinema. The name of this form of editing was derived from black music experiments: “scratch Video’ named after working with playing vinyl records in a scratch style.

Whilst with Triple Vision I unconsciously utilised the form in a work which documented the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh through being the video crew (with Anthony Coper) for Apple on Ridley Scott’s famous commercial. I had previously worked with Jon Dovey on a Ridley Scott Commercial for British Airways. I then ‘stole’ the footage I shot, which I then used as ‘found footage’ and then scratched this into “Prisoners’. The act of scratching came about as I had edited this footage for about 6 or 9 monthds and I wasalways unhappy with the end result. It worked fine - but not potently enough. One night, about 3 oclock I became angry and cut the girl hurling the hammer into the television screen against the skinheads racist talk... I came out of my act and realised that this was how to cut the whole work. It’s not generally included in scratch anthologies because it is intensely serious and scratch had a humorous bent to it. C’est las Guerre.

Click here to see Prisoners.

Meanwhile due to the advent of Channel 4 and the appointment of Alan Fountain with Caroline Spry and Rod Stoneman then funded the workshop sector, which was primarily film based but struggling with the budgets, the sector was engaging in trying to break down traditional aesthetics, but being mostly film oriented and having to use video, the struggle became confused because it was primarily motivated by budgetary concerns. Nevertheless some amazing video works came out of the cracks of the period. Isaac Julien’s ‘Who Killed Colin Roach’ for instance.

I and the other members of Triple Vision then left Video Makers and due to Channel 4 funding managed to operate in a television company form until 1992. This was a fertile period as television documentaries on various subjects were produced but long-form narratives such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Bad Sister (1986) were also made completely on Video as opposed to film - as an artistic statement and exploration of that mediums suitability in the act of suspension of disbelief - or its absence due o the effects of the medium. Birmingham Film and Video Workshop made Out of Order in 1987 for £500,000 - an unheard of amount in the sector for a video production up until that point. It was also one of the first ‘films’ produced worldwide on video and then transferred at Moving Pictures to 35 mm for theatrical release.

And where may you ask was the representation of the ‘dominant artistic video’ form backed by the Arts Council ? Absolutely nowhere. Abroad many of us met up at festivals and our work, the work that was not celebrated in the UK by the Arts Council, was being celebrated everywhere but in the UK. Only amongst the film/video coterie that was in its Ivory Tower was there any sense that that was where the work was happening. We made many connections abroad, set up projects involving 18 groups through ten countries (the State of Europe which connected RTE, TRBF, Channel 4 and ZDF), had retrospectives at places like the Mill Valley FIlm Festival in California (Coppola and Lucas had just moved up there and set up a festival). I found muself one day outside of a screening three people who were musing on the change from film to video. As I listened it dawned on me that they were the directors of the three films that were screeing and they were smoking and talking nervously. They were called Jean, Jim and David. After a while I reslised that whilst they kidded me about my interest in video, they were actually Jean Jacques Bienix (Diva) Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law) and David Drummond (Defense of the Realm). I had a cigarette and proceeded to go back into the screning and realised the little funhny bloke next to me was the star of Down by Law, Roberto Begnini.

Meanwhile, a branch of the academy, barely recognised but too powerful for the academy to ignore, was publishing the American revolution in the form of John Wyver’s Illuminations Ghosts in the Machine commissioned by Channel 4’s arts commissioning editor Michael Kustow. However, this was not the English Academy, this was the vital, fast, speeding video that video audiences as far back as the Air and Acme Gallery shows held in 1980 were used to. The Americans had access to hardware and the British had a less well-endowed access. Chris Meigh Andrews, Alex Meigh, Dave Critchley and myself had organised a series of shows where the early works of Gary Hill and Bill Viola, John Sanborn and Kit Fitzgerald could be seen. Equally shows of the work of LVA were being seen in the US by exchange. I always had a principle to not put my own work in these shows seeing that as a corrupt act. Doh!

By 1984 the Americans had matured and Ghosts in the Machine was an 8 part series of mainly American Video Art. Countering this Triple Vision had been commissioned by Rod Stoneman and Alan Fountain at Channel 4 to make a series about UK video art entitled ‘On Video’. This was originally to be done by Luton 33 but somehow it hadn’t happened, so we received the phone call to come in and talk about it.

Click here to see On Video 1.

Click here to see On Video 2

Click here to see On Video 3 (90 mins)

Click here to see On Video 4: TV or not TV

Click here to see On Video 5: Statement of the Art

Two sixty minute programmes and one 90 minute programme were initially made and in contradistinction to Ghosts in the Machine, interviews filled the silence between video art works. The difference was context. Many artists work was shown including Jeremy Welsh, Cerith Wyn Evans and John Maybury.

Eventually by 1987 Channel 4 commissioned two more 90 minute programmes, ‘TV or not TV’ which was ‘On Video 4’ and ‘Statement of the Art’ which was in fact ‘On Video 5’ which also interviewed and showed the work of European Makers such as Dalibor Martinez and Robert Cahen and his excellent and ground breaking Just le Temps which rivaled anything Viola or Hill was doing with the aesthetics of Video.

At that time too, there was another television investigation which I directed in association with John Wyver called ‘In The Belly of the Beast’, which used Video Positive in Liverpool as a platform to discuss where video might be going. Ths programme was commissioned by Zanna Northen at Granada.

Click here to see 'In The Belly of the Beast'

By 1987 I had developed a good relationship with Complete Video (a high level commercial house) at a moment when digital media became available. I gained access to some of the worlds most advanced digital equipment and this allowed me to investigate the coming digital realm with works such as ‘The World Within Us’ and later when I became Artist in Residence with them, The Inevitability of Colour (CH4 and ACE) which went on to be premiered at the Bonn Bienalle and win some international awards (Montbeliard and Locarno) - ironically I had directed Channel 4’s On Video series and The World Within Us was commissioned by John Wyver’s, Illuminations for Series 2 of Ghosts of the Machine. Meanwhile Invisible Television had been made by Gorilla Tapes (or Vulture Video depending on what they felt that month), and shown on Channel 4.

Click here to see The World Within Us
Click here to see The Inevitability of Colour

There is much more to say, many details to add but from the earliest experiments by Fantasy Factory and CAT, Albany Video, West London Community Video, Oval Video, Vida, Gorilla Tapes, the Duvet Brothers and Triple Vision, an aesthetic of production grew that was distinct from the academy and film based understandings of early video artists who’s concerns were those traditionally evinced in painting and sculpture. Again, there is much to add and as this is intended to be inclusive of what happened I welcome anyone emailing me to add to this history - or challenge it.

It is my contention that the excitement and aesthetics and material experiments of this time were the seedlings of the digital. We were passing across a boundary. Through my relationship with Complete video I made the Object of Desire which was a multi-layered version of Inevitability of Colour - this was deeply digital in its concepts and constructs and aesthetic. The Americans were generating works that were slight and lightweight with an aesthetic traceable to disney on a lot of levels. They were direct and obvious - the UK works were of a culture that had been around for a long time and one not prepared to be so simplistic about artistic and aesthetic concerns and therefore not so grabbing in their visual form - yet, in relation to time passed they stand up more strongly than the American works, which have of course grabbed the historical record. On that basis it makes sense to organise screenings of the named works of the timer against what was going on in the UK to give context and allow the audience to reflect on just how good the British makers were, who have been forgotten or written out from history.

These early investigations were indicative of what was to become digitial media and embodied concepts that were in contradistinction to the modernist project of truth to materials and a growing dependence on the concept as being as important as the material.

SCREENINGS
The screenings could run for three weeks and the first block could be the Channel 4 On Video series, 1, 2 (both 60 mins) and 3 (90 mins) and also On Video 4, ‘ TV or not TV’ and on Video 5, ‘Statement of the Art’ and a series of discussions with contemporary curators and artists. Screenings could be in the evenings, but also with agreement with various colleges during the daytime.

For the second week of screenings I propose to invite the group that chose the work for the 1st National Independent Video Festival in 1981 to select work from the ’80’s, plus have a series of discussions with artists who were active at the time the works were made.

The last 5 screenings could be in the form of showing a well known international work from a particular year that may for instance have originated in the United States - say the Vasulkas The Art of Memory - and then it could be accompanied by several works that originated in the UK and Europe. The point being that the US artists had a full blown push from their own culture on why the work should be seen as world quality work - the British however had none of this due to the reasons mentioned above, yet I will seek to demonstrate that the UK works are at least, as good as, if not better than the work that obtained the publicity. The screenings could be accompanied by discussions with artists of the time and contemporary artists and curators.

A possible fourth week of screenings could seek to demonstrate the nature of the digital via the works that have been made since 1992 - these works will be selected by a group formed of those active making work and curating during this period.

Integration, Convergence and Reflection

2009-03-31T08:56:00.000-07:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings.

Any DP of calibre will have wanted to use a camera such as the Genesis, the F35 or 23, The D21 or the new Dalsa to Arri D3, but the available and ubiquitous and first camera of nearly the highest resolution, has been the Red One. From what I’ve seen of the F35, it has the credentials to create a film-like image. What I mean by this is the simple improvement in highlight handling, where the hot whites roll off and transform to what seems to be a gentle white – though I have seen some DP’s create bad whites with this camera. Come to that I’ve seen very good output from the red as well as very bad.

The Red has been more than sufficient to the task of introducing higher resolution imaging to the world and now it’s even used to gather footage for TV shows. I saw one being used (as a badge of quality) on a low budget show the other day. So the 4k high resolution image or at least the technology that allows this little seen level of detail has surfaced into the mind of the zeitgeist.

But as a friend of mine said to me – “I don’t understand what your research has go to do with convergence or the idea of pervasive media” (as if this were the main or indeed the only criteria of digital worth).

Pervasive Media as an outcome of ‘Convergence’ (in some quarters) is the low-resolution introduction of digital technologies via mobiles and in my mind is typified as the kind of technical development that might lead to the world of Spielberg’s Minority Report. ‘Hello Tom’ says an advertising display as Tom Cruises’ character walks past.

Delightful or oppressive, this can only happen if the world of art devotes itself to a research and development strategy around new technologies which it is prone to do. From Art comes commercial use. It’s always been the way that since art has gained a technological edge – from music concrete using reel to reel recorders as a source of sound materials to make art, then on into early video art, then computer and digital art, the commercial realm has benefited from the investigations of artists.

Pervasive media is a sign that convergence exists and also it is a sign of the beginnings of integration, that’s currently my name for the next technological stage. Our recent flirtation with convergence as the main act in town is now coming to an end. Convergence began around 1400 with the invention of the printing press, which to my mind was an act of integration of several realms that had persisted as separate for millennia. At various Media Institutes, freethinking professorial headmasters have created ‘sandpits’ for people to play in and generate connections between hand-held devices (one sometimes imagines these are born of a nostalgia derived from readings as children in the 50’s of 20’s and 30’s science fiction – wrist communicators, ray guns and the like). All of this energy is directed toward generating the use of software on various ‘implements’ – objects within this world that refer to another world, the data world.

In my own research I have been looking at creating intelligent environments with remote telematic ‘eventing’ probably derived from my own penchant for moments in shows like star trek where the crew goes into the hollo-deck. Another convergent/integrative investigation. Here though, my intent is to enter into the data realm, where there is a significant difference from bringing mysterious objects, which have a narrative life similar to a comic book hero’s mysterious findings on another world – Green Lantern’s ring and lantern for instance. The significant difference is that there will no longer be a need for separate objects – implements and tools.

So to return to my friend’s question, ‘what does high resolution have to do with convergence and pervasive media?’ the answer is simply that when everyone has accommodated themselves to the idea of a low-resolution devices, spaces or events, then they will need to bring in higher levels of veracity to the experience. And with resolution comes detail and with detail comes veracity – as someone said ‘God is in the detail’. Yes we have to understand the technologies that allow free-flow of data at a sufficient rate to enable ‘veracity’ to substitute for the low-res Barnum and Bailey effects enjoyed at the pervasive bleeding edge, but I’m here to apply the bandage, stop the flow of blood and take off the leeches which were never that useful anyway.

My task is not simply to give sufficient thought to the enabling of high resolution experience, it is to consider what that means before we do so. There are ethical, moral, social and theoretical issues in the introduction of the new and we no longer have time to consider this after the event.

My interest in high resolution imaging means I have to get into the ring with the big bad sludge monster that people interested in Pervasive Media, or low resolution are not having to deal with. Sometimes I feel like Mickie Rourke in ‘the Wrestler’. The Sludge Monster’ is ‘latency’ – that element in the universe that Newton identified as entropy or as having entropic qualities.

I’ll explain this in a moment. It surprises me that, of the pervasive institutes worldwide, few are integrating their research with others outside of the traditional and Renaissance form of the symposium, or a conference, article or paper. Today, every event occurring at any research institute should be broadcast via the web. Every research institute should gather online to listen to the findings of others.

Because research is framed within the academic model it is fundamentally isolationist. It has learned the buzzwords that government is pushing for, knowledge transfer etc, but it hasn’t learned the culture, mainly because the funding for all of this style of research is given to something akin to a medieval barnony which in itself encourages separateness and at its extreme, the siege mentality.

The solution is that the academy begins to dissolve itself through moving away from the use of text as its fundamental currency. It needs to embrace resolution as the solution. Resolution equals veracity of experience.

So, when my friend asked me what my research had to do with pervasive media enquiries I had to reflect on the question and this is what I thought: I’ve been looking at streaming data from and to remote telematic spaces – an example of this would be a ‘Star-Trek-like-hollo-deck’ that can correspond with other ‘hollo-decks’ (clubs in Tokyo and London for instance) - and I began to realize that we have had the technology to create events in different places at the same time for some time now, but we have been enamoured with an outmoded thought process – that the idea of convergence has been configured intellectually up until now as a world full of implements – which echoes our past experience (for instance the recent appearance of the Wii).

But the under-the bonnet-mathematics that’s powering the digital domain is qualitatively different from any maths that have gone before because it’s a viral and intelligent mathematics that is replacing a more passive mathematics – And the software, hardware and firmware should now be envisioned and designed as integrative - as the digital domain is now becoming.

A way to characterize what it actually now is, is to invert the notion of a world full of implements, where technologies grow together. From my point of view we are way past that point and the maths is configurable so that in fact the world as it stands can be real-time modelled into a 3D version held in what used to be called a computer but should now be called a ‘domain’.

Using ‘difference’ a computational technique - the space without people in as compared to the space in their absence - this then alone can become the root of a triggering system – organic gestures, movements, glances and speech can trigger events. We will no longer need a laptop or tower to deal with the digital domain that is becoming pervasive in a way we can barely now imagine – in fact it will not be pervasive, because that suggests a reality filled with implements – it will be integrative because the potential ‘modelled’ reality will overlay reality as it is.

Two issues will remain: Latency and Resolution. Latency is about how long you have to wait, given the speed of the system (which moves at light speed) and Resolution is about how big the individual has to make their instruction (gesture, speech etc). High Resolution is data heavy and will have an effect on latency – and vice versa. So, two cameras used not as optical devices, but as matrixing and triangulation devices, coupled with appropriate software can do this real time – right now with the technology we have. Integration is therefore the real-time modeling of the world in the digital domain.

Imagine the detail of that modeling using the F35...

Still Prisoners after all these years

2009-03-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Digital Metempsychosis

2009-03-05T03:06:00.000-08:00

For a thorough assessment of my research up until this moment, please see the last blog dated 8th February entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Click the title to go there.

In investigating HD technology and aesthetics I have had to examine the digital realm and try to understand how resolution is formed from a set of under-the-bonnet-technologies, this need has itself created an inevitable spill over into an investigation of the deeper construct of digital technology itself.

Necessarily, standard and current academic theoretical understandings have come into play and ideas like Remediation and Convergence have had their sway with me but I’ve always felt that these ways of looking into the subject are themselves boundaried by a set of limiting characteristics that have had their part in disguising the real nature of what is going on. I recently said in writing to a friend: 'We are investigating what we think is a hat and may later come to find out is a pair of shoes'.

I’ve been watching the development of digital innovations, from interactive telematic spaces to 3D printers and it seems to me that the paradigm change from web 2 to web 3 has already happened. In fact it’s bigger than that. The concept of numbering developments on the web is almost Victorian in its obsessive compulsive indexing and cataloguing of change. The 17th century Enlightenment project has had its day. Now we need different tools for a different terrain and it is called the Digital Domain.

We take stabs at understanding it and come up short because we’re using a language designed for something else to try to name it and it resists being named because it is substantially and qualitatively different from prior technologies.

The ‘Digital’ is a technology of the imagination, not the material realm. It is true it utilises some physical means – pathways and voltages and resistance and ohmage and optics etc. But they are the transportation system for the wavelet transform mathematics that power our current change of paradigm - and that mathematics was born 200 hundred years ago in a pre-Victorian age as an late-enlightenment gesture. We will of course develop new mathematics to do the rest of the job.

So I have come to the conclusion that the time of Convergence is nearly over and the time of Integration has begun.

Integration is fundamentally concerned with overcoming the idea of latency. Latency is the function within a system where nothing can be truly instantaneous. Of course – you can’t press a button in the UK and have an instantaneous event happen in Australia. Light and radio waves travel at a certain speed – not an infinite speed which is why the signal will have some latency.

Integration is about removing the gap – or at least creating the experience that there is no gap. Touch a telematic wall in Tokyo and your dance partner in Vancouver then touches your hand on their telematic wall and an event, an animation of a butterfly say, is generated on the wall in both spaces. What is important is that this cannot be instantaneous but it can be made to seem to be instantaneous.

I am in a sense making this up and in another sense I know that this technology can be achieved not only right now, but actually several years ago.

Taking another route to establishing the idea, think of Adobe CS4 which has Encore, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premier, After Effects etc in its package. Each programme is now designed to stimulate all the other programmes from their programme interface. The day will come when (As with Maya) it’s all there in the same programme interface. They will al become one. And not only that. The idea of distinct programmes will have to go. As will the idea of distinct national boundaries. That’s what the credit crunch was about. A backup in the system that rendered it as destructive as it was aiding us. Ivan Illich studied the idea of a system and realized that with health for instance, there is the idea of iatrogenesis. This is the function where allopathic health treatment cause as much illness as the cure. Don’t trust me on this. Look at the figures.

So the idea of the system per-se is bankrupt. It is a medieval view of the world where as Newton inherited, everything is supposed to work like a machine of finely manufactured wooden cogs. It has its limits and in this sort of wooden design, friction is the problem. To push the analogy, friction and latency are the same thing.

So ideas around web 3 and integration have to get beyond the remediated language that recognises latency as a problem.

How do we get beyond the apparent problem of latency ? Heisenburg spotted the problem of the observer. You can know the position but not the velocity. You can know the velocity but not the position. I can’t remember the name of the Indian Mathematician working with Nasa but this man proposes the idea of observing an experiment and creating change when the experiment is viewed at the same time in another location by another observer and comparing the results later. The comparison will then develop a Morse code of fluctuations that both ends can use at the time of the observation thus eliminating the time delay. They will have their Morse code reference book and be able to see what the communication is – plus or minus its probablility which is chartable.

It will not be long after that to travel from the telegraph to the web real time viewing of the image of another as we speak together – over vast distances. Earth to Mars, Earth to Andromeda. Etc. Distance will be eliminated as a problem of latency.

Ursula Le Guin wrote about this in the Dispossessed,a novel that discussed the benefits of an anarchist society as opposed to a capitalist society. Her Theory of Simultaneity always struck me as being on the button – this is to be distinguished from Einstein’s Relativity of Simultaneity as published in his Special Theory of Relativity. With Leguin, everything everywhere is happening simultaneously, it is the inhabitance of a shell of a self-conscious entity that is placed within the space-time continuum that generates the idea that there is the apparent reality of ‘sequence of events’ and therefore latency. Einstein didn’t see past this and didn’t imagine the nature of a self conscious entity outside of a space/time continuum. LeGuinn realised that the self-conscious entity is a product of space/time but has ‘essence’ within non space/time. Essence is like probability. We can chart it’s marks in other media (space/time) and therefore know it exists. By extension, in a realm where everything is different an object (or a subject) with personal boundaries means nothing in that dimension. Nor does space, nor does time.

Looked at like this we can re-formulate what latency might actually be. From within the space-time continuum it looks like time is taken to do things. From the point of view of Simultaneity it is apparent that the idea of ‘distance’ is the problem. In this case of course, were one able to inhabit the simultaneous dimension, there is no time and there is also no distance of course. So we have to re-invent our understanding of distance so that there is no duration in it. Duration is a product of space and is called time – and vice versa.

Have I lost you? The thing is these words are in space/time so I haven’t got a chance to relay this insight when the description itself is undermined by a language generated that is obverse to the understanding – suffice it to say many people know this about the world. Now, within the period of Integration we just have to work out the ‘physics’.

A last note on this – a Victorian parlour game posited the idea of the Flatlanders, two-dimensional beings who perceived a three dimensional sphere moving through their two dimensional world first as a dot, then as a growing circle, then as a shrinking circle, then finally a dot, before it disappeared, To know higher non space/time dimensions take this metaphor and realise that an experience of a further dimension using your current senses which are developed and tuned for this dimension does not work. All understandings are therefore relative and limited. However, we have to keep our minds open to possibilities.

If I’m right then it will become inevitable that worldwide, each person will be assigned a code to register their individual existence and everything that I described above will become an available future.

This concept will inevitably raise the shadow of a familiar dystopia for us: for where there are possibilities for freedom there are also possibilities for repression and control. If as I stated that everyone has a code, then the first image my mind goes to is a bar code tattooed on the arm which is reminiscent of the treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust.

However, this is not a necessary outcome. For a start we were all born with a gene that makes some of us stand up and rebel. Don’t forget, the holocaust was not conclusive, nor was Cambodia, nor was Rwanda – a lot of damage was done, but these events eventually stopped.

The code is a way in which wherever you are in space/time you have a co-ordinate and therefore you can be mapped. If you carry two codes on two devices, then you can then be triangulated and it is triangulation that affords a 3d mapping of the world and your place within it and is key to the telematic realisation of space. Move an arm in the real world and your virtual arm will also be seen to move. What it does in that virtual world is then a matter of triggers and events and things then happening in the real world.

Integration is that realisation and then also of course its transformation into the beginnings of what could be called Web4….

But ‘web this’ and ‘web that’ are for consumers and the credit crunch gave us a way of disassociating ourselves from the raping of the wealth of the world by a few brigands in the higher hills of the data realm (known as money). These guys only did what they were trained to do and we have to re-invent what we ask of each other and what the base lines of automatic ethics achieve for the human condition. A lot of people say this cannot be so, ‘people are always going to be like this’. They often site the behaviour of chimpanzees being our nearest relative and exhibiting behaviour like rape and murder and that this somehow comments upon us. But the lie in that is that chimpanzees are not our nearest relatives, the Bonobo monkey is and it exhibits the kind of behaviours that if reflected and amplified in us would enable us to generate ‘web 3’. As John Lennon said, I may be a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. One potent dreamer, infects the rest.

So we no longer need to characterise ourselves as murders, cheats, liers and worst of all, morality free consumers (it was getting very tiresome anyway). Instead we can begin to look into our future, which of course as post-consumers, we can be a part of making its description and realisation.

In terms of researching High Definition Imaging, everything above relates to this area. The question of veracity of experience opens directly into resolution because without enough resolution one is aware of the scenery and mechanisms that are used to construct the image or experience. We need resolution sufficient to the task at hand.

I believe that without funds I am fairly stuck though. My latest bid to the AHRC fell upon stony ground as I have to apply into a scheme that is not suited to Creative Research Fellows and I hope to get a hearing for this point of view – but that’s another story. I shall of course carry on my research in any way I can and I have a few projects that are happening within my portraiture series. The kind of invention I was describing above is on hold until I manage to get the funds to try to realise the beginnings of what I have described – and I maintain, everything I’ve described above is not only possible, most of it is happening anyway, and above all what I’ve described is probable within a reasonably short time.

Time and Resolution: experiments in high definition image making

2009-02-08T01:19:00.000-08:00

As an AHRC Creative Research Fellow at Bristol University my research is concerned with High Resolution Imaging. The operative word in my title is ‘Creative’. My fellowship was awarded partially on my argument that ‘my methodological contention is that technical investigations have to be performed in the medium itself, using the form to inquire into itself, to speak in its own language side by side with the written word.’ The article that follows is a synthesizing of the understandings I have derived through practical and creative acts during my first year of research into the High Resolution Domain.

KEYWORDS: High Definition, Commodification, the Gaze, Electronic Cinematography, Audience Engagement
There are a series of links to works at the end of this article.

INTRODUCTION
In September 2007 I took up an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship at the Department of Drama at Bristol University, having until that point, been a cinematographer and a occasional educator. My enquiry concerns whether increased resolution creates deeper engagement for an audience and also how that engagement functions - for instance, if engagement increases in relation to increased resolution: is this a quantative, or quantum increase? My enquiry is not scientific, it does not seek to weigh nor measure, instead I am trying to understand through a creative enquiry that utilises audience response. That response comes in different ways, sometimes by the inflection of a voice, sometimes by a pause in a description. It is, in the best sense, relative to my own understanding.

In trying to explain my research to an audience at a presentation at Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre recently I used this metaphor: at dusk you might notice an increased coloration in the red, amber and green traffic lights which seem more saturated than during the day. The physiological explanation is that at dusk your brain switches from using the cones to the rods in your eyes. The cones, developed to produce a greater response to colour, are less numerous and are less reactive to luminance, the rods are far greater in number and have developed to have greater response to light, but not to colour. As the brain switches between technologies, fluttering back and forth, you gain a heightened awareness of colour. If you take this idea and rethink it in terms of resolution, then it would seem that there is a similar boundary between what we used to think of as a standard image for television and what we are beginning to think of as the lower limits of high definition.

A question that arises is this: is there only one boundary in terms of resolution? What if there were a set of boundaries where the mind responds at greater levels of engagement to quanta of resolution? What if every so often as you go up the scale of definition you slip ever deeper into the ‘dream’ of what lies before you?

THE GENESIS OF AN IDEA
In 1992 I was engaged to make an installation for the Bonn Biennale which was the shooting of a dinner party from above and then it’s projection back on to a table, complete with tablecloth, 8 white plates and eight chairs. Some years later, in 2003 I showed this at various exhibitions shot at standard definition (720 x 576 pixels). There certainly was a degree of engagement by the audience with the piece, but I wondered if the blurry images were limiting the effectiveness of the piece. It bothered me greatly that the image was not clear - i.e. the prongs of the forks were indistinct as was the food. The more I showed the piece, the more I came to feel that greater engagement was possible with a greater clarity of image.

On entering my role as Research Fellow I immediately shot In Other People’s Skins on P2 Cameras which are notionally HD (960 x 540 pixels in resolution before uprezzing to either 1280 or 1920 formats).

The common HD format is 1920 x 1080 pixels. This is known as 2k resolution due to the numbers accumulating to approximately ‘2000’. This is in the common 16:9 aspect ratio – 16 units horizontally by 9 units vertically. Another form of 2k is 2048 x 1024 pixels – this is the cinema form. 1280 x 720 is more common as an HD format in America – having less data, it is easier to stream this form for broadcast. When TV’s say ‘HD ready’, the resolution is generally 1280 x 720 pixels.

I created a dinner party for twelve people (thus invoking the Last Supper) and shot 5 different dinner parties, Asian, Indian, Western, African and first century Arabic. I carried out extensive tests with compression and decompression settings, in relation to projector set-up and then graded the work through projector as opposed to monitor, and so created the most accurate colour and resolution representation of the image for the public forum.

I contacted 7 cathedrals and then obtained an Arts Council award. During the 15 week tour around 50,000 of the 150,000 people that visited those cathedrals sat down at the installation.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON AUDIENCE RESPONSE
I made a point of viewing the installation anonymously and I noticed that people were ready to play, to move plates around, to mime the clashing of glasses between virtual guests. I noticed that whether the audience was old or young, people were prepared to join in: that babies placed on the table were fascinated by what was happening beneath them; that strangers conversed as if they were at a real dinner party, that soon the conversation turned to ‘art’ and what defined it for today.

I listened as some people said that they were truly confused about what was real and what was not and they were enjoying this confusion. I noticed that some people reached for a virtual plate expecting it to feel real. Some people said that the strangest feeling they’d had was when the virtual guest did something they were not expecting, that it was similar to what they imagined would be the feeling of protoplasmic hands thrusting out of their stomach.

So the installation immediately engaged the audience in a performative act which raised the following question: Was it the installation that was creating the main act of engagement and consequently producing subsequent performative acts, or was it the addition of higher resolution to the concept? The prior version was 720 x 576 pixels and this ‘HD’ version was 960 x 540 pixels.

RESOLUTION, PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMATOGRAPHY
We understand that new mediums tend to be thought of in terms of preceding media for a time, before we recognize the ‘true’ characteristics of the new medium, which then gives rise to a new aesthetic impetus that makes the new medium ‘whole’. From then on the new medium can be explored in its own terms, before it too re-mediates whatever comes next. But of course, at a certain point, new mediums have the capacity of reaching back and interrelating with prior media. In The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Sobchack,1992) Vivian Sobchack asserts that:

‘The cinematic qualitatively transforms and converts the photographic through a materiality that not only claims the world and others as objects for vision but also signifies its bodily agency, intentionality and subjectivity’.

Conversely, with regard to composition, movement of camera, the movement of objects or subjects within frame and the placement of light and illumination, it is my experience that cinematography has a photographic element. As I compose, execute and listen to the film whirring frame by frame through the gate, within the stream of frames in every shot, I attempt to achieve at least one moment or frame that is photographic in nature. The overall stream is cinematographic, but I have become convinced that to achieve truly great cinematography one has to unleash the potential of one frame in every shot that has the specific quality of a photograph. This is not particular to my practice as many notable cinematographers, amongst them Vitorrio Storarro and Conrad Hall, have considered the relationship between cinematography and photography from a cinematographic standpoint. The difference in the photographic frame occurring within a flow of frames as opposed to being created as a photographic act makes it the epitome of and also the evocation of the cinematic. As the film plays, the audience, at some deep level, recognises this moment and this re-cognition will then place the entire flow of images into a deeper level of availability and therefore allow deeper engagement by the audience. For me, this is a guiding thought in my practice of Electronic Cinematography, which on a material level has similarities with its predecessor. For instance, in Photo Chemical origination of the image there is the existence of a latent image prior to development and this is paralleled in the Electronic rendition (or development) of data in raw image processing.

THE CREATION OF WORK WITH REGARD TO THE DEVELOPING AESTHETIC OF THE MEDIUM
With the above in mind I proceeded to devise six new works that explored the issues as I was beginning to see them. This series of works had two trajectories: One set, In Re Ansel Adams, Portraits of Glastonbury Tor, and Un Tempo, Una Volta, was to explore the possibility of re-imagining that which was already well known to the popular psyche and somehow in using the new medium, say something new about the subject or present it in a way that utilised the technology and the aesthetic that I was coming to understand. The other set, Dance Floor, Water Table and The Unfurling, was conceived to try to explore audience performativity from working with the virtual and the real as I had in In Other People’s Skins.

In both trajectories there were deviations from the basic rules I had set myself and also during the first six months of the award I was heavily affected by In Other People’s Skins: this work had been successful in intent and outcome and that in itself shakes ones artistic foundations.

I left out a visitors book during the tour and due to the large attendance there were many comments that were potent in encouraging me to pursue my research path. The point of quoting these and others within this article is to relate my intention and concerns with the outcome, which in itself indicates to me my next trajectory:

‘Wonderfully creative - strange to change gender and race all in one evening.’

‘It's refreshing that this exhibition encourages and enables us to communicate with each other. A wonderful experience.’

‘Extraordinary. The most imaginative and socially interactive piece of modern art I've seen.’

‘A fascinating take on human life. A reminder that we are all the same.’

I had made work that had won plaudits from the audience before - but never on this scale, there were pages of positive comments from the tour and this was to cause me to continuously re-evaluate every stage of the making of the 6 new pieces - both consciously and unconsciously - sometimes I dreamed new elements of the work I was to make and then modified the work I actually made according to the dream.

The other thing to say about both trajectories of work is that they were intimately bound together in intent from artist to audience: through the making and exhibiting of In Other People’s Skins, I’d become aware of the power of the artist to affect the viewer if they understand the authority that the audience gives the artist in the agreement to view the work. That is a transfer of control and influence at one level; it is the giving of consent and this act of choice by the viewer, if the artist is truly aware of what the transaction means, represents all that the artist needs to make and exhibit the work in a successful way. By ‘successful’ I mean here to fulfill the bargain the artist has entered into with the audience - to deliver some element of meaning or significance (given the life understanding of the artist) through whatever tactics and strategy the artist has engaged in. ‘Bargain’ contains the notion of an increase of benefit for all involved.

THE PROCESS OF ORIGINATION AND STRATEGIES WITHIN THE WORK
The idea behind the first set of three of the six new pieces derived from a moment in 1988 when Alan Yentob, (then controller of BBC2), had left a 10 minute gap In his scheduling of Thursday nights and had asked for a series of shorts that filled the gap. Building Sights was the answer: An ‘interesting presenter’ would be taken to a notable architectural site and hopefully some interesting television chemistry happen. I worked on three series and every director was avoiding The Lloyds Building – the poisoned chalice because it had already been shot far too often. What would one have to say anew about this building? I was fortunate enough to have Michael Craig-Martin to work with and his relationship with Richard Rogers’ building was indeed interesting, but it struck me that the images that I was to make should also be interesting and enlightening. Given that practically every angle of the building had been photographed I introduced steadycam shots, dolly shots and hung a crane from the 13th story with a remote head – all of this new to television at that time – in a search to create sequences of movement that would speak about and evoke for the viewing audience the way the space was organized in the building. So it was this process of invention and renewal that struck a deep chord within and it was this idea that stayed with me: to look at the familiar and reflect upon the idea that was discussed by Jean Baurdillard in The Transparency of Evil (Baudrillard, 1993):

‘It is often said that the West’s great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the commodity. That great undertaking will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world – it’s cosmopolitan spectacularisation, its transformation into images, its semiological organization.’

In this attempt I would try to achieve a renewal of the location or image, flush out whether or not there is an aesthetic that accompanies the form, and is not simply the same aesthetic as obtained with previous and similar technologies.

My challenge in making In Re Ansel Adams, Un Tempo, Una Volta and Portraits of Glastonbury Tor was not only to re-present these locations but also develop the art that was possible in refreshing the image for the audience via the potential developing aesthetic of HD.

IN RE ANSEL ADAMS
With In Re Ansel Adams, the famous American photographer used high resolution black and white photography to propose the image so that it could be immediately received with visual impact.

Given that I was using a cinematographic form I had to adopt a different strategy:
When the image begins there are only incandescent dancing pixels bathing the exhibition space in a luminosity and play of light, accompanied by the sound which was constructed to immerse the audience as if they were deep within the waterfall and pull back in perspective until the huge Yosemite valley was revealed on the 16 x 9 foot screen as a deep thunderous roaring, potently detailed image. I then drained the colour to Black and White, thus connecting my work with Adam’s original and creating a moment of recognition for the audience.

Here, the active element is the ‘reveal’. The audience is continuously asked the question: What are we looking at? As the reveal develops it sees more and more of the image, which it recognizes, but the scale of display then overcomes the problem solving of intellectual recognition, to give way to its pleasure.

The question that arises for the artist is: does all of this manufacturing fall away for the audience until only the matter of ‘art’ is revealed, in a similar way to that achieved by Adams? Has 70 years of familiarity with the image been washed away so that another artist - myself in this case - may achieve some kind of transmission or communication with the audience?

Go to: http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/NEINRE.htm then click ‘see video’ to watch a low resolution version of this work.

PORTRAITS OF GLASTONBURY TOR
I then began working on Portraits of Glastonbury Tor. Using ideas related by John Berger in Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972), that of looking at the context of the production of art and artifacts and how clothes, location and objects within frame delineate the social standing of the subject or something that was of import to the subject. I also made reference to 20th century cinematography (the photo-chemical capture of motion and all that that implied) and 21st century electronic cinematography (the electronic capture of motion and all that that implied).

Outside of the technical imperatives to make this work there is a tradition in photography of the photographic series, which displays anthropological undertones, as well as those of the circus sideshow. People like August Sanders, Edward S Curtiss, Walker Evans, Dianne Arbus and even Robert Mapplethorpe have lined up an array of their contemporaries or social equivalents to display a cross-section of humanity and humanities concerns.

I began to prepare to shoot Portraits of Glastonbury Tor and I knew that I had to re-present this tradition of the documentation of the self in a different way. The reference became 16th-18th century portraiture where what the subject wore, held, or sat upon said something about them. In this case the Tor was also the subject of the work so the project would therefore include an element of landscape. Another reference I wanted to use was that of the long exposure times of early photography. I therefore asked my subjects to walk in to frame and hold their pose for one minute.

With the people from around Glastonbury, the gravedigger, the farmer, publisher, osteopath, priest, dressmaker, chip-shop owner, Zen Buddhist monk, window cleaner, special needs worker, this created a strong integration process with the community.

I then arranged for an exhibition at the Somerset Rural Life Museum inside the 14th Century barn cleared of centuries of rural tools leaving only a cider press at one end and a haywain at the other. I commissioned a 16 foot by 9 foot screen to show the piece with the subjects life-size so that the viewer might scrutinize what they were shortly to realize was not a photograph, though it had photographic detail – there were little moving figures on the distant Tor. I also showed this work at the Wickham Theatre and Windows 204 in Bristol and on a small back projection screen at Gallery Scarabocchio in Venice.

UN TEMPO, UNA VOLTA
With the third piece in the set, Un Tempo, Una Volta (Once Upon a Time) and having visited Venice a year before, I began to imagine a series of shots of some duration that did not show water, canals, sunsets, old buildings, tourists, gondoliers etc. But it was only when I realised I must free myself from simply doing the converse to expectation that the glimmer of an idea that was potent entered my mind. I began to ‘know’ that we should be able to hear the sound of water and not see it. I also began to ‘know’ that a boat should be present but we should not be able to see that either. I wanted to see the underside of Venice, the bit that’s always there, but that few people, except those that work there, actually see. I began to think that builders, firemen, ambulance-men and dockers might all see something special as they travel the canals.

Through this thought process it dawned on me that I should also create a Portrait project of this area too. The camera stays still reading the world, like a mobile scanner, in extreme high definition. That in effect is my research - how resolution interrelates with time. At this moment it began to occur to me that there is a relationship between higher resolutions of representation and the amount of time the attention is taken with perusing what has been mediated by the interface itself. If you look directly, then that is the experience you get - you and it. If you look via a medium, film, video, a telescope, a ride on a helter-skelter, that’s the elemental resource that mediates that gaze. What if that gaze were then returned ?

I organised a visit to Venice and set out to find people for a seventh piece that I had decided to make, as Portraits of Glastonbury Tor had revealed more than I had hoped for and itself demanded its own continuance in some form from me. This work was 1Ritratti di Cannaregio (Portraits of Cannaregio), set in a district where ordinary people live to the north of Venice where we were working. At the same time for Un Tempo, I met the boatman and sketched out a route and then on the day of the shoot took some silk banners to several of the bridges so that some of our helpers could drop them over at the appropriate moment so that they would brush across the camera lens and create a field of colour. This again was a device to interrupt the image or sensation the audience would be having, that of being mesmerized, and the interruption would be delightful: a field of sumptuous colour.

Friday evening at 7.40pm, when the footage had finished rendering, we took the projector we’d brought with us to the Gallery Scarabocchio and arranged for the exhibition to start at 8 p.m. When the covering board came off the window and the images of Portraits of Cannaregio fell upon one of the white banners now arranged as a screen for back projection, I could see around 60 Venetian faces waiting and smiling with surprise as they saw their own neighborhood and neighbors in front of them.

Outside of the gallery, Scarabocchio had set up a round of parmesan cheese and bottles of Prosecco (when in Venice…). On the bridge people were sitting and laughing with delight as familiar faces came and went. Yes it was in 4k resolution but shown at 1k and yes resolution was important, but more important was the representation of their own world through different, yet familiar eyes. Later I showed Un Tempo, Una Volta, In Re Ansel Adams and Portraits of the Tor. I again showed Portraits of Cannaregio and finally Portraits of the Tor was again requested.

This also happened at the exhibition of Portraits of the Tor at the Rural Life Museum in Somerset – the request by one community to see the world of other communities, which is why I shall go on and collect other ‘Portraits’.

Audience Comments on the first three works from visitors books at the exhibitions (including comments on Portraits of Cannaregio):

‘Mesmerising subliminal narratives; beautiful, haunting, informative and engaging.’

‘This is new - it redefines the portrait as a crossover between the static image and its limitations and the elements of time in a portrait. The biker is the most fascinating in his stillness as there is doubt about whether the image is live or frozen time. This piece asks a lot of questions about our perception and has given me lots of ideas for photography. Exceptional in a sea of plagiarism.’

‘An exceptional work which questions traditional portraiture with the minute discomfort of posing. The HD resolution demands our attention - detail becomes incisive - excellent.’

‘Mesmerising and curiously powerful. The way in which the angle of the screen upset my visual expectations of moving mages and films was particularly challenging.’

THE SECOND SET OF WORKS

The second trajectory of work was comprised of the following pieces: The Unfurling, Dance Floor and Water Table. I began to call upon the experiences I had had with In Other People’s Skins around the recognition of what new aesthetic might be developing in relation to the demonstration of and the dialogue between the virtual and the real.

In making this set of new works I wanted the audience to receive the work with a degree of expectation that the work will do something other than either entertain them, or simply offer them the ‘conceptual art experience’ - where a concept is equal to or dominant to the material elements of the work, where receipt of understanding of the elements of the jigsaw of the conception allowed people to leave the exhibition in tact. I wanted to deliver a third thing: that should the audience enter into an agreement with me, I would create sufficient space for them to intercede and create meaning themselves and in so doing understand something new about resolution which would allow them to leave the exhibition increased.

I found myself doing things which tried to upset conceptual work but also that of standard entertainment and that in itself became a platform for possible change. I felt I needed to place the audience where they were not sure of what the outcome of watching the work was, yet at the same time they would feel confident that whatever happened, it would be beneficial to them.

Using our tendencies towards assumption, expectation, assertion, ratiocination and then re-ordering the criteria, the parameters of how people read the space they are in and the work they apprehend, I tried to re-discover the simple strategies that I used in In Other People’s Skins - like the act of shooting an object and then projecting it back on to itself in a changed way.

One of the traditions I found myself calling upon was that of tableaux vivant (Paz, 2004):

‘originated as medieval liturgical dramas when a mass ended in a short, dramatic series or tableaux.’

Danielle Paz goes on to quote Mary Chapman (Chapman, 1992):

‘Although its emblematic and allegorical characteristics recall medieval drama, the “tableau” emerged as a true art form on the Continent and in England in the eighteenth century.’

This tradition finally finds its contemporary mode in places like the Ramblas in Barcelona or Milsom Street in Bath. Performers stand on pedestals and hold a pose. People pay to be startled and in turn delighted. In tableau vivant, the audience is aware that people are performing by holding the pose but might break it unexpectedly and there is delight to be had in this surprise. Later, a Grand Guignol tradition springs up to suggest that waxworks dummies might come to life. The power and possibility of this coming-to-life of the virtual is what I was interested in discovering in these next three works.

THE UNFURLING
In terms of the exposition of The Unfurling, in a preliminary test a year before, I found my daughter asleep on a rock and then in editing the footage slowed and stretched the 15 second period of her waking into 8 minutes.

When I was about to shoot the new work it seemed apposite to think in terms of High Speed HD capture so that each moment (at 1000 frames per second) would be unveiled in high definition. Some of Bill Viola’s work is captured at high speed on film or video - for instance in both Emergence (Viola, 2002), shot underwater, a man jumps in and sinks out of frame in extreme slow motion and in Ocean Without a Shore (Viola, 2007), people walk slowly to camera in black and white from beyond the real world and pass through an invisible watery barrier into colour and the real world before returning to the monochrome world) - in both of these pieces the clarity achieved though high speed, makes certain qualities that are not present in real time available to the audience.

Bill Viola and many early video artists, like Robert Cahen and Dalibor Martinez, went beyond this simple act and took ‘the photographic moment’ and extended its timeline so that it might be witnessed at leisure - and this witnessing by the audience produced in some cases, the awe of the expansive gesture as characterised in the work of Ansel Adams. But this potential spectacularising of the gaze, can be seen as problematic because it too can become a commodity when viewed from within a Situationist viewpoint, (De Board, 1967):

‘The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective’.

As a counter measure towards what might be seen as an over-expansive and gestural position, in Regarding the pain of Others (Sontag, 2003) Susan Sontag discusses some notions around spectacularising the gaze, in this case specifically of the viewing of suffering:

‘To speak of reality as becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment – that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of ‘the modern’, and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, un-seriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.’

Her specific point about refuting the notion of spectacularising the gaze through viewing suffering is useful in terms of the concern as a whole because at the centre of the concern is the central issue as identified by Sontag as she goes on to elaborate:

‘Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity.’

So the artist in society has to go beyond the fear that their audience might be incapable of sincerity or have a belief that their artists might be incapable of sincerity and simply pursue their intuition about what is important when trying to make art. This noticing of the gaze in the works of Viola, Cahen or Martinez, allows us past the spectacular to what critics of Viola might see as the ‘easy strategy’ of evoking the numinous present in every audience member. ‘Easy’ in the sense of ‘pulling the strings of the audience’. But evoking the numinous is not ‘easy’, it is instead an act of skill.

I prefer Plato’s use of the root of the idea, that of ‘nous’, where knowing is intuitive and prior to the act of ratiocination. I like the possibility that such an idea has crept into the language of the average person via the Cockney dialect – the idea of ‘nous’ or common sense. Etymologically speaking, the word nous appends from the Greek word, numen, or ‘to nod’ – I value the idea that rather than needing cultural helpers to understand a work or an act of art, that the audience simply nods in accord because it ‘gets the point’ - and from getting the point it can plunge further into the potential resonances of the work.

For me, making and exhibiting images as art is a revolutionary act against a system of approaching art that seeks to dis-empower the image and art itself. I use the word revolutionary in terms of a knowledge of ‘the spiritually essential’. Notions of authenticity of experience resonate for me when making art and I have a deep conviction that, like a shaman making a talisman, I as the ‘artist’ can infuse the artwork, primarily by removing my own set of neuroses from the work itself. If I can do this successfully, then I also manage to create enough space within the receiving of the work by an audience, that empowers that audience to become creative and active in dealing with the ideas within the work.

In the end, for The Unfurling I found myself liking the disturbance to the surface of the image created by shooting at 120 frames per second, then slowing it down more in post-production and then blowing the image up for projection. By presenting the changing image in steps, this distorts the surface of the image in a way that I prefer to the smooth rendition that would be obtained at 1000 fps. Arguably ‘seamlessness’ is a form of disguise and by now I was committed to getting rid of sleight of hand in relation to delivering work to the audience. As I worked through the creative process, I was beginning to face my own set of ‘givens’, my own set of previously unexamined beliefs about what matters and what does not matter in making art.

I used the 16 foot by 9 foot screen hung at a diagonal angle and suspended above the audience at the Wickham Theatre at the Drama Department at Bristol. The audience was invited to wander around the space, under or around the screen and see the ‘cinematic display’ out of context. There were no chairs, no passive seating space available – but there was a soft cushioned space that they could lie on to rest as they looked up at the huge image. This for me was not a passive space. It asked the audience to leave behind any fear that might have them not touch the work in some manner. For me, this meant leaving behind the inability to join in. Also this was a reflective surface, which also helped in a ‘shimmering of the image’. This was a re-presentation of the idea of viewing which kept the audience out of the passive state yet enabled a deeper engagement. They were surrounded by the slowed-down soundtrack; the text that the voice spoke was concerned with ideas around unfoldment and birth of consciousness – it was therefore a creation myth within a creation piece.

Some audience comments collected from visitors books, from various exhibitions of the work:

‘This work gets the viewer to look at something very ordinary in a different way. In particular I liked the way the film showed the balance of movements, that for every shift in one part of the body we must move another to compensate.’

‘Absolutely beautiful, mesmerising. I could watch it for hours. The architecture of the body and its movement in time and space becomes miraculous in this work.’

‘Aaah - I see the world as hyper-real. The grass feels as though it might crunch under my feet.’

DANCE FLOOR
I made tests for both Dance Floor and Water Table in standard definition. Dance Floor shares some of performative elements with The Unfurling; Water Table shares some with In Other People’s Skins.

I showed Dance Floor at the Phoenix Project in Glastonbury. As people entered they saw a rectangular platform raised 12 inches above the ground. This surrounded an image that was projected from above, on to the floor. I placed some 50 old and worn shoes around the space – I felt the need to create a sculptural element that works with the light and ephemera of the projected work. The exhibition space was bathed in a slow rumbling sound. As the audience proceeded into the room several people had already stopped around the rectangular well in which the flickering light of movement could be seen. Coming to the edge of the well the audience could see that beneath them, two life size performers were dancing together in extreme slow motion. People said that as they stood above the projection they felt like they were falling in to it and stepped back – the experience was vertiginous, yet the rostra was only 9 inches deep. Initially people stood around the well, eventually, some of the audience stepped down and danced upon the projection. People remarked that the image displayed a grace of movement that was missing from their ordinary apprehension of dance – they found themselves mesmerized by the movement and stayed for quite long periods just gazing down into the well – some obviously were bold enough to join in.

The words ‘mesmerized’ or ‘mesmerizing’ return again and again when people describe how high resolution images affect them.

WATER TABLE
As an installation Water Table is an extension  of In Other People’s Skins in terms of the recognition that people enjoy being seated around a table and trying to touch something that in real terms does not exist. There is a reference here to Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel The Invention of Morel (Casares, 1940). An escaped prisoner comes to an Island where he finds he cannot communicate with or touch the inhabitants. The explanation is that he is witnessing a 3 dimensional recording of a visit by travelers to the island the year previously. When he learns this he still remains in love with one of the virtual inhabitants despite the evidence of his common sense that what is in front of him does not truly exist.

In Other People’s Skins was punctuated with images of water, earth, fire etc to interrupt the audience’s belief in the table as being real. Of course the table itself was a real table and the image of the dinner party had a certain reality to it and people certainly believed they were sitting down with a virtual rendition of both these ideas. So with The Water Table I wanted to abandon image upon reality (table upon table) and utilize the actual table’s function, of an object to sit around and utilize for various communal acts, but replace its obvious reality with another.

I placed a white tablecloth as the screen on the table and eight chairs which were an invitation for the audience to sit. On the table itself I placed pebbles gathered at various beaches in Cornwall, Turkey and California (for variation). My intention was that this element would provide a sculptural dimension as with the plates in the dinner party or the shoes with Dance Floor. This gave the audience focus and there was then performative play with the placement of pebbles on the image and in obvious piles, but one or two people removed them and placed them on the floor between the table and the entrance as an indicator or pathway to the work. It interests me to work both with the virtual and real elements in the same installation as a means of bridging the audience’s connectedness with the work.

THE DEVELOPING AESTHETIC OF HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGING - SOME EARLY PROPOSITIONS
In all of the above there is the continuous issue that Benjamin raised in his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, between the virtual and the real: Can that which is a reproduction hold the aura of the original? It has always been of interest to me that when the electricity is turned off, so my works disappear, only to exist as a memory. But it is also important to me, that there is no conceptual dominance and that there is a relationship to traditional aesthetic and material concerns – even if the material is removed. Apart from the props, which, of themselves are replaceable and not integral to the work, that which has relevance has also been removed.

The wonderful thing about the digital is that it is not ‘original’. Even works created within the arena of code are simulacra. That which is displayed is only ever a representation of data flow. So the notion of aura residing within a material work of art, may only ever have been related to a world where ‘things’ mattered.

After a year and the completion of the first third of my enquiry I can formulate some of the thoughts I have on the effect of increased resolution as a set of aphorisms. I’m very aware that what I’m about to write raises a lot of complex issues which I will have to address later in the research. I feel however that it is my role to reveal and expose these issues. I’m using this form because of the tentative nature of my thoughts at this time:

Resolution equals time
Attention is energy
Engagement is an active property within the act of the gaze
Within engagement, time ceases
The gaze is resolution and is also time, as time equals resolution

To put the above simply: when the resolution of a displayed image is increased then there is more detail for the gaze to scrutinize. The gaze could be said to be an ocular expenditure of energy which rises or falls to meet its challenge - in that sense it has similar characteristics to wavelet transforms in that they intelligently examine the data they are to deal with and then appropriately deal with them. (Fourier’s Wavelet Transforms are to my mind the underpinning mathematics that enable the entirety of the digital realm to perform as it does).

In expending energy, in concentrating, discriminating, ratiocinating and utilising all the separate factors that usually constitute self as an intellectualizing entity, in the act of gazing, the self is momentarily subsumed and becomes that emission of energy and effectively suspended whilst one’s energy is focused upon an image, and in that focusing one becomes the image – because at that moment form and content are one.

There are three issues here:

a) there is the use of language in describing the actions of concentration which is currently derived from photography: ‘to focus’ and from that the larger idea (with a nod to Chomsky), that throughout history and the development of the self, the language of our most recent technology is utilized to describe the actions of consciousness. For instance, the expression to ‘gather ones attention’ could be attributed to the simple act of finding foodstuffs and medicines from the land.

b) The second issue is the notion of the image. Just what is an image after you strip away all that we collectively agree the image is? Notionally it is some form of inscription in a medium (Charcoal on paper, oil on canvas, media on media, etc). But there are images in the mind - pictures - and also less 'material' ideas of images: concepts. Duchamp championed the notion of the value of the concept above its material manifestation. Strip away the material and all that is left is immaterial - just as it is in the digital realm.

c) The third issue is whether or not it is worth thinking of the performative in this act - the response of self to the engagement with greater detail is a worthy level to analyze the act. Of course performativity happens - but how important is it when compared to the play of energy of mind across an image, whether two or three-dimensional?

In all of this I have to fictionalise these elements so that I may form a description of the terrain so that it might be discussed and thought about and reflected upon. I have developed the simile that there is a surface or interface where image meets gaze and gaze meets image - as if there was an exchange to be had between both. There is, but it is displaced by time. The act of shooting is at one time and the act of displaying is at another.

The iconography of the image, the exploration of a place seen many times seems to be in tact, yet I did feel that generally the image was made afresh with the accompanying benefit that the special-ness of the individual self can be maintained against the flow of images.

MY CURRENT UNDERSTANDING
One’s own work sits within a wider context of one’s own understanding of the world. To my mind the development of the self at the beginning of the 21st century is conflicted: on one level one could propose that it is further individualized than, for example, an Egyptian slave of the second century BCE. Arguably, the 21st century self has more power through the democratic order and therefore is less likely to submit its self-hood to the overall community. However, the contemporary self has taken to representing itself through an avatar, both telematically - myspace and face-book require a description of self as a collection of likes and dislikes and commodity choices which say ‘I am this’ because I have these brand loyalties' - but also via a status representation in real life through actual purchase of cultural elements that have 'value' amongst peers. The outer self pervades the inner self. If we transmit our self-image and avatar telematically from London to Beijing via the Internet, then simultaneously we transmit the outside world in terms of choices and allegiances equally as far inside - to an inner Beijing.

Given this conviction and the tentative results of the work, these are building blocks for my investigation into the nature of the mediated image, mediated through resolution. A basic question arises: Why does an image with many times less resolution than our optical system have an effect on us when an object directly perceived may have none?

LAST THOUGHTS

At the beginning of my work it seemed to me that High Definition should not be conceived so much as an image format, but rather a portal, a doorway through which we might look and see things differently. It is a doorway that enables a look into the future because it demonstrates and reflects back to us our current physiology and psychology. If technology should be ‘appropriate’ in that it arises through our imaginings (through our science fiction writers) and then manifests when it is needed, then High-resolution imaging is indeed a reflection of our state because it has become technically possible and therefore appropriate at this time.

For many years it’s been my conviction that this effect can be demonstrably countered by the individual who will engage with the process of manufacture such that the transmission of idea to the audience is reflective of and understands the global image condition. The community can also potentially be untouched within the global. It has long prolonged its resources for maintaining its authenticity against the deadening influences of late capitalism. Artists could utilize this innate strength to reinvent their own practice and go out of their own community and into others to formulate fresh and real responses in their art. This is the way that Un Tempo, Una Volta and Portraits of Cannaregio came into being and when returning with the fruits of that exchange it has become clear to me why staging is important in bringing back that exchange to my own community. Staging is an element within context and context clarifies meaning. My art is about speaking directly to the viewer, in a way that is untainted by ratiocination – because this is an intellectual function that intercedes and if you will allow me the conceit, lessens the ‘resolution’ of the exchange. It seems to me that global image culture is of ‘low resolution’ and that individual or communal acts can be at a ‘higher resolution’.

At this point in my fellowship, the study of increased resolution within image making is about revealing higher levels of clarity - about seeing more clearly, about creating the possibility of a gaze that is energetic and liberating and that is emblematic of the paradigm that is upon us. Art that works for the individual mind and psyche in an empowering rather than deadening or alienating way, can reveal what we are about to know about the world prior to the coming of a set of prescriptive thoughts – and that glimpse is then of an incoming paradigm. In catching this glimpse of the paradigm within which we think, we can perceive its limitations, an act which in itself generates the force that dissolves that paradigm and allows the new paradigm to grow.

References:

Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean (1993) The Transparency of Evil, Verso
Benjamin, Walter (1936), ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
Casares, Adolfo Bioy (1940) The Invention of Morel, Editorial Losada, Argentina
Chapman, Mary (1992), Living pictures, Women and Tableaux Vivants in Nineteenth Century American Fiction and Culture, Cornell University
DeBoard, Guy, (1967) The Society of the Spectacle, Buchat-Castel
Paz, Danielle, (2004) ‘Tableau Vivant’, Theories of Media, Unversity of Chicago
Sobchack, Vivian (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton University Press
Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the pain of Others, Picador

Videography/Installations - links to excerpts

In Other People’s Skins
In Re Ansel Adams
Portraits of Glastonbury Tor
Un Tempo, Una Volta
Dance Floor
Water Table
The Unfurling
Ritratti di Cannaregio (Portraits of Cannaregio)

1 Ritratti di Cannaregio (Portraits of Cannaregio), had begun to extend the development of the ideas first found in Portraits of Glastonbury Tor, so I next shot Portraits of the Somerset Carnivals in late Autumn 2008 and I am due to shoot Portraits of Bristol University’s Centenary and Portraits of London in May 2009 and exhibit these in the Autumn. I now hope to develop electronic motion picture portraiture before pushing further to an examination of the cinematic moment within high Definition Aesthetics.

Warfare is a market condition of late Capitalism

2009-01-25T04:21:00.000-08:00

The title above is nothing at all to do with High Definition but everything to do with High Resolution. To resolve highly is the thing - to resolve to understand. As I go on with my research it spreads out into everything I look at. Somehow the metaphor of the terms used, expands. In using the image of the child above there is a degree of shame. I have read Susan Sontags 'Regarding the Pain of Others' and I understand that the use of this image is complex. If you look at the images I use at the start of these blogs you'll generally see a humorous use - for instance, isn't that 'Brains' from Thunderbirds about two blogs back, looking a bit worse for wear after a night out? Doesn't that use of that image make the use of the image above disrespectful – maybe this is why shame comes into the picture? But regardless I feel the image is relevant, but the explanation of its use is complex.

The image will prompt many different responses in many different individuals - mostly emotional. There has always been shock in the use of an image like this and that's one of the primary reasons for using it - why should any child die in any war - ever? And, in a most recent conflict, somehow army apologists on British news have excused this act and explained it away as if 'it is necessary' or worse, that it is simply the end result of the heinous nature of the enemy they oppose. In other words, they blame the mothers and fathers of those very children that have been killed as if they were the killers.

All of this does not mean I am losing focus in my research - to the contrary: I make my tests with technology, I make my artwork, I write my articles... but I also now think more deeply about all of my concerns and experiences. I am concerned with the political nature of research, scientific or otherwise. I am worrying at the nature of things in our society that are supposed to not be political - to be free of the taint of that which is distorting.

I once met Noam Chomsky, but I wasn't completely aware of his relevance in the world – I was too young. I had earlier read and been moved, as every English schoolchild of my generation had, by George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’. I took great pleasure in realizing that Orwell’s central text, the work of his dissident character Emmanuel Goldstein’s analysis of the power relationships of the three dominant hegemonys, Oceana, Eastasia and Eurasia, was deeply relevant to the world I found myself living in. The fact that the text had been written as a trap for Winston Smith – as a ‘honey pot understanding’ – lent particular irony to Orwell’s deep cynicism not just about the Soviet communist project, but also about human nature (1984 was a bout a distopia after all and not a utopia).

Many years later I made a work which utilized some ideas from Orwell’s novel, aided by footage I had shot for Apple Computers at the moment they had introduced their new venture: The Macintosh. In 1983 I was rung by an LA company, Chiatt Day Advertising, to provide a crew to shoot the making of a commercial to be Directed by Ridley Scott and lit by Adrian Biddle. I was then working and managing a Soho based facility called: ‘Videomakers’ and we had aned a reputation for shooting on the American system – we understood for instance that if you shot images in certain English situations there would be a storbing fo the image due to our electrical system being based on 50 rather than 60 cycles. We were to shoot on NTSC, the American television format which recorded 30 frames of 525 line resolution images. We used to joke that NTSC meant ‘Never the Same Colour’ because it didn’t have the 13 cycle oscillation which the PAL signal did, which was a colour reference signal that the tv set could realign weather distorted images.

What I hadn’t quite internalized was that I was to be sent the son of the owner of the company to direct us, a young guy called Mark Chiatt. He’s probably now quite influential in the LA advertising world. At the time he was young and raw and often on the shoot I found my self being grabbed by the shoulder and spun round to cover something I’d already shot a few minutes earlier.

1984 as a commercial made advertising history for several reasons, the main being that it was only to be shown once during the 1984 Superbowl and the footage we were to shoot would be used, not only in a ‘Making of’ for the troops at Apple, but also to be shown on American News programmes and various other places (disco’s even) to hype the fact that the commercial would only be shown once and you’d better catch it. You’ve probably seen the commercial – if not, go here and have a look:

http://i.gizmodo.com/5136951/1984-macintosh-ad-still-rocks-our-socks-25-years-later

It just so happened that at the very moment I was shooting this for apple, a friend of mine was involved in shooting a large IBM shoot down the road and we’d both been constrained to sign secrecy clauses so that we may not talk about what we were doing outside of the studios for some time to come. Needless to say we met and talked together in a pub in Soho and mused on the nature of all of this but of course didn’t discuss the issue more widely – at the time.

On the shoot, which lasted for 10 days and cost about $1.5 million which was huge amount of money at the time, I found myself on an amazing set which, wherever you looked you inhabited that future world and the sets themselves rose 4 stories at least with sliced up jet engines hanging on the walls as if they were massive air conditioning units. I started to realize that a director like Ridley Scott had a greater imagination than most at the time and that he knew how to create a world. Also, the crew was large, maybe 50 people in total with around 100 skinheads from the Bother Boots Agency (who could also be hired to collect debts, be bouncers, extras – whatever). A lot of them were also Neo Nazis. The adveritisng agency was straight down the line capitalist. The country we were in was Thatchers Britain, the world we were in was Orwell’s distopian totalitarian future. We the crew were basically anarchists (sort of). There were even socialist workers party infiltrators amongst the ranks of the skins trying to change hearts and minds and not get beat up.

Very soon I realized that I was in an amazing and historic situation. The commercial would be fantastic visually (he had already made alien in 1978 and Blade Runner in 1981 which showed he knew a thing or two about creating an interesting sci-fi world on screen). The ‘Making of ‘would therefore be impressive – so what about me, the artist, film maker, cameraman – what would I do ? I’d already had a seminal moment when checking back the rushes and finding the whole crew standing behind me and the soundman watching what for them was the first time any of them would see images of what they were doing at the time of making those images – usually they would wait months to see the outcome at the cinema – not this time though. So suddenly, instead of ostracizing us as the enemy with the new technology as they usually did, they welcomed us and even began to help us.

The soundman, Antony Cooper and myself decided that we’d like to interview the skinheads. There had already been a knifing and a rape and the crew were very nervous that this group of extras, being already known for rioting on Pink Floyds ‘The Wall’, may just get very violent at the end of the shoot. We found the biggest most interesting Skin and arranged an interview. A short while after we had begun more skinheads had heard about what we were doing and quite a few joined us, including the ‘theorist’ – so named by us because he was watching and listening to what the skins were saying and originally correcting them. Then Mark Chiatt joined us and made the mistake of asking a Skin about his Bulldog tattoo: “What’s that shit on your arm ?” Meaning what’s that mark on your arm. There was a moment of cross-cultural confusion as the Skins thought that he was insulting them and we nearly came in for a beating – but we managed talking them out of that by saying that he was American and didn’t truly understand what he was saying. Close.

I decided that I had to ‘steal’ the footage (effectively from myself as the image maker) and put on another hat and work with the material I had shot. This took some fast footwork where I managed to get some standards conversions done to import the footage into the pal system – the colour and contrast of the images suffered of course – all before handing the NTSC rushes over to Apple.

Later Mark made a good corporate piece for apple which played the disco circuit in California and also was used on the news networks and then the commercial showed and instantly gained its position in the industry hall of fame.

I worked with the material at Videomakers for a while – we had just taken delivery of a time base corrector, which could freeze the image and we had basic vision mixer capabilities too. One night I became angry at the sheer hatred cming out of the Skins during the interview footage and collided that aginst an image of the grl from the commercial who hurls a hammer at the Telescreen and thus brings Big Brother crashing down. This was elementary scratch video – or, going back 60 or so years to Vertov and especially Eisenstein with his Montage of Attractions – the collision of one image against another to produce a third meaning.

As soon as I showed the work which I now called ‘Prisoners’ knew I had a special piece of work and the requests for festival screenings proved this to be so.

Prisoners deals with the problem of ideology, the potential manipulation of meaning and the hotness or coldness of the medium as expressed by McLuhan – as well as several other issues. I called this work Prisoners because I was interested in the problem of having a fixed ideology, of having a fixed set of ideas in relation to the world. To use a metaphor: it seemed to me that having sun glasses was useful whilst in the sun, but useless in the middle of the night. So therefore those people depicted in my work, the capitalists, neo Nazis, Thatcherites, communists, corporatists and us, the anarchists were all held Prisoner by our own set of beliefs.

I should add that some years earlier on a shoot where we were examining BBC practices and the BBC themselves ended up using this to teach with, Anthony had put his boom down, taken his headphones off and announced that ‘the only thing documentary documents, is the attitude of the makers to the their subject at the time of making – and nothing else’.

It also brought up issues outlined by Noam Chomsky who I was to meet three years later whilst shooting a documentary on US foreign policy in the 3rd world, directed by my then colleague Renny Bartlett, there is a documentary available called 'Manufacturing Consent'. In a nutshell it explains both Chomsky's understanding of the constant dark move to limit truth by vested interests and his relevance to a world where communication is the most important commodity. His understanding is that, with a nod to McLuhan, the world is global and the information that flows is not neutral, the medium is the message and the message is the way the understanding is limited. That limitation is an impoverishment of truth. Chomsky's relevance is that he has constantly proclaimed this to whoever has the ears to hear. The commodification of information is both the mechanism of control and the relegation of its worth to equivalence to any other commodity.

That’s what’s wrong with capitalism – yes it is functional on many levels, has ‘defeated’ communism, but the relegation of everything in the world to the lowly level of a commodity, a thing capable of being traded, is the force and mechanism that limits our vision. Some ideologies know this. Usually the outcome is a terrorist stance whether it is the Red Brigade or Al Quaeda – what’s a person to do when they realize what’s going on except do something to try to make people sit up and realize that fact? Of course that strategy doesn’t work – you just end up with everyone trying to then destroy both you and your ideology in response to the atrocities you’ve convinced yourself are necessary to commit – now that’s counter prodcutive

In all of this there’s the limitation of understanding, another commodification of concept that reduces what might be possible in our future as something unobtainable right now. That’s a failure of imagination of course. If you do speak up then the inbuilt herd function starts up – the sparrow with the broken wing gets attacked by the flock. Right now we’re all happily suckered into a Frank Capra like joyful moment of being pleased that such a nice man is now the most powerful man on the planet – and a person of colour to boot! I say suckered because Barack Obama is confined to solutions within the structures of the current system and has surrounded himself by advisors who really buy in to the whole thing. It was disappointing to see that he’s bought the threat from the Taliban because now the troops are going in to Afghanistan and that means what it meant so many times before.

Of course the Taliban are a group of people who want to limit the rights of so many people – women – to achieve a personal and group goals - and the world can’t allow that. But we have to find a way that doesn’t involve fighting to accomplish a change in their imagined needs for a rule that diminishes others. In taking fighting as the medium for change we import the commodification of freedom which has to be won intellectually, not bought via the coin or the gun. Warfare is simply a market condition in a market where money is no longer the medium of barter. Bartering is simply an agreement between two sides to make an exchange. One variable is the idea of agreement. If agreement as a condition can be suspended then an exchange can be made without the will of one side – and that’s warfare.

I ask myself: Do I truly believe that it's possible to exist without using commodification of resources (via money or value systems) to survive? Surely there are other potential systems of harvesting the benefits of the environment in a sustainable and enduring way that leaves no mark or corrupting influence on the planet? Surely, if we can imagine something positive then it can become a possibility. I can imagine a world where bartering is not necessary. I’ve read enough of our greatest visionary writers to see that a lot of people have wondered at this idea, even if the great mass of people exist in the limited confines of the contemporary zeitgeist and the overall paradigm of the age. I’m ot saying that I’m better than anybody here as my basic understanding of my own existential condition is that I have ‘sameness’ about me with not only other humans and my ape cousins, not only all sentient creatures, but all things that exist. I see nothing about myself that puts ‘me’ above or below anything around me in terms of precedence.

I do however see a lot of people who do believe in the idea of their own precedence, because the contemporary id, in it’s function of individualizing the human self, has come to that point where each and every human has to divide from the ‘group soul’ and gain self-identity. Four thousand years ago, as a slave within a dominant culture, you might have had more allegiance to the overall soul of your enslaved nation than to worry about your ‘self’. Therefore the tales the you might have found yourself telling would have been supportive of the release of your nation from Egypt (for instance). So the soul of the time was less individualized.

But now we have invented UTube, Myface etc, all of which are there to demonstrate (rather pathetically) the individual. My use of the word pathetic is because we utilize brand loyalties to identify our selves to others:

“I am this because I have these likes, (do you like them too ?) Then we are the same you and I – individuals within a mass of others, different and therefore special”.

Not.

Chomsky exists because we the group have to hear his message. “The prophet stood upon the mountain and spoke to the gathered throng”. The message is that the medium is limited and therefore distorts and groups of the powerful are busy utilizing the message for their own needs – often ideological. Vested interests often want the world to stay the same because it is good in some way for them, or if they do want change then they want a change that is also good for them.

You could argue that me writing this is a vested interest – I must want something, why else would I use my energy? In a world of commodification, isn't this blogging thing just another means of making ‘gain’? ...And then there's the use of those images I discussed at the beginning and the need to produce images and research the production of those images... and to look at High Definition....

What I want is to appreciate Chomsky – albeit a bit late – because I should have shook his hand even harder and told him that I appreciated what he had done and would go on to do. I would also do this with Blake or Voltaire were they alive - Blake because he would not cease from 'mental fight' to liberate truth, Voltaire because he would defend the views of others as a right - Chomsky, because while he is alive he needs his morale boosted to carry on speaking his truth.

With the image above, the desecration of a life like this is the real problem - the use of the image should re-evoke a continuous remembrance that war is one if the things we currently do because of the current state of the human condition and that we know, or feel we know, that it is not right, that the outcome of any war could have been agreed before the war was fought. We know we can be better and we should make that our higher resolution.

The Sum of Human Knowledge

2009-01-08T04:36:00.000-08:00

So a person like me, at a time like this, is concerned with a technical issue which relates to a sense we as humans have: sight.

The technical issue is High Definition, or as I would rename it, High Resolution Imaging. This however is a title that verges on issues around scientific photography, why is why I am ambivalent about the choice.

If the biologists are to believed, sight is derived from touch (there will of course one day be a braille version of HD). In smell, molecules cascade against surfaces that are sensitive to them. In sight, photons activate electrical impulses that transfer to a system that ‘makes sense’ of these impulses. Here the proposition is that mind is the sense common to all the other senses: it’s ‘the-making-sense-of’ sense. It’s the ‘common sense’ of all the senses.

But these senses we have are of local origin, local to this planet and this solar system and the physical conditions pertaining to this environment.

If you look at the universe, as far as we understand it, the the premise of the whole thing is based upon massive diffusion, gravity, heat and cooling, then aggregation, then collision and finally massive diffusion once again. It’s a soup.

Sitting on this ball of clod we stare out, using light, the medium of the universal constant as our medium (and what a constant!) and look for any evidence of where there is an absence of this constant. Where it is we know what produces it - where it is not, we hope to gain clues about why it’s there at all.

In that sentence there are many issues: the notion of a constant is what serious magicians call the ring-pass-not. It is something that may not be contravened. C.S. Lewis used this idea in his science fiction trilogy, Out of the SIlent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Loosely, my understanding of the universal constant is that it is mass at full acceleration. I’m simplifying for poetic effect of course. What I mean is, if you took the smallest amount of mass and accelerated it to the speed of light the particle would both weigh the weight of the universe as well as occupy all the space of the universe. That Einstein was a clever fellow and if one believed in the Illuminati, then one might imagine that that’s where he got his information from.

It’s big stuff, really big stuff. I also suspect that mass, space, time, velocity et al are all swop-able as values for consciousness - or rather unconsciousness. The big I am is in a state of amnesia - that’s what manifestation is, a state of necessary amnesia so that the impossible trick of pulling off localised consciousness (i.e. what makes us people) can Hermes-Trismestigus-like be enabled.

Equally ‘seeing’ is part of the trick and as I was told in my interviews with various planet-sized intellects like David Stump (Electronic Cinematographic SFX on Quantum of Solace) and Scott Billups (well, Scott is more like the mischievous norse god Loki, but both have big brains whichever way you characterise them). Naturally I asked people what they thought HD was and framed a set of questions around where it had come from and where it might go but people like Stump and Billups quite rightly countered with a disagreement about the appositeness of the questions about the technology’. They positioned their understanding rather as an enquiry into the sensory system we have.

Many of the issue that are coming up in HD are around verisimilitude, about whether to use Log or Linear or Gamma Curves, or LuT’s or Raw or various systems of generating data from light sensitive sensors - about how that data was generated, about how the eye generates data; about how we can view something that is true to what is in front of the lens and what is behind it. It’s the proverbial minefield if you only have half a grasp.

Lately, at the end of 2008 and bleeding into 2009, many people on the Cinematographers Mailing List have been discussing what all of these terms mean and what they may be cross-translated into for the normal person (i.e. standard Director of Photography or cameraman). There are some bright sparks who have a knack with words and can make plain what each is and how it pertains to the field. So far though, no one has cottoned on to the time honored issue of ‘the touch’. Simply put, you’ve either got it or you aint.

In film you take a reading and exposed and developed the film and took note of the results. Through doing this a few times you developed experience and knew what to expect. You tried various stocks with different responses and learned how to predict the outcome. You became experimental and did things, like under and over exposing, having the film developed for longer or shorter times, avoided elements of development like by passing the bleaching of silver process - you even suggested heating up the developer to the lab - and so on and so forth. Well that process is where we’re at at the moment in electronic cinematography and there are no easy answers. So whether or not you’ve got it or you aint, you aren’t going anywhere without experience which you gather from simply doing it again and again.

Like being able to expose film or a work in the electro-cinematographic realm, I think the universe per se is one big experiment within a set of parameters. Significantly the further you look out in to the dark, you still see galaxy after galaxy, each one of which has as many stars in it as there are grains of sand on the beaches of the earth (and then some). It’s not endless, it’s 14 billion years in terms of distance. Right up to the boundary of the space-time continuum, there are prototype galaxies slightly unformed because at the time of their creation it was all a bit hot and the necessary cooling hadn’t quite happened yet to formulate galaxies with the kind of matter and gravity we’re used to (and remember space extends as far as there is matter, as matter is a key element of time and space - where there is no matter, there is no space).

Within all of this are we. 3rd rock from this particular sun. I always feel that the local gravitational conditions forced this set up and that these conditions, that of having hard bits then gassy bits which are a condition that is at least this galaxy wide.

That temperate planets will originate at this kind of distance relative to a star of this kind, of mass, is part of the equation - bigger mass stars will have a similar effect on their planets but maybe there will not be an earth-like planet - maybe there’s fewer than .01 per cent of these kind of planets in this particular galaxy - but that’s still zillions of places where consciousnesses can originate. Maybe only 0.01 percent of those consciousnesses are self-reflective and so on and so forth - but that’s still many. And if you then look at all the other many zillions - no, god-zillions of galaxies out there you get life, self-conscious life originating out of the huge act of amnesia that is the entire manifestation. Amazing.

And in all of this, there’s a little human with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes him interested in how light hitting surfaces, bouncing into bits of glass and finally being represented to organs that are sensitive to these effects. Amazing.

By the way, I like the idea that the scientists now believe that this solar system is the third variant that we have all been part of. Apparently the kind of matter that exists here is the kind that needs to have been smelted more than once. We’ve dissolved and reconstituted and this is the third time (locally). I like that we’re on a spinning spiral of matter, going at around 600,000 miles per hour and that it takes 226,000 years to revolve once. I like the idea that in 2 billion years time we will silently and softly collide with the nearby galaxy of Andromeda, and that there’s so much space in both galaxies that hardly anything will actually touch anything else, but that gravity will spin us and twist us in a huge, eon-like ballet of amalgamation with the aforesaid neighbor. Amazing.