The Politics of Definition and early 21st Century Capitalism

I meant to put this up on January 1st - somehow it slipped my mind, so with apologies, here it is:
It's 2008 and I find my thinking coming around to delving into the bases of the technologies I am involved in investigating. I use the plural form 'technologies' because originally I considered that I was investigating High Definition within Digital technologies - therefore a singular Investigation. However, as I began to understanding that digitality itself is an eventual manifestation of a new kind of mathematics derived from Fourier's 1807 wavelet transform proposition, this forces the realization that this is no singular investigation, because like everything in our world, everything arises dependent on everything else. In the western idiom this is characterized by the idea of relativism, and in the eastern idiom this is characterized by the Buddhist theory of dependent origination.

But, given my background is primarily western I see with western eyes and therefore note the series of ideas that then require that I reflect upon where capitalism now is being as this moment is a distilling of the governing set of parameters of 'democratic' societies.

And, in the west, we do like the notion of democracy, or at least the notion of liberal democracy, a Utopian construction where you get to speak your mind and consume as much as you like without any effect upon the planet. I am aware that notions of Gaia and ecology are of our time and therefore circumscribed by a set of unknowables that may make our descendants laugh at our naivety.

I should confess here also that I have read various tracts of Situationist literature and have in the past considered that set of thoughts as being insightful of the society that was being created at the time it was written and is now very profoundly manifest in TV programmes like Big Brother and slogans like Porn Star on a 5 year olds tee shirt. Owning Situationist literature used to get one raided by the police in my particular liberal democracy.

So the notion that everyone and everything is a subject of and an adherent of the need to spectacularise, to make spectacular ones own self and condition is now firmly embedded in early 21st century capitalism as an expression of the developing ego's need to singularize itself or individualize itself in a more defined way – even if the subject is profoundly boring and quotidian. This project of the second millennial self says "I exist therefore I require a spotlight to celebrate that existence". It needs a My Space to celebrate that it is worthy of having something that is worthy of being perused by others - and of course it is all the others that visit that space in a circular feedback motion that is of so much comfort to the gargantuan capitalist entrepreneurial egos that now recognize trends and fashions within the fast moving zeitgeist - every ready to harvest the negative ego as expressed as disposable income. Lucas’s Jabba the hut comes to mind to characterize the spiritual state of those beings and the use of my term ‘negative ego’ is formed because I believe that puffing up is not at all useful when an ego is trying to adopt useful behavior to exist in a ‘real’ way in the world.

But we have deeper ruts to furrow in search of the shape of advanced capitalism. I say 'shape' but actually I mean essential nature.

In using the term capitalism I do not mean to cast it in a negative light. One thing I do know in this ever changing world is that what you might consider to be Luciferic at one moment can be angelic the next. That's probably related to the fact that the Bringer of Light himself was of course an angel. Whenever one uses an analogy one should be conscious of all possible connotations and associations, but one has a limited field of view of course.

So I set off on the course of describing contemporary capitalism as technological capitalism and of course I'm mindful that there are intense and profound theoretical discussions around the idea of technology and whether or not 'man' in and of him/herself is a profoundly technological re-imagining of the creation myth circa early 21st century thinking. For myself I still believe the first technological act is not the taking of something outside oneself like a stone to crack another stone to make a tool - but the very idea exemplified by Joe Ape to come down out of the trees and actually get up on his hind legs, not as something to amuse his friends, but actually to take to this trick as a profoundly useful technological stance toward the manipulation of his own world. I think if this is in any sense 'true' then one can extrapolate from this back in time and realize that 'mother nature' herself was at play in this species in particular because like Sea Biscuit in the 5.40, 'the early hominid had a good chance of becoming self-realized through developing fire, the wheel, the spinning jenny and 3d holographic projection – and of course the early sea-slug, did not.

If you accept this proposition, then of course technology is the main means of realizing man's utopian tendency. Coupled with the gas/juice/fuel/motive power behind our reaching towards the stars themselves. They are after all placed where they are as part of the overall scheme, drawing us into a standing position and probably becoming dis-incarnate in the long run.

Please excuse my poetic excesses at this time - I have been on a long celebration of the Christmas period and I cannot abide despair in any form. Instead of despair we should celebrate the root of despair, the dark side, the path sinister, the left hand path, the path that looks least likely when contemplating the search for self realization and knowledge of our place on the spinning ball of dust, iron, nitrogen, human tissue and vegetable matter that revolves around a rather supreme expression of hydrogen to helium technology that is after all ubiquitous in our known universe.

The universe itself of course, is a technological entity, as are its self-conscious inhabitants.

14 History Lessons, 18 Visions, 21 Beatification

Last night, Friday 18th January 2008 I premiered a work that has taken me 18 years to make. It is called 14 History Lessons, 18 Visions, 21 Beatification. This large scale moving image artwork is the culmination of a response to a piece of work by John Wyver, a friend who made a programme entitled L'objet d'art a l'age electronique. This programme, featuring the thoughts of prominent French intellectuals Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virillio, amongst others, opened the then new satellite channel, La Sept. The programme made reference to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay that discussed the idea of whether a reproduction of an object of art in the age of mechanical reproduction could retain some element of the original ‘aura’ of the work itself. By updating the argument to the current age it argued that in an era of electronic reproduction, where the copy itself had the possibility of a certain verisimilitude of the original, that the ‘image’ no longer had any meaning, as it had become so reproducible, so ubiquitous and therefore meaning had been eradicated by dilution.

At the time of my first response to this programme I was Artist in Residence at Complete Video, a leading commercials production house that had acquired D1 recorders, which were the first commercially available digital recorders in the UK – or for that matter, the world. Digital recorders promised to eradicate deterioration of the image and this set me to thinking that I might be able to construct landscapes or ‘picture-scapes’ from images combined together – previously, analogue images deteriorated on being copied.

I then promptly wrote to channel 4 and they gave me £20,000 to argue with the French. Of course, the project became transformed in the doing and took the form of a series of dialogues. This became The Inevitability of Colour where I used the analogy of the idea of colour as inevitable in the construction of the eye as the idea of meaning and significance were inevitable in the construction of the looking, seeing, sentient self. This transmitted on Channel 4 in 1990.

A principle idea in the project was the myth of Echo and Narcissus, sound and image, who were locked together through eternity, somehow producing meaning in the mystery of their imprisonment together. I wanted to see if I could construct an image track that apparently ‘randomly’ accompanied the soundtrack that through the act of repetition at certain points gave a set of meanings to the images.

Soon other ideas began to come and I then made Echo’s Revenge shortly followed by The Object of Desire which takes Narcissus’s viewpoint as he is captured by his punishment to only see himself – Echo’s punishment was to only be able to use the words of others with her own meaning injected.

These three pieces became the Colour Trilogy, which premiered at the 1992 Bonn Biennale. As this was happening I was beginning to get more ideas and wrote 4 other parts which joined the other pieces and together to become the larger 7 part work which I called, The Colour Myths. After moving to Somerset, and with the state of computing and low level video it took some time to have the resources to make the pieces at the level I wanted to make them and finally, by 2005, as so much time had passed I also had to go back to the first piece and ‘interrupt’ it, to confess some experiences I had had as a youth which of course coloured my beliefs. This then prompted the last name change.

Last night after the screening I organized a response session, because as I said to the audience, the proprietor of the Phoenix Project, Liz Beech had taught me through her curatorial skills, the artwork may be finished and ready to view, but one can learn a lot from the first viewings and so my intent was to learn from the audience’s. Of course many things came up it being a complex piece of work. But principally I was congratulated for making a ‘vulnerable’ piece of work, an open piece of work.

Given that I’ve recently realized that the artist taps into an inspirational creative act when making an artwork – and that inspire has it’s roots in the Latin verb spire, to breath and in this case to ‘in-breathe’ or to take note of positive internal intuitive impulses – then what the audience receives through the artwork maybe the distant resonance of that inspiration. If the artwork is ‘true’ then much of the original inspiration will be carried through to the viewer. So, if the main message was openness and vulnerability (depending on the audience member, because I can see that vulnerability is not directly swappable for openness) then what I managed to do was to transmit my original intent through to the audience – which from my point of view is very good because the work began in the intellect (after the first motions and inner whisperings that prompted me to respond).

Vulnerability always evokes a protective response in a listener or viewer, but openness is about simply baring ones inner emotions and thoughts and in this works case, ‘spirituality’. I can see how some people think that that is making oneself vulnerable. One person said to me that watching the work felt like seeing a man hanging on a cross. Another noted that the technique I'd used of making impossible phone calls to long dead people, because they took place in West Country landscapes, afforded a welcome break from the denser parts of the 'text' which took place in constructed environments. An appealing response was that of enjoying the duration of the work which was 'an intense 67 minutes - like being washed over by a wave of creative energy - an inspirational wave". Others wanted the work to be longer still, with more space between the elements.

For myself I’m so glad I premiered this work within a local context as opposed to a big international premier – the smallness of the event allowed me an intimate contact with my audience, which will feed through to any new formulations of the work. Various people had intimated in their comments a need for a less dense experience and I get from this a desire to expand the work and let spaciousness into the experience. I may even place some other images in the work for it’s second screening in February – I am now a fan of an opening that does not represent a closed piece of work – but instead an open piece of work.

14 HISTORY LESSONS, 18 VISIONS, 21 BEATIFICATION
(The Colour Trilogy, The Colour Myths: Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age - A Work in 8 Parts) 1989–2007, 67 minutes
THE INEVITABILITY OF COLOUR (1989 - 2007) (part 1 of both The Colour Trilogy and The Colour Myths) 21 minutes (now interrupted by my own tales)
Echo's Revenge (90/91) (part 2 of both The Colour Trilogy and The Colour Myths) 5 minutes
THE EYE PROJECTS THE WORLD: 1992 - 2005 1 minute (part 3 of The Colour Myths)
ECHO'S COMPASSION: Echo’s Gift, 5 minutes 2006 (part 4 of The Colour Myths) 4 minutes
TIMEPIECE 1992 - 2005 (part 5 of The Colour Myths)
THE OBJECT OF DESIRE: (1992) (part 3 of The Colour Trilogy and part 6 of The Colour Myths) 6 minutes
NEMESIS: THE MYSTERY AT THE HEART OF MEANING 5 minutes, 1992 - 2007 (Part 7 of The Colour Myths)
EPILOGUE: UNREAL TIME PIECE 1992 - 2005 1 minute

Full Definition Reality

There is a move in the contemporary zeitgeist which is allowing the notion of 'reality' to come under discussion. The Levehulme Foundation in fact includes this title in its guide for new applications - as if reality needs re-definition due to movements in contemporary technology: biological, digital and manufacture - nanotechnology, cad cam and the rest.

But I'm not sure that all we need to be insightful about the human condition still exists in prior technology and prior cultural forms, that the investigations we have to make about the way the world is now is not also present in the cultural forms that were previously dominant. Over the last three weeks I've become involved in lighting a play at a theatre and it's come home to me that the stage space is a place where images are made, high definition images with a depth and realism that 3 D cinema can only dream about.

The theatre world is a different world than the one I'm used to and though I've been there before, maybe 15 years ago lighting a play for the Edinburgh Festival, by now I'd forgotten the terms theatre people use: the use of terms for the equipment and the notation used to delineate the placement of lamps (lanterns as they call them) on a lighting grid. I worked through the experience in my usual male fashion: I can do this even if I know nothing of the form because I can use my natural intelligence to formulate theories as I go along about the space and place I am working in and tat these theories on a practical level will find the contemporary bar. Also, because I travel from another discipline I can bring something new to the form. I do not see this as a n arrogant position, in fact I see it as a necessary way to re-invigorate different forms and practices. The course I studied on for my BA was called communication design and was based upon the ideas of Stafford Beer, Edmund Carpenter, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan - all of which understood the notion of enriching the soil when it has become exhausted, The necessary nutrients were the insights and understandings gained within different disciplines.

There's also the issue of process where you take what you know into this different form and that act alone challenges the what's known and formulates it into something that distinguishes what you produce from the general practices prevalent in the form you are entering. This process often involves antagonism from those that work in the form seeing the incomer as threatening what is valuable and needs protecting against invading hordes who may dilute if not destroy the already realised form with new and inappropriate ideas. Ever the same old story. My own recent experience had elements of sabotage in it and nearly scuppered my plan which was me imagining what might work if given the chance. FUnnily enough even though resources were withheld I still pulled it off and on the first performance, of all the elements that go together to make a piece of theatre, an audience member was overheard by the assistant director as being imaginative. Therefore mission accomplished (I hope imaginative also meant appropriate to the story). On this particular production a particularly imaginative collaborator was Forkbeard Fantasy, internationally renowned for their crazy kind of theatre and they were responsible for a series of projections and puppets that had projections form inside their bodies onto their faces (yes they were big).

The lighting people from what ever discipline who might be reading this know that you need to do something special to not wash out the projections and that alone added a complication when cover light is a standard in theatrical form. Necessarily I didn't use any of that. I did use a lot of what I would call a 'special' - meaning something particular to light a specific thing. Bu the particular form of sabotage I encountered (be it unconscious or conscious) deprived my of a quarter of the circuits in the lighting board. Simply put this means that by the time I had got to the front bar of the lighting grid I couldn't put in what I\d planned to make the whole show work!

Usually on a film production I make a plan and by the night before the shoot I gather the courage to throw away the plan so that I might function on the shoot in the full knowledge that there is a plan if I need it but I have empowered myself to listen to my intuition at each moment and try to be truly creative on set because on set everything is different from what one imagines anyway when reading the script !. In this recent case the simple exigencies of the lack or resources meant that I ad to wrok with less than I'd planned - and that everything was in the wrong place now because of what was missing. Therefore I had to be imaginative about what I had placed and focused and use it for different reasons than it had been placed on the grid. This meant that lighting surprises (surprise for the artist being a principle artistic technique) were coming thick and fast and we entered an interesting lighting space immediately !

The definition I had intended was partially there, but also definitions of form and shape and colour came that I hadn't 'intended'.

Definition and intention - these go hand in hand in contemporary re-definitions of the zeitgeist. There's a sense in which intention was formed in a previous age and that previous intentions don't fit with the new digital world - simply because they're anachronistic. ANd definition is about bringing ideas into focus but of course in a world where the idea of reality is being investigated we have technologies offering higher definition but an attendant question of what it is that is needed to bring into focus.

So I may be arguing that we don't throw the baby out with the bath water here - that the previous has all the seeds of what is to come if we can decode it and release it from past associations.

Imagine a future High definition 3D theatre: It would be a world into which we look and see three dimensional images and CGI landscapes. One thing I am coming to know is that if you create too much description and detail then the experience of looking into that over described world is neutered - as contemporary games designers have told me - the game loses out to the high definition landscapes that have to be created and the game function is defeated. Could it be that theatre is the height of 3 Dimensional HD form already ?

In Other People's Skins

Terry Flaxton is the British Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Research Fellow in High Resolution Imaging at Bristol University. After a varied career as a Director of Photography encountering HD early in the game, shooting 4 Features as well as promos, tv dramas, cinema shorts, live shows and documentaries, he has taken three years out to look into the issues, both technical and aesthetic, around high resolution imaging.

One strand of Flaxton’s work is to compile a series of interviews with people who are shaping the HD world. This archive of over 30 interviews will be lodged at various institutions for use by future researchers. Flaxton points out that the history of film from 1890 to 1920 has very few verbatim accounts by the practitioners themselves and that this should not happen with HD. The Verbatim History of HD Aesthetics and Technologies will be that record.

The second strand of Flaxton’s work is a series of installations and tests made with High Definition technology over the three years of the Fellowship. This includes In Other People’s Skins, an interactive installation which will tour to 7 cathedrals from February to June 2008. It will be seen at Winchester, Worcester, Gloucester, Bristol, Wells and Southwark Cathedrals and finish its run at Bath Abbey in June 2008.

A few years ago I made a small digital installation piece called The Dinner Party. Visitors enter a room: a table is set for dinner; there are 8 unoccupied chairs. A dinner party is taking place, but there are no guests - just the images of their hands, food, wine, projected from above onto the white tablecloth and plates. I initially made this piece very informally, inviting some friends to have dinner, and suspending a PD170 camera directly overhead. The dinner table was of exactly 16 x 9 proportions – for obvious reasons. The footage was edited, looped and projected back on to the same table, now empty except for 8 plates, which act as little screens to catch the virtual food if positioned carefully. The chairs invite the audience to sit and touch, (unlike a lot of modern art, this art is for touching) - but with the irony that contents are virtual and so untouchable. The candles are a gesture towards the medium of light. There is enough of the real on this virtual table to allow the casual viewer to suspend disbelief.

This installation even in its Standard Definition form, enjoyed a terrific response wherever it was exhibited and I found myself wanting to stretch the form a little, to discover if there were more to be had. But I was really excited as well about the possibilities for this kind of work if I took it into the realm of High Definition, where there seems to be the possibility of further suspending the audience on the threshold between belief and disbelief.

Perhaps I could start with a metaphor: At dusk, sometimes you can see that the brake lights of the car in front seem brighter than usual. Also, the traffic lights seem too bright and too colourful. This is said to be due to the rods and cones in your eyes transferring duties from one to the other. The brain is switching from one more refined and developed technology that is used to dealing with colour and a certain level of luminosity, to an earlier technology that developed in relation to movement and low light. So, take this idea, this fluttering and switching between technologies and shift this idea into definition: what if the brain needs to switch between levels of definition?

I had a conversation recently with an engineer who described a High Definition practical joke someone played - he boarded up a window in the office and then projected back onto that board an HD image of that same window, hoping to confuse his fellow boffins. And as with trompe l’oeuil paintings of the 18th century, there is a moment when illusion works. The Dinner Party works like this, in that I use an image that overlays a solid object. It seemed very clear that a higher definition image would produce a more believable effect - or, more easily encourage the suspension of disbelief that we are familiar with in the cinema.

So last year I happened to be at an art event at the Bishops Palace at Wells Cathedral for the opening of a show and someone asked what I do – I told them that I earn my money on camera and I throw it away by making art. They wanted to know what kind of art so I told them about the table and that what I really want to do is take it a stage further. They told me to hold that thought and looking around they spotted a man who they dragged me up to - the Bishop. I told him that I wanted to do a digital version of the Last Supper and he thought that a very good idea. I discovered that he wasn’t the only person who liked the sound of it, as the exhibition tour grew to take in 6 abbeys and a cathedral, the Arts Council funded the project, and business sponsors came on board.

So a new work was born: In Other People’s Skins, is inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. It consists of a larger table covered in a white cloth and surrounded by chairs. Projected from above onto the white surface will be the images of the hands and arms of 12 people as they take food, break the bread, drink the wine. Visitors to the installation will be free to sit down at one of the 12 chairs and interact with the virtual guests – and to inhabit Other People’s Skins. Initially the virtual diners will be taking a simple 1st century meal of bread, wine and fruit. After a short time, the content of the images will change. Suddenly we see an Indian family, a Chinese family, a Nigerian family or a modern English family taking a meal. The food on the table, the plates and dishes, the colour of the hands and arms, the clothing and jewellery, all will be transformed so that the visitor finds themselves in a different century, a different world.

The act of eating together, sharing food, is a universal human experience, which crosses all cultural and religious boundaries, and the dinner table is the site where so much human communication takes place. The intention is not to create a piece based in any particular religion – on the contrary, the idea is to transcend religious divides and seek that which unites us.

In discussion with Alison Sterling of Ignition Films, the producer and production company behind In Other People’s Skins, I had to decide just where I would go with my image capture after simple standard definition. The Dinner Party had been shown off DVD, which damaged the definition of the images even more, and I was keen to maintain as much resolution as I possibly could with this new project.

I decided in the end, that In Other People’s Skins should be part of a journey through the various forms of HD that currently exist, all the way through to full scale and proper HD. Therefore I decided to work in the newish P2 system at this stage, and that during 2008 I aim to make a series of installations with work originating on the HD Cam and Varicam formats, and latterly toward the end of 2008 I will use a camera like the F23 for the artwork.

The reason for the choice for what some would regard as hardly an HD format (and I had ruled out HDV on motion issues) is that I have been staring at HD for a long time now and I really want to know it in its material form. When I look at an image I want to see it up close and personal and at a large screen level - I want to see what all of those pixels are actually doing and I want to know just how different pathways of posting the captured medium changes the way the image displays. Exporting through different codices was part of my post production research process, as I explored a number of possibilities for playing out the finished footage. We will most likely run off computer in a DVC Pro HD Codec (because it will run off 7200 rpm drives) though we did also explore the possibility of exporting via HD DVD, but this has been more or less ruled out because of further encoding and deterioration of resolution. There were also prosaic issues of budget and practicality (ie small runs of HD DVDs and BluRay are simply uneconomic).

Pre-production and production took just under a month: we sought out various communities - Gujeratis, Nigerians and pan-Asian – and asked them to join us in creating these meals. We wanted to find a range of continents, skin colour, and food culture, including the simple question of what implements were used in each culture – the knife and fork, chopsticks, spoons or just hands. In consultation with our production designer Charlotte Humpston, we made choices of colour for each of the meals so that the skin tones, the colour of the table, the dishes and the food itself would be complimentary, both within each meal but also in contrast to the other meals. We also enlisted the support of a number of Bristol restaurants who generously agreed to provide the food (Nigerian food from Kalabash; Gujerati food from Myristica; pan-Asian food from Teoh’s; European food from Bordeaux Quay) and also The Pier who loaned all the tableware.

Shooting took place at the Wickham Theatre at the University of Bristol Drama Department. We built two scaff towers and set up with a walkway in between so that I could get at the camera without moving it. The Ps was suspended above the table (and I did in fact use a little HDV Z1 as backup). Lighting was simple – with The Dinner Party I’d wanted no shadows, so I used soft cover lighting from directly above with the light bounced directly off umbrellas. This time I wanted all the glasses to zing, so instead I set up four poly foam core boards to bounce the light in from the four corners: this gave soft shadows which disappeared when hitting a dark tablecloth (Nigerian and Gujerati) or wood (pan-Asian), but in the Western meal with its crisp white tablecloth and the elaborate place settings with three glasses and three sets of cutlery at each place, then the articulation gathered from cross shadows and cross illumination actually made the image sing. Funny how sometimes you do what you know you shouldn’t and yet it works just fine….

So we started the week of production and I elected to data wrangle on to a Firestore which behaved without fault and recorded everything. At each point I immediately downloaded everything on to an Octo Core Mac with 7 gig of ram and about 1500 Gb of internal RAID which runs at a fairly high read and write rate (I could also have brought my other kit which has 480 MB/s read and write rates) but for the P2 system 7200 rpm is fast. And as soon as the data was downloaded I could show my guests what they had done. During the shoot I had a widescreen monitor on the set to allow everyone to see what was being gathered and demonstrate the issues around not putting their heads into shot.

The week was successful and people had a lot of fun in the shoot - it was, after all, a friendly, homely meal. I was pleased with the P2 image - albeit only some 960 pixels wide - but it did articulate a lot of what I wanted to see and in the HD game you have to spend an awful lot more for quite small increases in quality. So basically the little P2 camera do a good job for the money.

The next challenge has been how to display these images without too much further degradation, and there is the usual balancing act to perform between cost, resolution (ie number of pixels) and levels of luminance. To display through a full HD projector would be not only be prohibitively expensive (£35,000 upward) but the kit itself is too big to be a realistic choice for a touring show – especially as it involves being suspended vertically some 12 feet in the air. The smaller domestic home cinema projectors, which say they display full 1920x1080 do not have sufficient brightness as they are geared towards an environment where light can be completely excluded – sadly not the case in a cathedral. We are currently looking at a Panasonic PT DW5100 at around 5000 lumens. It isn’t full HD but has great intensity of image and colour quality.

The tour kicks off in Winchester on 7th February and then tours to Worcester Cathedral (4 – 16 March), Gloucester Cathedral (17 – 30 March), Bristol Cathedral (31 March – 13 April), Wells Cathedral (14 – 27 April), Southwark Cathedral (6 – 18 May), Bath Abbey (2 – 20 June)

Eye Watering Experiments in Low D

I've been offline for a bit through extreme business - all self-generated. Amazing how if one is in charge of one's life one can still create stress. In this case I've been putting on a show and through this act investigating upscaling and downscaling of HD images. There is only one conclusion though and I'll say this now: There is only a High Definition image if you maintain the purity of pathways in dealing with the signal.

If you engage in wanton and ignorant channelling of the information - if you neglect to understand where the signal goes and what it goes through, then the claim that you are exhibiting HD images will be false.

As a Director of Photography who has always in some way been involved in post production, the new emphasis of exhibition is bringing an interesting overview of the entire HD process. I hear so many people say they are shooting HD when in fact they are shooting some small format that is a falsification of the term. For instance as far as I'm now concerned an Mpg based HD format is a nonsense. Any format that doesn't actually record 1920 x 1080 (the minimum) is a nonsense. Any format that doesn't record 4 4 4 is a nonsense.

A purists stance? Yes. But what else is truth but pure?

So - outside of this one has to deal with pragmatic truths - the blemished kind - and, because I've been putting on a show where I've been trying to raise the bar in terms of presentation of images - and given the lack of good cheap exhibition equipment - I have plunged mightily into the compromises available.

It isn't just exhibition, I found myself forced through budget to use the 960 pixel P2 Panasonic system to shoot on which like a lot of low HD is a smoke and mirrors exercise. But worse, in the passage through various bits of kit: editing, then outputting into a codec which is compliant with what is to follow - then play off computer, with it's hard drive read and write speeds (as a RAID was out of the question for a month and anyway the projector wasn't good enough to warrant this element) and the computers graphics card and its limitations, or via an HD DVD player (and all the Mpg stuff in terms of the authoring programme before that and it's level of encoding) then through the HD DVD players' own upscaling/downscaling system, then through a projector with it's pixel limitations and its own upscaling/downscaling problems or through an 'HD Ready' TV set with it's upscaling system - it's a wonder one can see anything with looking at after all of the mashing the signal gets - and after all of this to find that actually the best image I found though this awful pathway was a PAL Quicktime file played off computer - I really mean that - I also played a DVC Pro HD file and by the time it had been processed it didn't look as good as the PAL version.

Oh woe.

Anyway - the point is that there's a pragmatism that has to come into play after the pure thoughts and then, due to the earliness of the systems we have available we have to chose something that will in the end work.

All of this latest show is a test for February when I have to find the best option to tour an installation around the country - so it's been good to go through the mill so that I know what I'm going to do - but it's been tough on the eye.

Happy Confusion

Megapixel is not the first conference concerned with HD – there have been a few before, but more industry based; the Megapixel at Anglia Ruskin University tried to include academics and artists to further discuss what HD might be, beyond the simple propaganda of the corporations with technology to sell.

A community that was involved for the first time was the Games industry and the contribution this sector made was a slightly neurotic occupation with photorealism – neurotic because underlying the simple fact that games had to get more photorealistic to satisfy a desire which the designers themselves originally encouraged. Beneath this was the real concern that though the spectacle had grown, the games play itself had diminished. Photorealism is simply a product of remediation and being so new, HD has to go through this stage before it finds it’s own aesthetic.

This concern also highlighted and revealed to me the unease throughout all sectors about HD. My own paper centred on the HD terrain, what it is, when there are so many differing identities, when the communities involved have no fixed definition. Also, what are the potential aesthetics of the medium? Malcom Le Grice proposed that the advent of digitality itself was the essential paradigm shift and HD was simply a refinement of certain tendencies that were evident within the 'operations', as Lev Manovich had termed them. Manovich himself called off at the last minute and Peter Swinson was drafted in to give the keynote speech. Swinson on his own admission is an unreconstructed film lover and so Megapixel, named within the popularist idiom, began with a paean to past technologies, which depending on your perspective is either appropriate or ironic.

Grahame Weinbren showed his self created HD system which he termed High Resolution – his most important discovery was the proposition of real colour information being equal to resolution information – previous systems of HD throw away a lot of the colour definition. His own art, as he himself admitted, dealt with the beautiful – this was, he said a result of age. Gone were the days of the more punk fascination for non-beauty.

On the whole the entire event was beset by modernist project issues and a deal of remediation which if one were unkind could be seen as gauche. But the High Definition content itself was fairly good looking given that to some extent an early conclusion one could make about HD is that its clean, clear surface is a sign of its 'transparency'. This ‘surface’ may just shake the tree a little and many artists who have survived on being true to materials may find little purchase here. Instead a deeper question will be posed by the advent of HD: Should the definition of what a medium is be changed, because in terms of the digital there is no tactile material to deal with, only a set of processes. If we redefine a medium only in terms of its processes - then the digital realm can come under McLuhan's law. For my own part I believe that this redefinition is necessary – the young understand this intuitively – we just have too wait for the oldies to come around - and 'oldie' now means anyone as young as 30.

Remembering Intent

Shooting of In Other People's Skins began yesterday. It was very intense on a technical level. I spent the whole of the previous day helping construct a set of twin towers to span a walkway between them so that I could then set up two cameras above the table. I say helping construct, however, I mean giving moral support as I was in my own private hell sorting out import and export functions with systems I wasn't familiar with. Then on to rigging links between cameras, vision mixer, computers, monitors, setting up sound, lighting - the paraphernalia of a shoot.

Then yesterday morning came and having woken at 4am and making copious notes about what was still to do, I started the day with a list of technical goals which by 5pm I had begun to win through. A reception outside the studio ensued and various people with glasses of wine and the bonhomie born of having finished their day of staff meetings (and wine was the best way to dispense the tensions gathered in that sort of human occupation). However, there I was with my team finishing off the technicalities and beginning to sort out the art of it all.

The Team: Charlotte Humpston, Production Designer, Jennie Norman Art Director, Prashant Roy and Yuan Li shooting 'the making of', Rod Terry, construction and Holly Foulds construction and also helping on the shot (sort of stage management), Phoebe Beedell People Wrangler and Alison Sterling overall Producer.

I haven't yet written about the art direction choices, suffice it to say that one reaches into one's cultural knowledge gained from living in the world and doing some research to find out what you can and can't do and then sourcing as close as one can what fits the descriptions made to oneself. Then instructions to the team and off they go to see what can be sourced, then coming back together to present to me and me making choices and all the time Alison warning against stereotyping and cultural imperialism.

By 7.45 we have another production meeting to make sure everything is together and then off the cars go to pick up our 15 Gujerati friends. A moment of quiet (and going through the elements - one last recording to make sure it works, checking camera positions) then, before long, the cars come back.

I speak for 15 minutes introducing the people to the theatre space we are in, show the table and describe how the installation will work then try to relax everyone. I make sure I serve everyone a glass of water so that I tell them through that gesture that I am as they are and without them there would be nothing. I hope this communicates through the simple act of going from person to person asking if they want water. I'm the director and artist and it is important to me they understand that I am simply inhabiting an archetype for the event.

We rehearse laying the table and giving people places to sit, all the time trying to let the 'Ma' of the community take control. She does so and wonderfully organises the other women (prompted by Charlotte's interventions from her experience on many high level shoots). The Hindu priest is a delight - Mr Vyas organised everyone to come - and agrees to say prayers after the plates are laid and just after our Ma lights the candles.

Eventually the food arrives from Myristica (we have organised a series of restaurants to supply the food which will be good publicity for them when the installation goes on tat the local cathedral). We go to it and because of the rehearsal the meal/soot goes off without a hitch. At the end I transfer all the data to computer as the people are ferried home.

I expect each day to go like this and shall write further with some insights garnered from hanging a camera above a group, of people who give their time to this piece of art. In 20 minutes I again journey to the studio to shoot the 1st century meal and some pack shots of bread being broken in detail so that I might drop these in to the overall shot of the 5 meals - so that people are for a moment looking at a screen and not at the virtual simulation of a dinner party for 12. I want people to both believe and question the deception before them as well as examine the issue around placing their hands in Other People's Skins.

I have to keep reminding myself what we are really doing here - the art of it all - the intent to transfer insight to an audience. The insight though must not be articulated - if it is, then it evaporates and becomes mere intellectualism.

Later tonight we shoot footage for the pan Asian region.