The Human Gaze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Far Horizons, now behind us

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

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

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

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

Invisible when appropriate

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

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

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

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

Cinematography

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

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

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

3D is here to stay - and?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Look: Digital Cinema Aesthetics and Workflows

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

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

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

This symposium will trace how the ‘look’ of shots changes at each stage of this process, explain some of the technologies that effect these changes, and discuss the decision-making behind these changes. It will also explore the reorganisation of production roles and responsibilities that has resulted from the digitisation of film-making workflows.

 The symposium will draw from a range of specialisms, bridging theory and practice: invited speakers will include Oliver Stapleton BSC (The Proposal, The Cider House Rules), Geoff Boyle DoP FBKS (Wallander, Mutant Chronicles), Jonathan Smiles Digital Production Supervisor, (District 9, Green Zone) Luke Rainey Colourist, (Band of Brothers, Man on a Wire), Professor Duncan Petrie, Professor Sean Cubitt, Dr Richard Misek, Dr Charlotte Crofts. Introduced by Professor Sarah Street. Mark Cosgrove, Director of Programme, Watershed Bristol

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

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

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

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