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.

Size Matters

Last night I went to a Hindu Temple to talk to the priest. The reason being that to make a work which involves a community, as the work I'm currently shooting In Other People's Skins does you have to make peace with that community and you have to be allowed by that community to take something from them, their image, even if you're going to give something back. I hope this work does in fact do that.

Loosely, In Other People's Skins is an extension of The Dinner Party, my standard def version of a group of people eating a meal, shooting from above, then projecting the virtual diners back down on to a table of the same size, putting some real chairs around it and some real plates to serve up the virtual food to the viewer.

I have shot many documentaries as a simple camera person, been in many communities and situations that I wouldn't have been in if it were not for the work I was doing and somehow, having stopped that work a while ago, the act of art is bringing in this rather wonderful exposure to the multiplicity of cultures on the planet. And of course, In Other People's Skins is about placing one's hands in another persons hands and clothing oneself, albeit virtually, in their skin. Later I shall work on The Laying on of Hands which is another extension of tables and hands which also involves the act of healing, by those that take part, and by those that view the work - it's all so bound together.

You can't make art or technology without it having an effect - in this case the effect was on me as I stood watching the priest giving prayers and leading the community in speaking to their version of God - in this case the many faces of God in the form of Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, Ganesh, Kali et al. That was humbling because I couldn't help but be appreciative of how people are always inclined to help the cause of Art, somehow seeing below consciousness that it is a force for goo in some way.

Technology is not necessarily in the same league, but it can be harnessed in the cause of art and that is what I'm currently exploring.

I've recently been looking at people's hands - in fact I've always been looking at people's hands since seeing at an early age the pictures of the masters of Western European painting who gave to the Judaeo-Christian son of God such wonderful mudras and gestures to occupy his hands in their paintings.

But this recent project is focussed on the hands and in fact whilst setting up the shoot for this project I conceived another one to be shot at the same time. It was influenced or inspired by seeing an acquaintances hands. This is Peter Copely a 92 year old actor. My piece will be called Peter's Hands and will look at the act of greeting another - by holding their hand.

So in all of this I shall be looking in extreme detail at the hand and therefore I need High Resolution, or definition, to show to others what I have seen and imagined. So in this case, as in so many cases, bigger is better - bigger in the sense of more pixels, more detail, more resolution and hopefully more resonance happening in the mind of the viewer as she or he witnesses what it is that I, in this case the artist, tries to convey.

Making Art Make Art

Difficult subject this. I've always been an early adopter, this grew from a means of escaping a working class background into a full blown life commitment, with the making of art the central and overwhelming thrust of all that I do. When young, I used to tell myself that I simply had a creative urge, that I had to make marks in whatever medium was at hand, later, on the discovery of image making with other than a brush or pencil enraptured me, then that focussed down to the sheer excitement of moving images. I say excitement but that doesn't quite touch the meaning I have in mind. It's an imperative and there's a joy in the knowledge that I've found the means to realise the imperative.

A little while ago, Daniel Chandler of Aberystwyth University noted the individual use of early websites to make a statement about an individual's likes and dislikes. Prior to Utube and Myspace, people were making websites saying things like - "this is my cat, cherry, I like Vivaldi, Bon Jovi, or Kasabian, this is how you make flapjacks" - or whatever else it was that enthused them that they used to present a version of themselves to the world. Myspace systematised the tendency and people could simply list who they are. A consumer fetishistic approach to the self. Of course, my art tendency is just a more sophisticated and early adopter version of a humanity that knows that there's soon going to be about twenty times the current number of hominids in the world.

How does one define oneself in the midst of ubiquity ? When the most ordinary consumer can consume green and blacks, travel to canada for extreme biking, or choose any place on the planet, any act to 'define' themselves ? And, in 100 years time, when web3 has addressed and solved starving humanity's problems - where are we amidst the onward thrust ?

If you read Ray Bradbury, J.G Ballard, or especially Nigel Kneale (Quatrermass) one proposition is that the solving of problems generates psychosis which eventually destroys us. If you read Blake or his inspirer, Swedenborg, then you'll see a heavenly future wrapping us in it's war pink rosy glow. Popular entertainers like Lucas in the last Star Wars showed a ind of art that is in fact made from gingerbread - it's cheesy, it's holographic, it's gauche.

This is the problem for the artist. We have a long tradition of thinking out side the box. In fact that's been a major part of what we've done in creating 'art'. Painting on a cave wall with berries and roots is pretty amazing thinking outside of the box for a hunter gatherer (if you believe that tale of what we once were) - making images that carry ideas of the world around us that stimulate thoughts/feelings/intuitions/insights in others - if that's what art is (well it has to be something) - is a fair calling for a person. But given that calling, and given that the strategies are mostly now investigated and understood, and given that fame comes to those who shock (mostly), then elegant, subtle art that strives for a resonance with the undefined in the viewer of the work is hard to recognize amidst the noise in the art marketplace.

So this leads me on to another thought: I want to make art that can be seen in not only a national, international context but also a local context - I want to realize the making and exhibition of art (and exhibition is half of the equation) in a way that no matter where it is shown - it works. Some art works because it is in the Tate, Metrolpoiltan or Uffizi gallery, working because the sheer act of appearing on those sites 'says' a lot about what you will see - it says at least, 'look at me - I wouldn't be here unless I have weight'. But we all know that if someone chose a dustbin to look at in that context - we would all look (thank you Duchamp - very important moment that one).

So yes, the exhibition space is of course important, but what if you put the work in the Phoenix Art space in Glastonbury ? In a way, it's a far more rigorous space in that those that go there know that the fact that we're all alive at this particular moment is pretty amazing, so given that, what might the artist present to us with that in mind ? Comments on consumerism, the state of the world, political battles, documentations of far flung tribes (especially Tuaregs - how fashionable are they in the contemporary artists mind!), no, the more trite art can't stand up in the local space given also that local artists are often emulating the greater art they've seen and the work is often substandard (and sometimes the audience is painfully insulting in its ignorance). But my point is that somewhere in all of this is the possibility that making art can or should be as valid to show at the Phoenix as well as the Tate Turbine Hall or the Louvre.

In some pieces I've made which have exhibited both internationally in mini turbine halls and locally, the local exhbition space has generated a different feel, a different way of experiencing the art - the art itself has been transubstantiated in the act of exhibition.

Local/interactive art which invites the viewer to take part - it does not say: 'Don't Touch'.

My work generally is inviting you to touch it - which, given it's virtuality, is an impossibility. In this liminal boundary, there is much benefit, there is room for the viewer/experiencer to make it their own.

By inviting the viewer/experiencer to take part in the artwork I feel as an artist that I can communicate better as the work is non-presecriptive or dogamtic, but gently persuasive in the best sense of the word. Participants can then take part and reflect whilst doing so in their own personal way and take away from the work what is theirs, and not mine.

I just want to re-state a review of a piece of mine, not for the ego value, but because the reviewer is getting something that I inuitively feel and is just rising to the surface of articulation:

Terry Flaxton's shrewd and paradoxical installation contributes to the deconstruction of traditional video. The restless and versatile British filmmaker refuses usual interactivity, and displays, instead of a normal screen, a laid dinner table; then invites the viewer, through a very precise projection, to try to match the virtual fellows' gestures. An unforeseeable and bewildering end follows. Techne Catalogue October 2005 - May 2006

The key here is the statement of how this work 'refuses usual interactivity' and this act ' invites the viewer, through a very precise projection, to try to match the virtual fellows' gesture'. The virtual fellows.... Though material, we believe we all exist, the bodies around us perform and on faith we believe that something within them is just like us, is experienceing the world just as we do. So the artist feels the need to speak to the interior experiencer through any means possible, and last century we saw the artist take any hold of any means they could get hold of - even their own material shit - to speak, sometimes too loudly and unsubtly, to that which resides within.

But the artist has existed within the definition of the indivdual. There is a history told at many universities that charts the growth of the idea of the self. Maybe ten thousand, or one thousand years ago the boundary of the self was different and also, differently defined to the self, experiencing their own self-nature. But now it's digital times and the paradigm shift is occurring once more. Prior acts of art that relate to the idea of a self that is a consumer and experiencer, in fact a doer and a knower, is profoundly placed within a Newtonian if not Euclidian universe. ...Clocks and mechanics, equal and opposite reactions, the second law of thermo dynamics...

General humanity hasn't yet caught up with the paradigm shift, spoken through science, the apogee of materialist gesture, formed and articulated by Einstein, Plank and Bohr and hasn't yet faced up to the fundamental immateriality of the universe, of themselves. I'm not sure that our famous contemporary artists have yet, being born of an idea of existence that is set back in time in terms of the paradigm shift, are making art that deals with the deeper issues beneath simply serving up 'art' as it has previously been defined. I have to apologise to any of them who have faced up to this issue, not in artistic terms because they've made their mark and who cares what I think anyway, but maybe some are struggling with this issue beyond the fetishism of conceptual, consumerist art.

I now need to define, or find a description of how or why that might be possible within the act of more highly defining my own virtual works - I have to examine why 'virtuality' seems to provide an important key to the problem as I try to overcome the formal constraints to let the 'content' whatever that really is, speak.