I’ve begun to realise how long it takes for a concept to reach maturity and then when it is expressed technologically in one form, it is in fact the expression of a concept that seemed to have begun in another form. In other words, the real world follows thought.
Take for example the Edisonograph - an invention by Edison of a means of recording sound on a wax scroll. All praise to the inventor for the act of invention and to paraphrase Einstein, all of those inventors upon who’s shoulders he stood.
It seemed like an analogue invention: the way the signal was encoded on the scroll used analogue technology and was susceptible to all the faults of the analogue. Think of Chinese whispers, tell a tale from one to another and before long the tale is changed through reproduction. This is a simple way of understanding the analogue mode. It copies and also copies the faults of the medium until eventually all the faults outweigh the original content. This is called the signal to noise ratio. The content is the signal, the faults (hiss etc) are the noise. The signal to noise ratio is how much there is of one compared to the other.
I note that even in my language I refer to an earlier invention to describe the inscription of the wax scroll as writing, which refers to that of writing on Egyptian papyrus - I called Edison’s roll of wax a ‘scroll’. This speaks of our entire set of inventions before the digital as if they were all analogue in form. This is simply revisionism through hindsight. Projecting back one understanding upon everything that preceded it - and I’m about to embark on another revisionist projection and suggest that everything before the digital - was in fact digital.
Cultural ideas had begun to spread from culture to culture at the beginning of the analogue age and as soon as a commodity was invented to transmit value and therefore its culture, the wax scroll, the disc, the tape etc, then the digital age had begun. The East was privy to the culture of the west as was the West privy to the culture of the east - and each was of course as valuable as the other - and so it was ten centuries ago and more. Digital media was latent within analogue media. The printing press did that very same job as ten centuries before that, word of mouth with its analogue Chinese-whispers form, using letters carried between readers by non-readers or people telling myth and tale to transmit data from the thinkers of each culture to each other.
So to the concept of the hundred monkeys: when the hundredth and last monkey on an island learns to wash the potatoes (taught by a zoologist or anthropologist) then the first monkey on another island somehow seems to develop the ability to wash a potato before eating, as if by magic.
Nowadays children show each other their ipod or variant and even if they can’t speak the same language they exhibit their cultural leanings to each other by asking each other to listen to what their listening pattern is - this is simple demonstration. They use digital media - it’s just faster than learning a linguistically based language and could be argued to be a meta-language. It dispenses with the detail and cuts to the chase. So now we’re learning to communicate with other abilities derived from our sensorium (this is my favourite word to describe the overall set of senses, intuitions, emotions, physical state etc that we exist within). It avoids a spiritual description, but equally avoids that nullifying Aristotelian description much loved by the followers of scientism, determinist or materialist. I use this because as Hamlet told Horatio, to paraphrase, there are more paradigms dreamed of in our current intellectual grasp.
Chomsky proposed the dependent origination of language and thought, a concept cherished by Buddhists - that everything arises in relation to everything else. Westerners say you can only know one thing about something to the exclusion of other things (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). We romanticise Eastern thinking by imagining that the sanguine response to that contention is that the wise Buddha figure sits patiently by reflecting that this is not so, that all you have to simply defocus your ratiocinations and mentations and various anxious frontal lobe activity that are constricting your ability to perceive both at once - that is, the mental activity of alienation that is so beloved by cold-climate western thinking.
In all of this, that which appreciates logic in us, “this fact, this fact, this state, this idea should follow each other” and the prime form of logic is simply ‘yes and no’ - the two digital states when encoded into voltage. Philosophically of course this might break down when applying the Buddhist philosopher Nargajuna’s thinking: “Neither this, nor that, nor both and also, neither”. Perhaps there’s an extension to digitality when we transcend yes and no. Nargajuna was probably quite happy washing potatoes when he had to. There’s a line form a story by John Cowper-Powis that comes to mind as a critique of the inebriation that can be caused by mentation and ratiocination: An old housekeeper is in the kitchen washing potatoes as the old gardener comes in and sits at the table and muses philosophically about the events that happen in a garden. “She listened with the patience of women of all ages, as men as they are wont, muse upon things greater than themselves”.
So with a mind to the women who might be smiling to herself as I say this, as well as the Buddha sitting with the Bonopo Monkey in the corner: at the moment it seems to me that digitality is in fact a simple washing of potatoes before we eat - after all, aren’t we supposed to be apes too?
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Monday, 1 September 2008
We have always been Global
It’s happened: I knew it would happen, but what’s taken me by surprise is that it happened whilst I was watching and I didn’t see it happen. I pride myself on being aware, conscious of the flow of things in the world - it’s a lesson in itself that the need to define oneself as self-aware does not actually produce self-awareness - or world-awareness.
What’s happened is this: the connections across cultures have been made. If you were a Japanese you too would have heard a famous English tune, as Haruki Murakami speaks of the Beatles song in his novel “Norwegian Wood”.
I thought at the time, that this song, this reference was too specifically English to spread. Yes it was famous, yes it crossed barriers, yes it was popular - yes ‘the Brits were coming’ etc. So I imagined that we in the West, or in the dominion of the West, really would be familiar with the song - and not all of us would know it well either, just the cognoscenti.
Yet the notion of the ‘West’ has spread, even the ‘East’ is now the West, even though the governments of the East mistakenly believe they should preserve the notion of the East. The West as a notion carries certain meanings around politics and culture: the interests of the West for instance, energy, cheap clothes foodstuffs and so on - around culture as well - short skirts, a lax attitude to the culture of the country the notion resides in (where has the English folksong gone unless it as a notion can be harnessed to further extend the very idea of the West as in recent years) - and so on. But the ‘West’ and more specifically ‘The American Dream’ is the dream of the species for itself as it sheds the clothes of a former existence.
I don’t want to detour into the problems of America, or more the problems of the country that is the key exporter of the baser levels of the idea of the West, it is after all, simply the baton carrier after the UK, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal and to a far lesser extent Belgium, Switzerland and a few other countries, as the reins of empire were handed over after the second world war. The Japanese though coy at first took up European dress and ideas, as did Korea and now, massively, China, with its censored internet, itself a contradiction which will be the motive power for its own change, then there’s the rest of Asia, South America, India and so on - finally we are in a global village where unlike the global concept of the 60’s where small cultures exchanged cultural values, now the digital is in fact the currency of exchange as grinning children adopt faux Hollywood posses the world over to seem to themselves more than any other that they too are the heroes and heroines of their own lives.
The pictures and soundtracks they carry on their data sticks, pads, panels, wrist gadgets and pods are the motive soundtracks of their own lives displaced, so that they are themselves the audience for things-that-happen to them and the beat goes on trying to convince them that they are in fact the experience in a consumption pattern which itself denies the idea of the experiencer, for it in effect supplies a notion of an active consumer rather than experiencer.
All of us are now bi-directional, multi-directional in fact. We are polymaths going into the net and coming back like raiders who have a swag bag of assets as if they were un-cut jewels that we had to polish through using them with other raided assets: pictures, sounds, moving-images, whatever - next to each other in the form Herman Hesse described in his book The Glass Bead Game. By placing them next to each other we imagine we are creatively involving ourselves in the world by using the rotting bones of others creativity. Yet as we all say to each other, those of us truly engaged in creating work “nothing is new, it’s all been done before” and so on. Yet if we are true 'creatives' we don’t believe that stance as we say it, because the search for the new - the philosophers stone - is what drives us. The newly created is transformative of the one that is the vehicle for the manifestation of the new thing - that is what we are searching for - not a set of assets, old rags that can be bumped up against each other so that the seams and divisions are obscured in a blur so that the middle-adopters can’t tell the difference. They never could, they never will until humanity has gotten over placing itself anywhere along any kind of curve - bell, octagonal, straight line - or whatever.
As I grew up I was an early adopter and therefore amongst the leaders of the bell curve to take the new things up as they appeared, I didn’t need to be told things by others; I found them myself and swapped directions with the other explorers to the new incoming esoteric places within culture that validated my sense of self which hinged upon being different.
I remember later though being told by the middle adopters, those people in the very middle of the Bell curve about a music group who for me, by now, were old and tired. I remember the very same person had called me weird when I had tried to tell him about this very same music early on whilst in the early adopter phase. He mocked me and exposed me to his fellow latecomers and they mocked me too. This however is now the past. We are all early adopters now because the notion of the bell curve is now at least truncated, if not redundant.
Something appears and commodity fetishism is the dominant value to receive it: “In the Kingdom of Consumption the Consumer is King” (this is my paraphrase of a series of ideas outlined in 1967 by Guy De Board in the Society of the Spectacle and not forgetting in the same year Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday life - two texts that a friend of mine was raided for and arrested in the seventies - now the authorities celebrate this text as it is the bible of late capitalism, and not its critique - C’est la Guerre).
A few years ago, at the beginning of the new digital age everyone who had adopted a stance to the Net had a webpage and the page told the world, telematically, of the likes and dislikes of that person - ‘what I like, what I don’t like, what identifies me to you’ and asked the question, ‘are there others of you, like me, out there?’ But this was a simple extension of the late twentieth century self that had become porous, where it’s boundaries both external and internal were far further, yet far closer than they had been in previous centuries. Also these likes and dislikes were a simple collection of commodity values. “I like this group, this colour, this wallpaper. I decorate my soul in this way”. But what was that soul? Just another middle adopter with a taste derived from the commodities that make up the taste of the general mass of humanity? And even if you were an early or even a late adopter (and those were formed from a need to be different by not following the mass which in itself seems good if you look with an attitude formed by the criteria of the old paradigm - that to be a middle ranking soul was good, a high ranking soul even better, and a low ranking soul not good at all), even if you were one out of the ordinary, were you not also just a ragbag collection of details?
I’m railing here about the dominance of commodity fetishism, which seems so fluidly connected with the tsunami of innovation of wavelet digitality*.
Now though, whether you’re a young Turkish person going to a coca cola backed music and light festival in Istanbul which seeks to evoke the original festivals of the ‘West’, or a young Nicaraguan, or a Thai fisherman’s son you will be connected to the waves and pulses that pass through culture as they happen with a set of references that grow out of the Aquarian digital explosion of meaning of the sixties.
It happened back then and I was there all the time saying, “I wonder where it’s happening - I can’t find it”. The magic of course was that it’s always happening and never detectable by those present - except for the mad man and it wasn’t my place to be mad. A reading I had from a 5000-year-old ‘book’ told me that I was placed close to the centre of a vortex to observe. Should I become too involved the vortex would suck me in and I would become the vortex itself and therefore become unconscious - which in my world is the only crime. Well, not a crime, there are no crimes in a universe where there is no good or evil of course.
So what does it mean? It means that the human race is flourishing and growing out of its state where it’s emotion is too connected to mind - or rather, the evolutionary stage of needing cold-mind to be tempered by hot-emotions is passing with mind made a little more compassionate. And when we get over this stage we’ll all become creative beings because we’ll no longer be acquisitive of others ideas, thinking that if we possess them they’ll ennoble us, make us better in some way. The only thing that’ll do that of course is when we get over the desire or need to demonstrate to all the others that we have the right badge to join their club - to be looked up to because of what we have. The only determinant in the end is of course what we are - and - of course, unsurprisingly, we are all the same when we stop thinking of self and just become channels for the creative energies that surround us from our birth. The stuff that comes through is devoid of self, it just naturally ‘is’. I speak from the perspective of someone who is familiarising themselves with the creative act and the creative space one has to maintain to make the creative act.
But: more than two million years ago before the first migrations, when we still sat in our shaded and dusty places after first venturing from the tree canopy, with our nearby water, covered from the sun, defensible from wild animals that might see us as lunch, or other family groupings that might want something from us (for free) - as we sat around at that moment free from worry, free from labour, free from care, we might tell another person about something we’d seen or found. We might tell them of a place we had found that we might re-visit because its memory had stayed with us for some reason, yet we did not populate that dream ourselves. It had stayed with us dreamtime-like as a symbol of something that meant something more than the ordinary things around us, than the flints we used, the skins we tanned, the sex we had, the warm cuddles that protected us from the cold that surrounded us. This memory was the echo that would stay with us for two million years or more. It is the memory of the connection of the singular to the many; of the wholeness felt by the yogi as she enters a union with the only narrative we have, of flowing back to the one that we are derived from. I do not mean this spiritually; I mean this simply, logically, without sentiment. I mean this as a statement of fact, that we have always been global in thought and mind and soul - the very root of us as the one and the many at our root.
So in talking of an historical moment when the ‘digital’ might register as a significant moment, this somewhat misses the point. We are encouraging ourselves to become more self-reflective, more analytical, more conscious of what is happening as it is happening, so that the world we make is as good as it can be. But it is becoming apparent that simply to look does not mean that we shall see. As Heisenberg pointed out we might know something about a particle, but we may not know all about a particle. It is in the looking, in the condition of the act of looking that we create a tunnel through which to look - a telescope that isolates the thing that is looked at so that we may see it more clearly. ‘Clearly’ in the terms of a telescope means brighter and sharper because the form of ‘looking’ is of an optical nature.
So the form of the looking, the state of the enquirer, the state of mind, the values, the quotient for the sensibilities that the looker is composed of is the determining factor about what will eventually be seen at the end of the act of looking.
So it would seem that the concepts that underlie an idea, which precede it’s manifestation come long before the thing itself and that is what is almost impossible to note when they actually occur - at least in terms of the language that might be formulated later when due time has passed for the moment to ‘come into focus.
So by now I can see that the thing that I’ve been alertly looking for has happened and yes it took me by surprise: the connections across cultures have been made. The issue now is - what are those connections in their deepest form. They seem on the surface to this writer to be simply signs of a growing fetishisation - and in the previous paradigm to festishise was to displace, by simple definition. One was left with a purist reading which says: if you have the thing itself why would you have a symbol that same thing as having greater power than the thing itself? But then this idea comes from a world where authenticity was the dominant concept within the paradigm. But with the digital comes the telematic and the telematic of itself brings the necessity of the representative to conduct the actual business - in past ages did not the powerful potentate send his or her ambassador to affect treaties and conduct new business?
The Situationists held that 'In the Kingdom of Consumption the Consumer is King' and a contemporary reading of that might be: In the Age of Digitality the Avatar is king.
*Wavelet digitality is a phrase which seems apposite in its description of this phase of the advance of digital technology in that it is in my estimation the very thing that has superseded the old analogue paradigm that was being applied to early digital technologies vis a vis: Joseph Baptiste Fourier invented some maths, the Discrete Cosine Transform in 1800 which served us well until around 1990 but was damaging of data compression especially when applied to images, whereas Fourier’s 1807 invention, Wavelet Transforms was the very piece of mathematics more perfectly rendered around 1990 that intelligently’ dealt with data compression, but not only this it is far more efficient in that it’s internal Mathematical Algorithms respond to the data in a more sympathetic order and also with greater effect in terms of reducing the information that has to flow between the devices those that have entered into the world of the commodity fetishised require in their depicting of their own lives as a Hollywood story - to themselves and others. My only problem of glamorising a life is that you may no longer be attached to the authenticity of that life - though I do know there are pitfalls in having allegiance to this notion - it’s part of an older paradigm for a start - but authenticity seems to me to be necessary for an authentic unit to uphold. Mind you, we are all genetic copies so this may also be an outdated median to follow.
What’s happened is this: the connections across cultures have been made. If you were a Japanese you too would have heard a famous English tune, as Haruki Murakami speaks of the Beatles song in his novel “Norwegian Wood”.
I thought at the time, that this song, this reference was too specifically English to spread. Yes it was famous, yes it crossed barriers, yes it was popular - yes ‘the Brits were coming’ etc. So I imagined that we in the West, or in the dominion of the West, really would be familiar with the song - and not all of us would know it well either, just the cognoscenti.
Yet the notion of the ‘West’ has spread, even the ‘East’ is now the West, even though the governments of the East mistakenly believe they should preserve the notion of the East. The West as a notion carries certain meanings around politics and culture: the interests of the West for instance, energy, cheap clothes foodstuffs and so on - around culture as well - short skirts, a lax attitude to the culture of the country the notion resides in (where has the English folksong gone unless it as a notion can be harnessed to further extend the very idea of the West as in recent years) - and so on. But the ‘West’ and more specifically ‘The American Dream’ is the dream of the species for itself as it sheds the clothes of a former existence.
I don’t want to detour into the problems of America, or more the problems of the country that is the key exporter of the baser levels of the idea of the West, it is after all, simply the baton carrier after the UK, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal and to a far lesser extent Belgium, Switzerland and a few other countries, as the reins of empire were handed over after the second world war. The Japanese though coy at first took up European dress and ideas, as did Korea and now, massively, China, with its censored internet, itself a contradiction which will be the motive power for its own change, then there’s the rest of Asia, South America, India and so on - finally we are in a global village where unlike the global concept of the 60’s where small cultures exchanged cultural values, now the digital is in fact the currency of exchange as grinning children adopt faux Hollywood posses the world over to seem to themselves more than any other that they too are the heroes and heroines of their own lives.
The pictures and soundtracks they carry on their data sticks, pads, panels, wrist gadgets and pods are the motive soundtracks of their own lives displaced, so that they are themselves the audience for things-that-happen to them and the beat goes on trying to convince them that they are in fact the experience in a consumption pattern which itself denies the idea of the experiencer, for it in effect supplies a notion of an active consumer rather than experiencer.
All of us are now bi-directional, multi-directional in fact. We are polymaths going into the net and coming back like raiders who have a swag bag of assets as if they were un-cut jewels that we had to polish through using them with other raided assets: pictures, sounds, moving-images, whatever - next to each other in the form Herman Hesse described in his book The Glass Bead Game. By placing them next to each other we imagine we are creatively involving ourselves in the world by using the rotting bones of others creativity. Yet as we all say to each other, those of us truly engaged in creating work “nothing is new, it’s all been done before” and so on. Yet if we are true 'creatives' we don’t believe that stance as we say it, because the search for the new - the philosophers stone - is what drives us. The newly created is transformative of the one that is the vehicle for the manifestation of the new thing - that is what we are searching for - not a set of assets, old rags that can be bumped up against each other so that the seams and divisions are obscured in a blur so that the middle-adopters can’t tell the difference. They never could, they never will until humanity has gotten over placing itself anywhere along any kind of curve - bell, octagonal, straight line - or whatever.
As I grew up I was an early adopter and therefore amongst the leaders of the bell curve to take the new things up as they appeared, I didn’t need to be told things by others; I found them myself and swapped directions with the other explorers to the new incoming esoteric places within culture that validated my sense of self which hinged upon being different.
I remember later though being told by the middle adopters, those people in the very middle of the Bell curve about a music group who for me, by now, were old and tired. I remember the very same person had called me weird when I had tried to tell him about this very same music early on whilst in the early adopter phase. He mocked me and exposed me to his fellow latecomers and they mocked me too. This however is now the past. We are all early adopters now because the notion of the bell curve is now at least truncated, if not redundant.
Something appears and commodity fetishism is the dominant value to receive it: “In the Kingdom of Consumption the Consumer is King” (this is my paraphrase of a series of ideas outlined in 1967 by Guy De Board in the Society of the Spectacle and not forgetting in the same year Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday life - two texts that a friend of mine was raided for and arrested in the seventies - now the authorities celebrate this text as it is the bible of late capitalism, and not its critique - C’est la Guerre).
A few years ago, at the beginning of the new digital age everyone who had adopted a stance to the Net had a webpage and the page told the world, telematically, of the likes and dislikes of that person - ‘what I like, what I don’t like, what identifies me to you’ and asked the question, ‘are there others of you, like me, out there?’ But this was a simple extension of the late twentieth century self that had become porous, where it’s boundaries both external and internal were far further, yet far closer than they had been in previous centuries. Also these likes and dislikes were a simple collection of commodity values. “I like this group, this colour, this wallpaper. I decorate my soul in this way”. But what was that soul? Just another middle adopter with a taste derived from the commodities that make up the taste of the general mass of humanity? And even if you were an early or even a late adopter (and those were formed from a need to be different by not following the mass which in itself seems good if you look with an attitude formed by the criteria of the old paradigm - that to be a middle ranking soul was good, a high ranking soul even better, and a low ranking soul not good at all), even if you were one out of the ordinary, were you not also just a ragbag collection of details?
I’m railing here about the dominance of commodity fetishism, which seems so fluidly connected with the tsunami of innovation of wavelet digitality*.
Now though, whether you’re a young Turkish person going to a coca cola backed music and light festival in Istanbul which seeks to evoke the original festivals of the ‘West’, or a young Nicaraguan, or a Thai fisherman’s son you will be connected to the waves and pulses that pass through culture as they happen with a set of references that grow out of the Aquarian digital explosion of meaning of the sixties.
It happened back then and I was there all the time saying, “I wonder where it’s happening - I can’t find it”. The magic of course was that it’s always happening and never detectable by those present - except for the mad man and it wasn’t my place to be mad. A reading I had from a 5000-year-old ‘book’ told me that I was placed close to the centre of a vortex to observe. Should I become too involved the vortex would suck me in and I would become the vortex itself and therefore become unconscious - which in my world is the only crime. Well, not a crime, there are no crimes in a universe where there is no good or evil of course.
So what does it mean? It means that the human race is flourishing and growing out of its state where it’s emotion is too connected to mind - or rather, the evolutionary stage of needing cold-mind to be tempered by hot-emotions is passing with mind made a little more compassionate. And when we get over this stage we’ll all become creative beings because we’ll no longer be acquisitive of others ideas, thinking that if we possess them they’ll ennoble us, make us better in some way. The only thing that’ll do that of course is when we get over the desire or need to demonstrate to all the others that we have the right badge to join their club - to be looked up to because of what we have. The only determinant in the end is of course what we are - and - of course, unsurprisingly, we are all the same when we stop thinking of self and just become channels for the creative energies that surround us from our birth. The stuff that comes through is devoid of self, it just naturally ‘is’. I speak from the perspective of someone who is familiarising themselves with the creative act and the creative space one has to maintain to make the creative act.
But: more than two million years ago before the first migrations, when we still sat in our shaded and dusty places after first venturing from the tree canopy, with our nearby water, covered from the sun, defensible from wild animals that might see us as lunch, or other family groupings that might want something from us (for free) - as we sat around at that moment free from worry, free from labour, free from care, we might tell another person about something we’d seen or found. We might tell them of a place we had found that we might re-visit because its memory had stayed with us for some reason, yet we did not populate that dream ourselves. It had stayed with us dreamtime-like as a symbol of something that meant something more than the ordinary things around us, than the flints we used, the skins we tanned, the sex we had, the warm cuddles that protected us from the cold that surrounded us. This memory was the echo that would stay with us for two million years or more. It is the memory of the connection of the singular to the many; of the wholeness felt by the yogi as she enters a union with the only narrative we have, of flowing back to the one that we are derived from. I do not mean this spiritually; I mean this simply, logically, without sentiment. I mean this as a statement of fact, that we have always been global in thought and mind and soul - the very root of us as the one and the many at our root.
So in talking of an historical moment when the ‘digital’ might register as a significant moment, this somewhat misses the point. We are encouraging ourselves to become more self-reflective, more analytical, more conscious of what is happening as it is happening, so that the world we make is as good as it can be. But it is becoming apparent that simply to look does not mean that we shall see. As Heisenberg pointed out we might know something about a particle, but we may not know all about a particle. It is in the looking, in the condition of the act of looking that we create a tunnel through which to look - a telescope that isolates the thing that is looked at so that we may see it more clearly. ‘Clearly’ in the terms of a telescope means brighter and sharper because the form of ‘looking’ is of an optical nature.
So the form of the looking, the state of the enquirer, the state of mind, the values, the quotient for the sensibilities that the looker is composed of is the determining factor about what will eventually be seen at the end of the act of looking.
So it would seem that the concepts that underlie an idea, which precede it’s manifestation come long before the thing itself and that is what is almost impossible to note when they actually occur - at least in terms of the language that might be formulated later when due time has passed for the moment to ‘come into focus.
So by now I can see that the thing that I’ve been alertly looking for has happened and yes it took me by surprise: the connections across cultures have been made. The issue now is - what are those connections in their deepest form. They seem on the surface to this writer to be simply signs of a growing fetishisation - and in the previous paradigm to festishise was to displace, by simple definition. One was left with a purist reading which says: if you have the thing itself why would you have a symbol that same thing as having greater power than the thing itself? But then this idea comes from a world where authenticity was the dominant concept within the paradigm. But with the digital comes the telematic and the telematic of itself brings the necessity of the representative to conduct the actual business - in past ages did not the powerful potentate send his or her ambassador to affect treaties and conduct new business?
The Situationists held that 'In the Kingdom of Consumption the Consumer is King' and a contemporary reading of that might be: In the Age of Digitality the Avatar is king.
*Wavelet digitality is a phrase which seems apposite in its description of this phase of the advance of digital technology in that it is in my estimation the very thing that has superseded the old analogue paradigm that was being applied to early digital technologies vis a vis: Joseph Baptiste Fourier invented some maths, the Discrete Cosine Transform in 1800 which served us well until around 1990 but was damaging of data compression especially when applied to images, whereas Fourier’s 1807 invention, Wavelet Transforms was the very piece of mathematics more perfectly rendered around 1990 that intelligently’ dealt with data compression, but not only this it is far more efficient in that it’s internal Mathematical Algorithms respond to the data in a more sympathetic order and also with greater effect in terms of reducing the information that has to flow between the devices those that have entered into the world of the commodity fetishised require in their depicting of their own lives as a Hollywood story - to themselves and others. My only problem of glamorising a life is that you may no longer be attached to the authenticity of that life - though I do know there are pitfalls in having allegiance to this notion - it’s part of an older paradigm for a start - but authenticity seems to me to be necessary for an authentic unit to uphold. Mind you, we are all genetic copies so this may also be an outdated median to follow.
Mind the Gap
I nearly began this entry by writing: 'you must forgive me for being absent for so long’. But of course this presupposes that there is a ‘you’ reading this. At this time I tell myself that I am writing this blog so that I can record what happens (happened) whilst I was upon my three-year fellowship. How did the ideas grow, how did the thinking manifest itself and mature into concepts that I could exchange with a real reader. But actually it would be more correct to write “I must forgive myself for being absent”, but then I don’t believe in blaming myself so that would be redundant.
What has been happening is that I have been ‘realising’ my six new pieces for an award that I received in October 2007 and I have made an agreement to complete these by the end of September 2007 - and it is now August 26th 2008. Since my last entry I have been absolutely flat out either arranging for the shooting of the new work or actually producing it - weekdays and weekends too.
The reason I can write this, that I have the time to write this is that I am in Turkey in 37-degree heat and I cannot possibly do anything to advance any of my productions. When I get back in 8 days time I hit the ground running and have to go to a post-production suite to finish some images at 4k resolution and prepare them for 2k display, then shoot another production, the Unfurling, then go direct to Venice to shoot Un Tempo, Una Volta over 6 days then return too stage 10 exhibitions until the end of September by when I will also have to lodge my interim report for the first 12 months of my Fellowship.
In amongst all of this I also have to formulate some ideas about what I’m doing - and why, and this of course goes to the heart of my fellowship itself. I have what is known as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Research Fellowship in… I hesitate here because there are some issues to hold back to discuss. The first 4 words, the AHRC, is a government-backed council empowered to give away money for research. So far so good. But there’s the caveat buried in the next bit `Creative’. I am a Creative Fellow - in all senses. It’s taken me years to come out of the closet and admit to creativity publicly - but I can do that now so that’s not the issue. I’ve been flexing my creative muscles for as many years as I’ve been able to make a mark - I know how to do it, it’s up to the audience to judge how well.
The real issue is that my research has to take place within the idea of the creative, which is more Euclidian and less Aristotelian. Here I make reference to an old but influential text: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ where the author, one Robert Pirsig notes that creativity is in the eye of the beholder. His work is about the creative juices that have to be invoked over and above intellectual acuity when compiling, in his study, a set of instructions. One may be intellectually acute but that does not mean to say that anything valuable gets communicated. It was Pirsig’s contention that Aristotle created the split between the creative and the scientific. Aristotle created a world view where things had value if the were weighed and measured - all else was irrelevant - according to Pirsig. Euclid, through this writer’s a vague avoidance created a more whole worldview through his geometry.
So going back to the idea of creative research - what does that mean in terms of the Aristotelian imperative? Clearly one cannot weigh and measure the creative act, yet the money says you can - so somehow I must at least make an attempt here where I reside in a Euclidian universe. I’m using this epithet in a lax way - what I mean here is that unlike Heisenberg - who has been in my thoughts a lot lately - I believe I can know both my velocity and my position. That’s what artists do, they utilise what the Aristotelian thinker can never use - a Euclidian sense of worth. A real bastardisation is happening because I like the idea of geometry as propose by Lewis Carol in Alice through the Looking Glass - things are relative and valuable and measurable within the circumstances by those that would take up a tape measure to a brush stroke by Cezanne. The scientist can only know the length of Cezanne’s brush stroke, or its colour, or its tone in relation to other colours and brush strokes - practically everything else that is valuable in art is unknowable and unfathomable by the scientist.
But the ‘money’ says that you have to try to know something about what your intuition is telling you. And here I have to make a small commercial break because at least some wise soul in authority knows that there is something to be had here in the outer reaches of the investigation of creativity and has made provision for people like me to try to know it.
I assert that I am on the right track to find something out about what I’m doing. I can’t make reference to anything that can substantiate that statement. I just ‘know’ it. And what I’ve been doing as a process toward finding something out within the boundaries of the scientific method, i.e. make a hypothesis and test it, tells me that all the lights are on green and not amber or red - the conditional sense of the notion of a hypothesis has given a thumbs up to the contention that, in my specific case - making art with High Definition Technologies will bare reward. Even my tests on standard definition or the lower realms of High Definition are delivering an audience response that speaks of a transmission between artist and audience that bares the fruit of pleasure (at least) for the audience. Pleasure has limitations, often we want the audience crying or at least reaching for a handkerchief so that the audience is ‘moved’. If we move them then we as artists might feel satisfied. But like Brecht, I have a suspicion of emotionalism - my goal is higher that that.
The Hindus say that the emotions are a lower frequency response (note with me how I slip so easily into scientific language when describing the non-scientific), let me rephrase that then with a musical metaphor - the Hindu’s say that intuition is an octave higher than emotion - that the same quality as emotion at a higher octave is what we term intuition. That the still small interior voice is simply a clearer articulation form within, from the mechanism within, about what it finds in the world.
Brecht wanted to touch the audience but not make become emotional. Perhaps he just wanted to communicate a political idea, perhaps he wanted more, I don’t really know and I’d rather leave that to people who really know about Brecht. I want to give the audience something that allows them to be truly creative in their response. If I can make art that has sufficient space within it then they too will respond creatively and become engaged with the work and also generate performative acts for themselves that are an integral part of the work - in fact, ideally, the work should itself fall away and then what the audience does becomes the work itself.
What has been happening is that I have been ‘realising’ my six new pieces for an award that I received in October 2007 and I have made an agreement to complete these by the end of September 2007 - and it is now August 26th 2008. Since my last entry I have been absolutely flat out either arranging for the shooting of the new work or actually producing it - weekdays and weekends too.
The reason I can write this, that I have the time to write this is that I am in Turkey in 37-degree heat and I cannot possibly do anything to advance any of my productions. When I get back in 8 days time I hit the ground running and have to go to a post-production suite to finish some images at 4k resolution and prepare them for 2k display, then shoot another production, the Unfurling, then go direct to Venice to shoot Un Tempo, Una Volta over 6 days then return too stage 10 exhibitions until the end of September by when I will also have to lodge my interim report for the first 12 months of my Fellowship.
In amongst all of this I also have to formulate some ideas about what I’m doing - and why, and this of course goes to the heart of my fellowship itself. I have what is known as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Research Fellowship in… I hesitate here because there are some issues to hold back to discuss. The first 4 words, the AHRC, is a government-backed council empowered to give away money for research. So far so good. But there’s the caveat buried in the next bit `Creative’. I am a Creative Fellow - in all senses. It’s taken me years to come out of the closet and admit to creativity publicly - but I can do that now so that’s not the issue. I’ve been flexing my creative muscles for as many years as I’ve been able to make a mark - I know how to do it, it’s up to the audience to judge how well.
The real issue is that my research has to take place within the idea of the creative, which is more Euclidian and less Aristotelian. Here I make reference to an old but influential text: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ where the author, one Robert Pirsig notes that creativity is in the eye of the beholder. His work is about the creative juices that have to be invoked over and above intellectual acuity when compiling, in his study, a set of instructions. One may be intellectually acute but that does not mean to say that anything valuable gets communicated. It was Pirsig’s contention that Aristotle created the split between the creative and the scientific. Aristotle created a world view where things had value if the were weighed and measured - all else was irrelevant - according to Pirsig. Euclid, through this writer’s a vague avoidance created a more whole worldview through his geometry.
So going back to the idea of creative research - what does that mean in terms of the Aristotelian imperative? Clearly one cannot weigh and measure the creative act, yet the money says you can - so somehow I must at least make an attempt here where I reside in a Euclidian universe. I’m using this epithet in a lax way - what I mean here is that unlike Heisenberg - who has been in my thoughts a lot lately - I believe I can know both my velocity and my position. That’s what artists do, they utilise what the Aristotelian thinker can never use - a Euclidian sense of worth. A real bastardisation is happening because I like the idea of geometry as propose by Lewis Carol in Alice through the Looking Glass - things are relative and valuable and measurable within the circumstances by those that would take up a tape measure to a brush stroke by Cezanne. The scientist can only know the length of Cezanne’s brush stroke, or its colour, or its tone in relation to other colours and brush strokes - practically everything else that is valuable in art is unknowable and unfathomable by the scientist.
But the ‘money’ says that you have to try to know something about what your intuition is telling you. And here I have to make a small commercial break because at least some wise soul in authority knows that there is something to be had here in the outer reaches of the investigation of creativity and has made provision for people like me to try to know it.
I assert that I am on the right track to find something out about what I’m doing. I can’t make reference to anything that can substantiate that statement. I just ‘know’ it. And what I’ve been doing as a process toward finding something out within the boundaries of the scientific method, i.e. make a hypothesis and test it, tells me that all the lights are on green and not amber or red - the conditional sense of the notion of a hypothesis has given a thumbs up to the contention that, in my specific case - making art with High Definition Technologies will bare reward. Even my tests on standard definition or the lower realms of High Definition are delivering an audience response that speaks of a transmission between artist and audience that bares the fruit of pleasure (at least) for the audience. Pleasure has limitations, often we want the audience crying or at least reaching for a handkerchief so that the audience is ‘moved’. If we move them then we as artists might feel satisfied. But like Brecht, I have a suspicion of emotionalism - my goal is higher that that.
The Hindus say that the emotions are a lower frequency response (note with me how I slip so easily into scientific language when describing the non-scientific), let me rephrase that then with a musical metaphor - the Hindu’s say that intuition is an octave higher than emotion - that the same quality as emotion at a higher octave is what we term intuition. That the still small interior voice is simply a clearer articulation form within, from the mechanism within, about what it finds in the world.
Brecht wanted to touch the audience but not make become emotional. Perhaps he just wanted to communicate a political idea, perhaps he wanted more, I don’t really know and I’d rather leave that to people who really know about Brecht. I want to give the audience something that allows them to be truly creative in their response. If I can make art that has sufficient space within it then they too will respond creatively and become engaged with the work and also generate performative acts for themselves that are an integral part of the work - in fact, ideally, the work should itself fall away and then what the audience does becomes the work itself.
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Achieving a 4k workflow
I’ve just had a very interesting experience grading some 4k Red footage (my Yosemite Project) in Pepper’s Grading suite in Soho, London. For the first time in the investigation into HD I felt I was conducting research.For a start the comment from the days work that rang through came from Jet Omoshebi, a well respected colorist on the London and European scene. When asked compared to importing film at 4k, how did red 4k footage compare? She answered: In the short time she had to play with the footage she had not come to the end of its latitude which was the case when grading standard HD footage. This to me was revolutionary because it means that the sheer limitations of electronic cinematography colour space, which was the basic problem in grading, was not there at this level of electronic cinematography.
The other thing that rang out from working with 4k was the fact that all future handling of data is limited by its size and the pipelines we can push it through - and, importantly, the physics of the medium. WHat that means is that we have to seriously start thinking of using metadata to control the oceanic drifts of data around the systems we use. To continue the seafaring metaphor: As we increase our demands on the information that describes what lies in our field of view through the camera, or mobile scanner (as Tim Sassoon, the British yet-based-in-Los-Angeles-grader, calls the modern electronic camera), then the super tanker of data - which used to be through compression a small boat - needs to be steered through its various incarnations by a little tugboat with all the relevant information about it. How big it is, what it’s supposed to do, whether it’s supposed to look like a red supertanker, a blue supertanker etc. Time to ditch the metaphor which is becoming preposterous.
So in the grade, on a digital vision Film Master, which can handle 4k data, we were actually using RedCine to output Redcode in Log mode as opposed to Linear broadcast space which would be limiting and then made 2k DPX files. The Film master was outputting through a 2k Barco Projector. We occasionally looked at 4k DPX files and of course could only see a quarter of the image - but the detail was incredible. Back in 2k we graded and the we the take the metadata - the instructions about how the footage should look - out to the 4k render path.
A note here is that a lot of facilities have a raid array set up for Broadcast ad HD specs and of course 4k needs about 900 Mbs - so in a protected raid you really need 1800 MBs which halves when in it’s protected mode. At home I have a raid that runs around 485 MBs - unprotected - but it’s so cheap I could buy another and do the backup myself through automating via the Mac. I used Redcine to select takes and final cut to import proxy files to edit what I wanted - this was a kind of sketch pad prior to the proper grade.
So, eventually when the 4k DPX files are thoroughly rendered we can either output for 4k Projector or apply a Lut for the particular stock and output to 4k film. The only difference in our experience was that we didn’t have the 4k projector to view through which of course may have influenced some decisions.
I guess you had to be there.
That’s the thing about all of this knowledge, outside of a theoretical understanding, you actually have to do it yourself to truly understand what’s happening and if you have that understanding you can think of new ways to create new pathways that might be better than the accepted ways of doing things which might in fact derive from somebody having had use of a particular piece of kit and the idiosyncrasies of the kit influenced thoughts about what was a ‘good’ idea which later proved a bad idea. In a sense, people in high level post production facilities are the best placed to do the experiments. Rendering though is a key issue and a piece of kit like the Film Master has 17 processors. No doubt more processors will be added and other companies will have other solutions and eventually rendering will occur faster than the delivery to the display device creating a ‘real time’ experience.
Incidentally, the grade Jet achieved on the shots of Yosemite - especially when we finally drained the colour to imitate the famous Ansel Adams picture - were phenomenal.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
3k 4k 5k and Beyond
After 27 years on the road as a DP I recently took up a Creative Research Fellowship in High Definition Imaging at Bristol University. There are two strands to my research i) to look at the effect of various resolutions on perception through making and exhibiting HD installations and ii) creating a resource for future researchers of video interviews on HDV of the thoughts of those people working in the higher reaches of HD at this point in time. So I’ve just been in the USA doing some interviews with people who are across the HD medium in an interesting way. Some of the people interviewed were just back from this years NAB, at which Red have announced 3k and 5k cameras besides their Red One which is notionally 4k (most industry people who’ve tested it believe it to be about 2.7K but I’ve also heard that it is as low res at about 1.8 k). So how does the Red fit in to our future and does the technical stuff really matter ? Read on.
Part of my research at Bristol University is to find out what the affect of high resolution images are on humans as we develop and tailor this new technology to our needs. I have some evidence from a recent installation that increased resolution can confuse the viewer as to what is real and what is not – but this is just the beginning of this new medium.
Remediation is a word that describes what a new medium does by copying the effects of the preceding medium for a while, whilst it’s finding its feet. Still life painting morphed into still life photography and the fledgling medium had to deal with older ways of thinking. HD Cinematography has the mindsets of three prior mediums to deal with – film, analogue video and early digital video.
So for this next work I decided to re-shoot a scene made famous by Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley which he captured through his exquisite Black and White images. This was not a gesture towards the idea of remediation – a form of copying - it was in fact about exploring something I’d noticed as I slowly get my eye into shape. In short my installation investigated at what level of resolution do people confuse real and projected reality. It turned out that images shot with 960 pixel AG HVX200 up-rezzed to 1080i create an interesting level of confusion with some projected plates of food and some real white plates placed in the projected plates location.
In this new strand of work I want to re-shoot those places that have been over shot to saturation to try to find something about what higher resolutions might say in addition to the iconography of the image, to try to photographically unveil some new truth about the location.
I hired a Red from Chater Cameras in Berkely after being directed to them by Art Adams, a well-known Bay Area Director of Photography who as it happens was only a week behind me in terms of doing a serious shoot with Red. Originally I’d posted on CML to try find a reputable source for a Red but apart from one in LA from Dale Launer (just a little too far from Yosemite) I mostly attracted some very dubious email correspondence from people who you just knew had no idea about the kit they were hiring out and certainly no back up. Chater had two bodies – that’s basic if you’re hiring. They also had the lenses I needed – you need serious glass with a Red. Also John Chater is a Scott and we like Scottish people don’t we.
I wanted an extremely long and detailed zoom out of the Bridal Veil Waterfall to slowly but surely increase detail, depth and definition until the viewer is completely overawed with the shot. This would be the kind of awe you get from An Ansel Adams photograph, but with the addition of the ‘reveal’ which of course the single image photographer was restricted from doing by their medium. My reveal also begins with a long slow digital zoom from the pixels of the image which displayed the water within the fall itself which was then picked up after it had zoomed out to 4k by the analogue lens zoom from tight on telephoto then out to wide shot.
Chater recommended Jeremy Long as a good AC familiar with the Red sufficiently to get the thing working and eventually downloading the data to laptop. I have to say, when you work with the kit it’s a fairly simple operational procedure – but with all of these things you need to get to touch the stuff in the first case – that’s why AC’s prep so much. The camera came from Berkeley to Yosemite after a 4 hour drive so if anything failed we were not going to be able to solve it – it would be a do-or-die shoot.
I realised I needed some good glass on the front of the camera in 4k mode so I asked John for his suggestions and we came up eventually with 24 – 290 Angeniux Optimo zoom that you can see in the picture – its not for the faint hearted. There’s a 6 inch Chroziel matte box on the front holding 4 bits of glass in front of the lens to ND the shot down to the right stop plus some atmosphere cutting glass as well as some sky ND Grad. Are grads dangerous on zooms? Only if you use them wrongly. As it happens I’m adding more and more grads into the mix these days to induce light control all around the lens. The 6 inch matte box is mandatory for proper HD shooting also - so the lightweight camera begins to get very heavy indeed.
So before I press record for the first time I’m standing at Tunnel View looking at the scene and wondering about exposure or at least some kind of placement on the latitude curve with a hubbub of people around me. I take out the light meter and take a reading at 320 ASA (and the Red is balanced at 5000k by the way – near daylight - I've begun to like this colour temperature a lot more recently as it actually reflects what my eyes are really seeing).As for 320 ASA, I think this is the correct 'exposure' for the current build.
In film we think of an Fstop (or Tstop) as a location on the exposure gradient and at the same time keep in mind that unlike video which was so damn critical in terms of exposure (don’t get it wrong basically – just like reversal film) – that all exposure values were in fact a relative judgement. We placed ourselves on an exposure curve and used experience to make an artistic choice about the representation of reality that we saw in front of us and in that choice induced atmosphere and hopefully the suspension of disbelief for the audience.
This gained an auteur kind of respect in the industry as we the cinematographers ‘painted with light’. I shan’t take that statement apart except to raise a doubt about what some people would prefer to maintain as an ‘artistic’ idea when in fact most DP’s use quite prosaic colour values to paint their ‘paintings’ - Like in any other practice, it's only the special ones with 'the touch' that make superlative work.
Many DP's simply use obvious colour ideas – warm looks make you feel comfortable with what’s going on, cold looks make you feel blue and alienated – etc. Conrad Hall and Vitorrio Storraro took two different approaches to the problem of conventional understandings and forged their own path in colour and exposure to widen the palette of the less talented people. We all owe them a great debt of gratitude for taking the risks they did and dragging the commercial folks along with them.
In video we had to play a slightly different game using all kinds of tricks to pull off the ‘dirtying of the look’ to generate some kind of organic feel in a clinically clean medium. In video I used to do all my work in camera and not abrogate my responsibility to the grader to work a thin patina of look over the footage. In film I lived on the edge of exposure – sometimes getting it wrong of course, but always knowing that as a head of BBC natural History once said – ‘we send people out with film cameras as opposed to video cameras because even a monkey can get something by spinning the dial’. That’s a telling statement, not because film is easy, but rather because that’s where the skill comes in – to get it ‘right’.
So it's said that a camera like the Red One has latitude for say 13 - 14 stops: 27 years ago I paid £500 to attend a workshop of a name cinematographer to try to learn how to expose film for low light. The cinematographer had specialised for his career in low ASA film and costume drama and was know for the excessive use of light. I asked him how to work at the low end and he didn’t understand my question – which was good because he relayed to me that I was thinking in the wrong way. There is no such thing as correct exposure, just a choice about where you place your exposure on the latitude gradient. So I paid my $1000 for that one piece of information: “Think Differently’.
So for absoulteley nothing I’ll pass this on to you: ‘Think Differently’ from now on about exposing electronic cinematography (that’s what I’ll now be calling it by the way, because that’s what I accept that it’s now legitimately become).
With all the above coming in to my mind as a dawning realisation started to take shape which I’ll talk about ina little while, I rated the camera at 320 ASA for rec 709 and measured 16 in the shadows and 45 in the highlights. The sweet spot on the lens was between 5.8 and 8 so I offered up a 2 stop polarising filter, a .3 or .6 of ND depending on the lowering or general lift of light, a .3 ND grad to obtain more of the clouds and a stop of 5.6 (and a half) to place the whole image on the place in the gradient to realise the way I want to see what was before me then, once again. There’s nothing special about the above calculation – it’s a straightforward safety net.
So I shot and Jeremy then downloaded the data from both Flash Cards and the 320 gig Red Drive. To demystify this process, one thing to keep in mind is that if you change speed or resolution on the camera you have to reformat the flash card or drive before recording. This means you push a card into the slot, set the settings and record, format it, shoot for 4 minutes, take out the card, put it into a cheap flash card reader through a USB connector on the mac and it mounts as a drive and you drag off the footage. Easy. If you use the Red Drive you just firewire it into the laptop and do the same thing. (why did red make their cards proprietory and therefore expensive ???? and has anyone hacked this yet or am I missing something? Forward apologies if I am). Scott Billups told me he’d shot an entire movie with 4 cards using them in 8 minute pairs (16 minutes at 2K). He’d enjoyed this as it had made the whole team feel like they were back on ten minute magazines. (Keep in mind you have around 160 minutes on the red 320 gig drive).
You then open RedCine to watch the files (at a quarter resolution on a 5400rpm portable drive which still blew everyone away that watches the shot - and a quarter resolution on my 1920x1080 laptop screen meant one thirty second resolution of the actual data as far as I can work out) or import at 2k into final cut. You can use a cropped 4k (4000 pixels not 4098 if you use Cienform’s Neo4k utilities for Final Cut). You switch to log and transfer then import though redcode. In Redcine you have to choose whether to watch in Red Log or Rec 709 (or various other routes). If you value the camera at 320 ASA it will look ok in Rec 709 or dark in Red Log as it should be rated then at 180 ASA. There’s a whole set of arguments about which to use – this is one to study up on but Rec 709 is good for TV, Redcode for cinema. Everyone can have a good argument about this subject the more that gets ‘properly’ shot. Also, with information like that above, don’t try and learn it – it’s too hard just through the mind. You’ll understand in a few minutes if you get the programme and press a few buttons. (I do love this about Red software by the way - no instructions, you just work it out as it's all self explanatory).
I found the process easy and even though every take I did was watched by a large crowd (put a movie camera at Tunnel View in Yosemite and even though the view is one of the most stunning on earth – gadgets still win out). In fact with all of Yosemite valley there before them, those who watched the shot slowly emerge on the RED LCD (no Viewfinder yet but the LCD is good in daylight) there were still ooh’s and ahhh’s a plenty.
Back in San Francisco and I had to reflect on what I was being told by those contemporary practitioners and users of very high level HD that I was interviewing: I’ve discovered that there are other questions to ask besides those that easily come to mind. For instance questions about where we’re going in terms of resolution are not necessarily of much import – does it really matter if the military are working with 64K? Even if that’s where we’ll be going commercially eventually and that’s what we electronic workers will be using at some point – sooner rather than later. Whether a question like this matters or not is about the state of mind you’re used to being in and what other states of mind may be relevant to the way the future will unfold.
As I go along asking the questions that have arisen through my own exposure to HD, then in using a camera like the Red One for instance one has to ask the question: does this line up with expectations generated by strong advertising messages from Jim Jannard and his team. In fact my recent use of Red is generating a new level of realisation about what is going on with HD which has grown out a part of my own intellectual terrain that I thought I had shut the gate and thrown away the key on. This is film thinking, a slightly overgrown garden which still has its fascinations and secret places. Right now I’ve thrown that gate open again and I’m clearing away the undergrowth with a high level of enthusiasm. That’s the end of that metaphor ! And here’s another:
I’m now feeling liberated finally. I’ve talked to highly professional people who are quite anxious about what is going on, but through experience I feel like ten years of climbing has brought me to the top of the cliff and has allowed me a view across the Mesa. I now realise we’ve been working in the canyons thinking that this is our terrain – but actually, the truth is that we have to inhabit an entirely different terrain completely to understand and use HD as it is now re-forming itself technologically. In fact HD as we have come to know it is dead.
Like taking on Einstein’s general law of relativity our minds need a re-boot and a re-think about what we’re actually looking at to begin to understand the High Resolution world as it now is. We are truly into the next generation of thinking about how we achieve our goal which is of course to make images that completely blow the audience away and so make images that enable the audience to performatively enter the space that the image is creating. I mean here that the images we create are immersive in its truest sense – that we plunge in and inhabit the space the image creates – with compulsion and agreement.
So here’s the rub. Electronic Cinematography is a description of a raw data flow where the data holds a latent image – just like the photo-chemical process of film held a latent image. It was latent until the development process released the image partially. I say partially as there were other processes where the image could be affected in a material way – bypassing the bleaching of silver from the negative was one such process that comes to mind – the now over-used bleach bypass process. This would have been an innovation in its time where the cinematographer would have asked the lab to do something that was until then unheard of.
Contemporary electronic cinematography would have it that you leave certain of the cinematographic responsibilities to post to fix it. To my eye this simply casts a thin patina of colour over the image for the discerning eye to be annoyed at. This is a hang over from the early days before the RAW data period, the days of compression, with its desperately awful solutions like Gop images which still fuel low end sub HD formats like HDV and low sampling and throwing away much of the camera head data and all the rest of the processes used to render an electronic image - this is basically now bad information.
So what’s really important here is the latent nature of the RAW data image and as with film there are some interesting things we can do that are akin to the idea of heating the developer and bypassing the bleach ! With RAW data I intuitively feel that you don’t just leave this to post to fix the image. The issue now is that just like film you can affect the ‘materiality’ of the image.
In the past in film cinematographers had clean stock and even sharper lenses and the aim of their job was to make an atmospheric image to carry the audience deeply into the story. So they realised that you should over or under expose – mess around with the temperatures of the various baths that unleashed the latent image until a change was made that revealed an image that was to the taste and aesthetic of the director of photography. Now we are at that moment where you really can do that with Raw data. The image in front of you can be recorded, imprinted in Data form and a latent image will exist until the ‘development’ of that image. Of course, here’s where the bright imaginative ones can come along and innovate ways of dealing with the metaphor so that real and substantial changes are affected in the images we see derived in the digital realm.
I have no doubt of the above – every bell I have is ringing to tell me that I am ‘warm, warm, warm’ as children say, in the game of positioning yourself near the goal to take the prize. Since shooting on the Red I realise that some people are going to have no idea at all what to do with what my intuition was telling me at Tunnel View in Yosemite.
When I see the shot again in its two dimensional form I want to see its essence as it occurred to me at the moment where I looked at the vast scene in front of me and in a zen-like way regarded the scene as I imagined Ansel Adams would have looked at the landscape.
The man had a zone system to measure exposure, to find a way of systematizing the process so that it worked each time he used it. But it was in the end an intuitive zone system. When I’m lighting a room or space I turn off my beta functions and shut my mind down so that the wide vision aspect of my seeing can come to the fore. By ‘widevision’ I mean in this sense a more reflective state of mind and therefore a more meditative view.
So when I stepped back from the precipice at Tunnel View with my light meter in my hand and my equations about filters come to a conclusion about what’s a good place on the lens, what other filters might I introduce – all that technical stuff and have to plump on an F stop that in some way is a measure of an irony – that there is a set of learned outcomes that act as confirmation that I should ignore all the set of learned outcomes one has accumulated to be able to cope with life – or expose a shot as it’s commonly known.
Anyone who’s exposed a foot of film will understand the previous description and this is the place we have to go to in digital cinema, together with willing accomplices from post-production data handling who can see that this may be a way forward. What I’m proposing here is a relationship between production and post-production that is simply there to bring this latent electrical image out into the open in a qualitative way.
In that little equation lay a route where people can travel to create images that are transcendent of the values of the first period of intensive look-creation from the industry. What we’ll see is subtleties of colour and resolution that haven’t been seen before. Images that are in their own way as qualitative as those derived though releasing the latent image in the film domain. I showed my teenage kids the proxy files and both commented separately that they sort of looked like CGI. This is significant because it is a realisation that something is going on that they can relate to – something that means something in a way that previous digital HD work didn’t.
A note on resolution and for this I'll take a metaphor up front: If a standard lens of a format is the one that when put in front of the eye does not change its magnification one way or the other (in other words neither gets smaller nor bigger but stays exactly the same), then I would content that our eyes tend to function at 'standard resolution'. WHat I mean by that is that when we focus on something we select the thing to look at and then bring to bare on that thing two elements: increased focus and increased resolution. By these means we separate the object for scrutiny. What this idea brings up is that we have the capacity to incrementally increase certain visual and mental functions - unlike camera optics which have to be set and relay information in a way the DP chooses to get at the essence of the thing he or she is trying to say something about on a narrative level. I haven't really completely thought this idea through - but I find it exciting that our 'sensorium' the set of senses and the sense common to all, the mind, are available in an incredibly subtle way to the experiencer.
Besides incredible resolution, what I haven’t said so far about my experience manipulating the raw data within RedCine and RedAlert (free programmes for exporting Red raw files) is that within these simple little programmes I’ve seen looks from within the footage that will completely blow people away. That are ‘different’ from what I’ve seen before – that are so, so much subtler, delicate, resolved, softer, in fact just better. The colour ranges are subtle enough to be sufficient for artistic work to occur.
All we need to do now is embrace the medium fully. I look forward to trying out the Arri 3k and the Dalsa 4k, the Red 3k and 5k to see if their images match, or better the Red 4k. Also, I expect Apple didn't show up at the 2008 NAB because they're re-defining final cut to be resolution independent - if that happens, then truly, what was latterly known as HD or 1920x1080 will be truly dead.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Addendum to the premier of 14 History Lessons
I premiered my work 14 History Lessons, 18, Visions, 21 Beatification in January, then on 14th March I re-screened it with the modifications in place suggested by the audience reaction from the first screening. After the discussion last friday, a friend who is also an artist within digital media suggested that although I'd spent 18 years trying to integrate various elements into a linear timeline (actually 20 if you go back to when the original inspiration came for the work) perhaps the problem of the work lay in this attempt at integration and that perhaps all the elements would work together more easily or sympathetically to each other and to the audiences experience, if I separated them !That's my exclamation mark. 20 years work is not a light undertaking. But I am now committed to finding out how a piece of work functions for an audience regardless of the cost to myself. Last year I worked with Robert Cahen. I sat with him operating an edit suite so that he might make a piece of work entitled Blind Song which he was making for the Blink project (links on the side). Robert had previously made a piece which only I and Sandra Lischi, a professor of Digital Art at Pisa University had liked - more than liked, were excited by. However, the majority of viewers had not liked the piece as it re-evoked a use of classical music juxtaposed with its antithesis in terms of image - this technique being prevalent 40 years ago and exemplified by Stanley Kubrik in 2001 a Space Odyssey. Robert understood that Sandra and I were ahead of the wave in accepting this juxtaposition but that it was important for an artist to know where his or her audience were at.
So my 70 minute piece will be broken up into several sound and image streams and become not only a linear work but also an installation. Unlike In Other People's SKins which is simple and pure, 14 History Lessons is mightily complex. It was begun after all, when I was 20 years younger, before I had learned my lessons (spoken about in the previous blog) made at a time when I had a tendency towards the portentous. So given what I know I'm in the position of having to nurse a less that ideal work into the level that I now understand to be important to work at. It might be argued that I should leave this alone and let history judge it but the motives I had to finish this work are still with me so as an experiment I shall continue on in the hope of re-engineering the work to my current level. We'll see.
Trying to write my own name
In Other People’s Skins has now been put up at Gloucester Cathedral. I’m amazed at the visitor comments for this piece because I’ve never seen such glowing comments about an artwork before (mine or others). My initial fears that the work would simply function on the smoke and mirrors level (that people would simply enjoy the ‘functionality’ of the work) has proved unfounded. It seems that people are actually ‘getting it’.So this tells me something that I also regard as amazing: In Other People’s Skins is a signature work. What this means is that I have learnt a certain level of ‘craft’ in my art, enough to make a work that people can relate to strongly. The danger of the signature work is that it becomes what you are known for and which you can never better.
Earlier today I was thinking of other artists that I know whose engagement with their chosen medium (primarily digital) is still hampered by its technical elements. I’ve been working in video, both analogue and digital for a long time now; I’ve made a lot of work, both linear and latterly installation in form – I regard the definition ‘signature work’ as being a piece of work that somehow is imbued with the answer to the basic enquiry the artist is making. That doesn’t mean to say that I the artist, understand that answer, but rather that the glimmerings of an understanding are lighting the dark.
My use of the word craft, above, is about knowing enough of the technicalities of the medium, enough about the potential audience response from the use of those technicalities and enough about the mystery of art to create works which fulfil certain requirements of a ‘work of art’. The mystery is of course that an artwork should have space within it for the audience to import personal meaning and significance whilst at the same time carrying the resonance of what the artist was originally inspired by.
Subject matter can only really be one thing: that which makes us self-consciously aware or what we truly are. What we truly are, is ever changing, yet ever the same.
Anyway, my understanding has grown through making and exhibiting In Other People’s Skins (IOPS) and I hope that that understanding grows the more it is exhibited. On that point I’ve had a few enquiries asking for it to be shown at other cathedrals and maybe some in the US.
What this does is arms me when I make my next installation – on that note I have six to make, exhibit and report on, by the end of September. This gets really interesting for me because all six will absolutely not use any ‘engaging tactic’. For instance, in IOPS people get to place their hands in the image of others hands, or maybe move a plate when they feel it’s miss-aligned with the virtual image of the plate. Somehow I have to make artworks that use whatever fascinates the individual as a means of bringing them in to the essence of the work.
We know that everyone is different and has different meaning structures inside them so therefore the only thing to do is use whatever lies beneath and is the motive power of meaning structure and its corollary, significance. We might argue about that sentence: it could be that actually significance precedes meaning structure – I don’t know at this point – it might even be that one accompanies the other. But, what lies beneath either or both these ideas is the species base, the bit that got us out of the trees and standing upright. So as an artist I’m realising that I have to allow that to flow through me as it’s pretty clear to me that I as a thinker am limited by my own thought process. Here we go, we’re unavoidably into ‘the mystery’.
In a recent work I had some fun having found some old footage of me trying to phone someone with the phone set up to record the other end of the conversation. I remembered being on a documentary and flying Noam Chomsky over to our office in Great Russell street. I was introduced to the great man and said, ‘hello Noam’, with a degree of ignorance of his intellectual weight and reputation, I didn’t say anything else to him except the odd quip from behind the camera as my friend Renny interviewed him. In the recent work I put some text over the footage from 1977 which ended with me giving up and not getting through to the person I was ringing. The text said: ‘Trying to talk to Noam Chomsky’, a little joke to myself about a missed opportunity. As the piece went on I rang other people who I also didn’t get through to. Quite quickly I introduced people that were no longer alive, Bertolt Brecht, Plotinus and Hildegard of Bingen was one of them. I ended up trying to ring ‘the first person who stood upright’. These interstitial elements lightened what was quite a portentous piece.
That’s a circuitous way of getting to a woman who wrote music, poetry, painted and had sexual union with Christ – regularly. Hildegard not only knew the mystery, she was a part of it.
And it came to pass ... when I was 42 years and 7 months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming... and suddenly I understood of the meaning of expositions of the books...
Hildegard then did what committed artists do in some way, shape, or form:
But although I heard and saw these things, because of doubt and low opinion of myself and because of diverse sayings of men, I refused for a long time a call to write, not out of stubbornness but out of humility, until weighed down by a scourge of god, I fell onto a bed of sickness.
Today artists aren’t required to have the ‘modesty’ gene that Hildegard had, and a lot of stuff that is presented as ‘art’ is neurotic as opposed to enlightened. ‘Mystery’ is one of the things that art is about and I find of course, that this cannot be described except by circumlocution. From the artists point of view the act of making art is to try to realize truth in some way, to convert oneself from the vessel governed by ego, to one governed by a more enlightened state. The use of the word ‘work’ in the phrase ‘work of art’ is not only a noun but also a verb. As the artist works, so they work on themselves trying to release the form that is hidden within themselves – they sculpt themselves. The urge comes to create, the inspiration comes for the work and then the artist through the truth of their practice places the inspiration in the work and through the exhibiting of the work the audience receives the ‘transmission’ of the inspiration – that is the artwork. If the artwork is fashioned with craft garnered from both talent and developed through experience then that transmission has the suitable space within it for the audience to create it’s own meaning as well as absorbing what the artist has to say.
So: I recognize that I’ve made a signature piece which is a marker along my route as a developing artist, for which I’m very thankful. Now, as I turn my attention to other works which I have to raise up to this level, I find myself having to become clearer about what I’m doing as an artist, more impervious to my own tendency to obfuscate through my own clouding mechanisms, I have to eliminate sentimentality towards my ego self so that my artist self is unencumbered by the neurotic elements of human existence.
Curiously, the thought of leaving my ego behind makes me feel free.
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