ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL - A HISTORY OF BRITISH INDEPENDENT VIDEO ART

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to see Television Interruptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to see Prisoners.

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to see On Video 1.

Click here to see On Video 2

Click here to see On Video 3 (90 mins)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integration, Convergence and Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still Prisoners after all these years

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

25 years ago I was asked by Chiatt Day Advertising in Los Angeles to cover the making of '1984'for Apple Computers. This commercial was to be directed by Ridley Scott to introduce the Macintosh to the world. Costing around $1.5 million dollars, '1984' was to make advertising history by being shown only once in the middle of that years Superbowl - a highly prestigious slot - but never before had an advert been only shown once. The message of the whole enterprise was: 'If you miss this, then you're going to be at a disadvantage'. This sentiment in itself set the tone for the definition of the self at the end of the 20th century, when the self was to be defined by its likes and its dislikes. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the individuality of a person is now to be seen to be definied in these terms.

I was then working and managing a Soho based facility called: ‘Videomakers’ and we had gained a reputation for shooting on the American system – we understood for instance that if you shot images in certain English situations there would be a strobing of the image due to our electrical system being based on 50 rather than 60 cycles. We were to shoot on NTSC, the American television format which recorded 30 frames of 525 line resolution images. We used to joke that NTSC meant ‘Never the Same Colour’ because it didn’t have the 13 cycle oscillation which the PAL signal did, which was a colour reference signal that the tv set could realign weather distorted images.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Metempsychosis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time and Resolution: experiments in high definition image making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SECOND SET OF WORKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three issues here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAST THOUGHTS

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

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

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

References:

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

Videography/Installations - links to excerpts

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

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