REDaesthetics and the Art of RAW

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu‘

‘RED aesthetics and the Art of RAW’ is an event to be held at the Barbican on Monday 26th April 2010 and explores how changing technologies are having an impact on the practice and aesthetics of cinema and moving-image arts.
 
As an event it is intended to get under the skin of what digital is and means, or can mean for artists and filmmakers. The debate was prompted by the arrival of RED camera technology and its impact on the film industry. A central question was: Can it also be a good thing for artists and individual filmmakers, or does throw up new issues and problems?

Here are the series of questions to be asked and my response to them - I hope there's something in this that reveals something about High Definition thinking.

How is it different to film? Are the differences substantial or superficial?

Electronic Cinematography and Photo-Chemical Film are materially different
The real issue is their similarities because their difference is their materiality.
Their similarities lead to confusion.
They both record images with a similar latitude of response, they both have a latent image state and then a way of bringing the image via development and rendering into a material state. There are similarities of post production. They both end up being displayed.
Digitality enables the prior technology of film to distribute across its sister medium, the internet.

What do those differences mean for artists and filmmakers?

If treated in the digital realm - not a lot.

Are the differences just relevant to artists to whom the material is part of the work?

The differences are relevant to cinematographers and adherents to the prior paradigm of film. Film thinking remediates digital thinking - like painting did to photography.
 
Is the digital image a different thing from the film image? If so, how is it?

Basically yes - but the question itself turns out to be complex:
Depends on where you are asking in the process. In capture, in workflow, in post-production, in display they all differ through their materiality - if at any point you cross-process then each material takes on the qualities of the other. Also the digital image is different from video which can be either analogue or digital. In fact digital imaging takes much from its analogue predecessor. It should also be noted that the first adherents of video art were film avant-guardists who had remediatory concerns and and produced muddy outcomes on analogue and digital video for years.
 
Do new forms always and automatically mean new options for artists?

Unequivocally - Yes! That’s what modernism brought to the party.
Of course modernism wa the rejection of art as determined by the invention of the printing press and exemplied at its apogee by the Frankfurt Schools ‘reading’ of art as something that requires ‘interpretation’ to reveal it’s point, its truth,, its significance. With the advent of the digital, text based analysis and the requirement for the artist to encode meaning and the audience to decipher that meaning became obsolete. We are currently stuck with this old form until more advanced ideas become articulated with what is actually happening within audience experience which is one of ‘entrainment’ rather than interpretation.

Are artists lead by technological developments? If so, to what extent?

Always and never. Some go their own way, some listen to the way the world is through technological advance. Its within the dominant ideology of this time - the tale end of modernism with late capitalism.
 
Artists such as Steve McQueen and Issac Julien use professional DoPs for their work. Does this alter its status in terms of authorship? Should these works be thought of as collaborative works?
Walter Benjamin asked in 1936 whether or not whether the replica can have as much aura as the original artwork. In 1987 Illuminations made a programme to start the satellite arts channel called L’Objet D’art dans l’age electronic - Can copies of the object of art have aura. In the digital realm there is neither copy nor original - where does this question lie now?
All artists use craftspeople to accomplish their goal if they are within the modernist ideological, late capitalist state as they reject the need for self competence within the area they feel they are empowered to speak within - which is why there are so many babbling voices. The Italians have a saying: Few are called - but many answer.
 
What about technical skill? Within the industry DoPs/camera operators will be trained on RED, but this is unlikely to be the case for artists. Does skill level then have an effect on creation?

This question is about whether or not art is conceptual - or that its assessment is based on criteria that relate to skill. Recently, the only skill relevant to the creation of art has been within the arena of ideas with execution being left to craftspeople - and yet, judgements about absolutes within art are determined by questions of skill. The issue of Leonardo or Micaelangelos reputation - or Vermeer or Titan etc is around their ability to execute their ideas within painting or sculpture. It is their art that is undeniably seen as the apogee of human activity and so by default - carft and skill ARE the determining factors about the potency of art in relationship to its shelf-life.
Artists recognise they have to buy in skill to make their work achieve recognition above the bar that art without craft lies beneath.
 
It has been said that film is ‘truer’ as it has an indexical relationship to reality.
But in fact, is HD ‘purer’ in that it is raw data rather? Does it matter? Is it interesting?
I think there’s a confusion in the asking of this question. Neither medium is more pure than the other. RAW is a state and film information can be encoded in RAW data as much as Electronic information - so I don’t buy one is more pure than the other. They are both materials. Indexicality is a state of mind. If I look at a film or HD image without indexicality as my mode of looking then what is seen could simple be an abstraction. It is only a tendency towards organisation in some minds that create indexicality - and especially those who have inherited aristotleian/enlightenment/victorian cataloguing tendencies that indexicalise the world - i.e. academics. Artists have to develop the opposite kind of mind (unless indexicalisation is their project)
 
Is technical purity/excellence somehow limiting to what artists can achieve? Does it undermine individuality?

Technical excellence is a practice and some philosophies propose that practice - and especially limiting practice like zen meditation - is a key to unbridled comprehension of the world. Also individuality and that neurotic expression, individual creativity, is a compound of the period from the early medieval to the present. We are placental mammals wit placental mammal imaginations. Certain artists sometimes trigger response from somehow being apposite in such a specific way that they earn the cheers of the mass of the other primates - but the idea that individuality being undermined is non-cogniscant of the fact that out profile as individual creatures is severally limited in the first place.
 
Does technical purity/excellence detract from identification/storytelling?

I think we should do away with being good technically as being a problem. It’s true that technical excellence comes with a certain set of values, but if the artist or film maker isn’t up to it then nothing they do will be any good anyway.

A Spring declaration of the Death of Film

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu‘

A few weeks back, with the advent of the Alexa from Arriflex and the new sensor from Red, Marc Weigert an Emmy award winning visual effects designer declared on Friday, March 5, 2010 at 11:03 am in an article on the Film Animation World Network that:

2010 is the year that celluloid Died

For a week or so there was opprobrium expressed in abundance on the Cinematographers Mailing List: “obviously this man doesn’t know what he’s talking about” - others said “let him off the hook, he’s just being enthusiastic” others said - “maybe he’s got a point”.

Well, the cat was out of the bag. A few weeks later an article by Alan Brandon on gizmag (17 the March) asked:

Will the Arri Alexa finally kill film?

The point here is that the conversation’s on. The truth is film will never die or go away - people still chalk images on rock, so by the same token, film is here to stay.

The step-change with the Arri Alexa is that the ideas proposed by many cinematographers concerning getting a full image form a digital camera by shooting two frames one with low exposure one with high exposure - then combining the low lights and the highlights of both so that the final combined frame benefits from both exposures - must mean that the latitude given in the pho-chemical medium of film is surpassed.

However, one rule of electronics is that supposed gains always produced un-supposed drawbacks and we wait to see what the downsides of the new innovation produces.

There’s another issue too: over-exposed film highlights were beautiful whereas over-exposed digital highlights (for various technical reasons) were not. So by cutting out over-exposure digital capture will at least not be ugly in that area. But the hidden loss is the potential absence of one of the colours from the cinematographers palette.

Well - of course until we all get our hands on the cameras and do some work in earnest the jury will have to remain out on this.

One by-product of dealing with so much data is that the Alexa is limited to 2K - therefore notionally good enough to rival the resolution of film’s 6k (I quote the necessary scanning figure for good transfer), baring in mind that by the time you get to a release print with film in the cinema you see what approximates down to 1k (because of the degradation of the various processes film has to go through), and of course HD 1920 or 2k acquisition (2048) screens at 2k - therefore twice the resolution of standard film projection.

The Red shoots at a notional 4k (3.2 if your lenses are good enough) and the unspoken problem in data management is Modular Transfer Function: each bit in the chain of data has a quality level - whatever the lowest quality in the chain is is the MTF of the data. Often, 4k can be below 2k...

The Alexa sensor is running 2 x 2k frames for every red 4k frame - effectively half the amount of data - so if as Panasonic often shout from the rooftops that measuring resolution and anything else come to that, is dependent on the quality of the chain - you better know what the weaknesses of the chain are.

Incidentally - Red can run 120fps at 2k and the Alexa will run 60fps at 2k - that’s the same amount of data.

However:

The point of all of this is that technology is following the aspirations of the DP’s (finally) and we have a good chance in the Alexa of putting out some images comparable to film.

The image below is a description of Modular Transfer Function

High Definition, High Resolution and Electronic Cinematography

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu‘

New sensors scheduled to deliver in the coming year from both Red and Arri are even more promising. Despite my nostalgic love for film, I fear it may soon be a fond memory on all but the most specialized productions’. Johnathan Flack cinematographer, Cinematographers Mailing list, 18 january 2010.

I’ve been minded to try to summarise what has happened in High Definition technologies for a while now but it was only having to answer the mistaken notion in a recent document that went under peer review that made me realise that the general understanding (of academics at least) is still back a few years in origin. People often talk in terms of High Definition - yet this term alone creates a huge confusion about what is actually going on.

One of the two reasons HD was called HD was to combat Film’s hold on image generation for feature films. Sony and various other electronic corporations needed to rebrand what they were doing to successfully challenge the corporations such as Kodak who dominated production of professional and consumer materials in this area. The other reason the word ‘High’ was used was because the new format was to replace standard definition equipment in one of industry’s new-broom maneuvers which allowed them to sell a lot more product.

I want to cite a distinction that we shouldn’t waver from: High Definition is proprietary in form - that is it comprises of data that is packaged in a particular file system, generally with a pixel count of 1920 x 1080 or the other popular system 1280 x 720, under a certain amount of compression that make is handleable by the proprietors other equipment. In other words when you use High Definition you’re buying in to a group agreement about a set of easily handleable functions that capture an image at one end and and display that image within certain tolerances at the exhibition end. A particular system of compression that is best suited to streaming video, or compressing for DVD or Blue Ray is that of creating Groups of Pictures - say a set of 7 - where the first frame and the last frame have a set of common reference points and the frames in between throw away that information and only update the elements that change. This system is particularly bad for depicting morion as practically everything changes in each frame, but the tolerance of the system is set to limit information - that’s a contradiction. A short Group of Pictures is therefore less qualitative than a 15 picture Long GoP structure.

On the other hand, High Resolution technologies, such as most Electronic Cinematography forms do use a package, but this is for convenience, it’s intent is to retain as much data, or information generated by a photosite as possible. Photosites are locations where light is turned into data. Pixels are not photosites - pixels can be an aggregation of the information generated by several photosites - or just representative of one photosite. The point is the idea of a pixel is really of a value which may be generated by one or more contributing elements.

Compression still exists in this form, but it is limited because the central thrust of this technology is to retain as much data about tonal latitude, resolution and colour from the natural world as possible. Also, ownership exists in this form - Red’s R3D file system is owned by then and no one else. Also it is compressed - maybe to one tenth of the data that was available to the sensor - but, being wavelet driven as opposed to DCT driven (where DCT means Discrete Cosine Transform as opposed to the rival Wavelet Transform version) it is less destructive of the data and information can more easily be retrieved or simulated from this form of compression.

Data cameras utilise logarithmic (log) as opposed to linear colour space. ‘Linear’ is a product of preparing an image to travel through older analogue technologies (phosphorus screens) and therefore has limitations placed upon it to work in that domain. Linear utlised 8 bit Colour and nowadays we are looking for 14 or even 16 bit systems. Log maintains a higher level of data but tends to look not so good on contemporary display - so we introduce ‘look up tables’ to treat the monitor with to make sure the image looks ok on set.

Lastly - data recording means that changes are made to the image after the data is recorded unlike in proprietary systems where treatment are made at the time of recording. Sony was famous for throwing away around 500 pixels in its HD cam system which recorded only 1440 of the 1920 pixels it was trying to represent.

For a masterly description of the discussion around colour space, see Douglas Bankston's article In American Cinematographer, The Colour Space Conundrum. Or my own paper on colour space: The Concept of Colour Space from the Practitioners Standpoint.

So - since beginning my fellowship in September 2007 there has been a fundamental change in the thinking around high definition technology.

Before this time, development of the technology was in the hands of large corporations who employed specialists in various areas to create systems that handled data or information that assembled 25 frames per second into a moving image stream.

Opinion about what was good and what was bad, correct or inappropriate to the process was derived from a cultural attitude assembled through 100 years of corporate development. Research labs, product labs, customer testing and so on assembled and produced the products that industry and then consumers had access to and were encouraged to demand.

From early experiments by John Logie Baird, Vladimir Zworkin and Philo T Farnsworth, modern analogue technologies developed finally via Bing Crosby’s Ampex Corporation into what we now know as standard definition analogue broadcast tv in all of its variants, Pal with 625 lines and 25 frames per second (due to the 50 hz electrical system), Secam with 819 lines, NTSC with 525 lines 30 frames per second (due to the 60hz electrical system) and no colour reference signal, Brazilian PAL with 525 lines and so on, all of which lead towards early analogue HD systems such as NHK’s 1125 line system and Philips Mac 1250 line system.

Due to the persistence of vision factor, where in early film 18 frames per second needed to be held in the gate whilst a circular wheel with two or three slits in it span and allowed two or three flashes per frame (i.e. 18 frames flashed three times was 54 times per second), analogue video needed its 25 frame structure split into two fields to achieve enough flashes per second. Pal with 25 frames, split into two fields of 325.5 lines flashed 50 times a second to create persistence of vision and NTSC flashed 60 times a second. Splitting the frame into two fields is called interlacing and the resulting resolution is half the line structure. 625 lines is 312.5 lines in resolution.

The reason that television as a form developed the idea of interlace (besides the persistence of vision factor) was that the lowest link in the chain was display. Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT’s) worked by having an electron gun fire electrons to excite phosphor on the surface of the screen. Magnets pulled the beam left to right (because were in a society that values that direction more than the Japanese or Chinese), then the beam switched off, another set of magnets pulled the beam fractionally down, the beam was switched on and pulled left to right again. Glass technology was limited to a certain size and electron beams could only sweep so fast before their accuracy was lost. 625 lines was close to the limit of these technologies at the time of invention.

Meanwhile early digital video was developing into digi beta where the remediation of the incoming digital signal imitated and developed into something akin to a line system of 625 lines in Europe and 525 lines in Japan and America. However, there were no lines, only pixels: 720 x 576 in Europe and 720 x 480 in NTSC. Anamorphisation was used to take the European digital system into a 16:9 aspect ratio as it was naturally 4:3 originally. Cathode ray tubes were the main display system and so early digital video used interlace to display the image.

Having established a pixel count the way forward into ‘High Definition’ was established. HD was so-called because the manufacturers were interested in creating a product to rival film and therefore enable them to come into the film market place - they wanted a system that had more Kudos than old analogue terms suggested. Sony still calls its HD system Cine Alta. Due to the financial might of America and Japan. Due to electrical system frequency (50 or 60 cycles a second) a relationship developed, (as it had already done in analogue calculations to derive first 408 then 625 in the European system and in 525 in the US and Japanese system) between it and the ‘natural’ amount of pixels that might easily be recorded and then displayed - From capture through to display is, after all, a chain where the lowest level of information at any point is the determining factor of what the viewer sees - this is the modular transform function of the any system - it’s weakest link in effect in the chain.

So we come to the technology that was prevalent prior to 2007. Having won the frequency battle (50 or 60 cycles per second) Japanese and American manufacturers offered proprietary systems of image capture and display that was sympathetic to the outgoing interlaced paradigm. This meant that we still had lack of a reliable standard between manufacturers because on a financial level - to the victor goes the spoils. This was seen in the early analogue battle between Sony and Mitsubishi who were proposing VHS and betamax. At that time it became clear that the best system might not necessarily win (by best I do not mean most reliable, just best in the sense of image representation - it is arguable that betamax was more fragile on a mechanical level).

What was evident from the start was that film recorded a progressive image and needed many flashes to create persistence of vision and digital video might do this but the forms of display were just developing - so interlace still persists - but it must be remembered that a 1080i picture is only 540 lines in resolution!

At that time computerization and storage was not as developed as it is now and so manufacturers were recognising that though they basically had a standard they could comply to much data had to be thrown away to record an image on tape. The argument about whether 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 was the right standard were still being argued about - where due to simple maths the lower level pixel image could have a greater recording of colour information than the higher level one (also the 720 line system was fundamentally higher in resolution than the prevalent 1080 i signal - it’s only today that we have 1080p in such amounts).

In recording an image the issue is always of how fast your data capture, transfer and recording is (until we pass through the barrier where we can capture and record more data than the eye and brain can see). For me its a question of plumbing - how big are your pipes and your tanks. The manufacturers were using systems of compression and decompression - that is trying to keep as much data as was necessary to fabricate an image that was seemingly high definition.

It would pay to look at the difference between Fouriers’ Discrete Co-sine Transform and Fouriers 1807 innovation which is now becoming the compression system to use - Fourier’s Wavelet Transforms. I refer you here to Astrophysicist Amara Graps work on Waveforms: http://www.amara.com/current/wavelet.html

As Amara says: The fundamental idea behind wavelets is to analyze according to scale. Indeed, some researchers in the wavelet field feel that, by using wavelets, one is adopting a whole new mindset or perspective in processing data.

Then there’s the issue of recording Groups of Pictures or GoP’s which seek to only record the changes in the pictures as they proceed rather than the whole picture and this eventuates in artifacts, blocking into squares that the developed eye finds so painful. This is the system of compression beloved of the internet, DVD’s Blue-ray, streaming etc.

If you have a long GoP of 15 frames where the image is refreshed every 15, it stands to reason that it’s an image of less resolution than a short GoP of 15 (in a nutshell Sony at 15 and Panasonic at 7). This is the basic system in streaming across the internet which is fine in that form (for a while) but there’s no place for it in image capture any more.

Then Red came along to make the data argument public. It’s not that Red were the first, others had proposed systems that did not throw away data, or rather recorded information in packets of data that were less lossy than the proprietary systems (HD cam for instance throws away 500 lines, just like that, so that there’s 1440 lines left to compress to record)

So - the basic change that’s taken place since 2007 is the cultural change that no longer accepts image compression as a de facto stance in image capture and display and would rather have all of the data captured so that choices could be made at varying points along the pipeline about what is kept and what is thrown away.

Cinematography ?

For an assessment of my research, please see the blog entitled Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, which outlines my work and current findings. Another set of ideas I've been working on, in terms of how colour is represented can be found at: The Concept of Colour Space from the practitioners Standpoint. You can find other papers of mine at: academia.edu

Since the beginning of my fellowship in September 2007, in the development of HD technologies we've travelled from proprietary format wars (Sony, Panasonic et al) with high compression, an inability to store what we needed to store were we to improve the situation and all kinds of nonsense passing off as High Definition, through to Wavelet Compressed Raw file formats with the ability to store endless amounts of data through pipelines big enough and fast enough for the data to travel.

So now we reside in a place where we can attain a goal: uncompromised, uncompressed data streams with a deep enough bit depth to be in sight of the data flows that function between eye and brain.

When I began this work in September 2007 (though I've long been looking at the issues) 4k was an impossibility, streaming 'HD' on the net also an impossibility.

The point is as of my 3rd year in the fellowship, everything's possible: Every student is a cinematographer (thank you Red) everyone has the information to hand (thank you internet). On a democratic level, when everyone can - everyone will. Then 'experience' doesn't matter so much because 'we have the technology' and the issue becomes - again quoting the Italians: 'Few are called but many answer'.

Red are shortly giving us (a kind of) 9k capture. In fact 4, 8, 16k - who cares in a way. There are still issues around latitude in electronic cinematography - mind you, if you checked out the latitude of film in 1910, Electronic Cinematography is way in advance of that material's development. I always think here of the mirror of the development of film from 1890 to 1910 to the development of Electronic Cinematography from 1990 to 2010.

We should have a better name for Electronic Cinematography, it's too long and clunky with too many syllables - 'Film' referred to the substance the emulsion was applied to - data sits on drives (flash or hard drive) - should we call it: Stream? Carriage? Magnetic? Particles? Current? Or just Cinematography, a title agnostic to the material that the images reside within?

Late in the year thoughts...

I make art to explore my subject, which is high resolution image making - or, after several years of looking at the subject area, where everyone is now experiencing something of the high resolution form, I feel that I should now just refer to the area as simply, image making.

Yes there is a high form and a low form of high resolution and very much of what people are experiencing is to my mind very, very low. But then I’ve had the luxury of circumstance to experience many levels of resolution. Like Blake.

Art like everything else turns to dust in time. So, if that’s the case why do it, if your rationale was to make something that was about connecting to the eternal? That was after all my rationale as opposed to having a project that was about shape, form, structure - all that old, old stuff. I certainly have had no interest in recent yet profitable exploits of the artist/charlatan state where the kings new clothes are worn de rigueur - and with pride. Always by very very stupid people with everyone else wondering what the fuck it is all about. Well I’m here to tell you it’s about nothing - nothing at all.

I’ve come to the point (once again) where I’m standing looking up at the cosmos and thinking about my own existence. There it is and here I am. When I’m absorbed in looking at it then there’s no need to do anything - when I come to the end of my looking then there’s a need to sustain my self, food, heat, light, exchange with others and making marks which speak about the absorption I’d previously experienced whilst contemplating the immensity that we are placed within.

Why reprise that - why not just go stare at it again? For one I don’t just want to repeat myself because in that repetition are the seeds of hedonism - self-pleasuring. So I realise that a return to that contemplation can only happen once again when I’ve been refreshed or remade or changed sufficiently for that experience to once again mean something - all of which can come from sharing the experience. In that sharing comes further enlightening moments as once articulates what it was that transfixed one in the first place.

‘Transfixed’.

That’s a word that refers to the crucifying of the human spirt on the cross of matter. Yet actively contemplating the infinite relieves that state - and sharing that relief propagates renewing the self. It’s a circle - but then most of existence as experience, from the human point of view, is a series of circular movements and wisdom tries to speak about that - ‘there is a time for hope, there is a time for grief, everything has its time’ - say the psalms.

Art has been commodified by a value system that has fetishised commodities and so art itself within the limited and local zeitgeist has also been commodified. But we know the earth is in some kind of trouble and so we need to make art that relates to this condition. I’m not proposing a lot of eco art that will be just as local as the prior form, - rather a making of art that speaks of the eternal, right here, right now. People have found that they want to express themselves as being alive in an important way - ordinary people have extraordinary selves inside them and commodification will no longer be helpful in defining the extraordinariness of that self.

So to me it seems that we the artists must speak to that need for articulation in the ordinary person and so we must speak of the eternal - the most difficult of subjects to be clear about - and for all of those reading this with lack of understanding at this point someone else once said - if you’ve got the ears you’ll understand the message.

The Italians say: Few are called, but many answer.

Though the commodification of the world eventually implies that anyone can make ‘art’, by reducing what art is to a commodity, therefore it’s re-produceable easily- the truth is only a few can make worthwhile art and at a time when everyone is answering that call, it’ll take some time to be clear about what is good art and what is bad art. But then again one can simply see what’s there with intuitive eyes and mind and respond to the work knowing that it’s good if it speaks of the eternal and frankly, no-good if it speaks of anything less.

Time to make some good work

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

So a young artist, Eugene, wins ‘School for Saatchi’ - well, someone has to win - but truth to be told, Eugene’s piece was by far the best work - if you judge the idea of art within contemporary ideas of art: that it is impactful, easy to read, understandable, interpretable and also at the same time, enigmatic. The enigmatic element is what keeps the art market going. If it were not enigmatic then it would be hard to make a commodity of the work - which doesn’t fit in with the decadent end-of-civilisation stance that those who broker the value of art within the contemporary zeitgeist require. (For those unfamiliar with this TV programme, 6 artists make work week by week then get eliminated until 1 wins an exhibition with Saatchi in Moscow).

Saatchi is an ad man - he shapes art in his own image, his own understanding. In McLuhan’s world in which he grew up, things need to be impactful to get through in the global village, they have to be fairly direct to be able to sell the moment where everything is clamoring for your attention. No blame - it’s just the way he is and because he had money he could shape the work of artists by functioning as the demand element of the supply and demand equation. Artists cannot be blamed either. They had to eat. Some of them engorged, but some of them are trying to make amends (if they truly understood their acts in the past) and Hirsts paintings for instance are creating opprobrium amongst the critics and curators because they of course, are behind the wave.

It’s a problem we all have to deal with - the intervention of the artist, the relationship to an audience of a work; the relationship of ideas to objects.

As an artist I’m of course interested in all of that and it is disconcerting to be ‘unrecognised’ and probably were the contemporary curator to consign me to oblivion as an artist then it would be affecting of my confidence - however, all of that must not matter in pursuit of what art might actually be in relationship to the Mammalian/Homo Sapien project - which of course may or may not be existent - but I like to think that it does: that we are an improving species and that ‘art’ is in fact a galvanizing and improving force in relation to the goals of the project - that the artist is in cahoots with the project to make work which reveals something about the truths of life for those that are busy living it.

I’m pretty sure that when I exhibit, I exhibit in some kind of vacuum. The vacuum is my own set of beliefs - see above - and that though I understand about the space in which a young artist is dealing in, the assets and the real estate and the property bonds, the stocks and shares of art, the determining concepts as raised by Duchamp, outlined by Magritte and articulated by Warhol - then utilised by Koons and Hirst - etcetera - I have a responsibility to do more - and I also have to accept my own pre-disposition to the cultural and historical continuum in which I have been placed - but, within that understanding I use my chosen form, video - electronic cinematography - which has a relationship to single image, single frame photography, to photochemical forms... I still have to take the space as did Eugene with impactful work, but then create work which has deeper meanings and resonances for the public, deeper than the flimsy, frothy expressions of concepts (as being as weighty as materials) and going beyond those concerns reveals the deeper empathy of people made sentient within a human frame.

I’ve played with ways of getting at that state and sometimes made work that resonates with that inner tension found in a ll sentient, conscious beings. Now, however, I have to challenge myself to be bold enough, creative enough, brave enough to go beyond my own form and thoughts, transcend my own condition to reveal work which itself reveals everything said above and more.

That’s my manifesto - I have intimations of things that I have to do. I have first to make ‘The Way North’ which I’m part way through making, then I have to make The Crucifixion and use the symbolism in that mithraic and christian idea (and Babylonian and Egyptian come to that) to demonstrate where we stand in history - which as usual, is crucified on our own lack of ability to see beyond our own state - the cross is usually the cross of matter - but we now have to face the fact that the cross is made of everything that constitutes our own blind spot.

‘The Way North’ or as it’s subtitled ‘Until I’m Gone’, is about my own passing on the basis that we really should get used to the idea of death, that just as we were born so shall we die. The Crucifixion is the crucifixion of an ape - because that’s what we are in terms of genus - seen as Dali saw the son of man, from above. At the apes feet there will be the carcass of a cow in a vegetable plot, because it’s time to stop eating living sentient beings, turn the planet over to the production of vegetables, limit the amount of people on the planet and find pleasure in doing real things and stop consuming experience (and things) - because it’s now time. We don’t need ‘The Age of Stupid’ to know what we have to do. True there are a lot of men attached to the idea that they need to eat meat to be a man and carry along their womenfolk in that belief, much as grandmothers commit the actual act of circumcising the young women for the culture - those who should least be involved - but it’s time to stop or terminate the planet (as we now know it to be).

Not that there isn’t a zillion earth-like planets out there and we should also get over our own ‘specialness’ - but our own particular backyard needs tending simply because some of us do not want to be wanton, some of us always wanted to care for the environment, some of us knew from the very beginning that animals should be spared - not just because they too feel as we feel (in every respect), but how could we look ourselves in the mirror if we committed an act of cannibalism ? It’s just time to change, that’s all - and art has to reflect that decision to mean anything to anyone in a world that just might seem to be dying.

A friends questionnaire

Bristol University 1921 - from a a recent Portraits Project

A friend asked me to complete a questionnaire on the subject of 'Art' and I realised I've been thinking about this subject area a lot lately and needed to commit myself to 'paper' no matter how pompous it seemed. I write this just having examined the latest thoughts on exposure and compression in wavelet transforms (as used in Red One). So though there's not a technical note at all in what follows, it's written with a mind to the technicalities of producing moving image art with todays digital media.

1.How did your recent Portrait project come about?

I began in photography when I was a student – so the still image is my starting point (in some ways). Having made many documentaries which examine ‘real issues and real people’ and having come to the conclusion that the only thing a documentary documents is the attitude of the maker at the time of making to their subject, I put the documentation of the real on the back burner and became more involved with fiction and with art in the moving image. Having gone through many ideas over 20 years I became interested in doing the opposite to what you should do with moving images – move the camera and change the shots: so moving image portraiture became of interest because you neither moved the camera, not the shot. Portaits iof the Somerset Canivals is my fourth portraiture project and there will be more of these plus developments of the form – Monumental Portraits of the working people of the Somerset levels being the next. In this I’ll turn the screen portrait at 20 feet x 10 feet to aggrandize the subject. It’s a socialist perspective.

2. Where would be the ideal place for you to show Portraits of the Somerset Carnival?

Tow ideal places: The Rural Life Museum because it contrasts the past and contemporary technology and the second would be any foreign environment because using the ‘strangeness of others’ is a useful and impactful staging of work. When Portraits of the Tor was shown in Venice, the Venetians loved it – and – when Ritratti di Cannaregio (Portraits of Cannaregio) showed in Glastonbury, Somerset people love that too. Therefore ‘difference’ works as a staging tool.

3.Do you think the location of where your films are played makes a difference to how people think about your film?

This only appears to be a film – it is s movement of light and a movement of sound which we choose to see as an ‘image’. So I reject ‘film’ as a description – also it doesn’t describe this technology but the late 19th century invention of celluloid. As for the place where people are exposed to this play of light and sound, it is as key as where it was shot and what was shot. The artists selects the subject, the form, the description and where the audience apprehends all of these. Sometimes the artist has to randomize their own preconceptions (as above with the use of ‘the other’). However all you’re trying to do as an artist is to display, depict, transmit your own intuition about the work as clearly as you can – I don’t mean intellectual clarity – that’s an academic position which is explicitly centered on how we apprehend via the frontal lobes of the brain. I’m more interested in the whole or gestalt experience of the audience. If the artwork is ‘true’ to the artists original intuition and realized without too much personal baggage attached, and then staged knowingly, then the audience will receive the ‘transmission’, the artwork, as the artist originally intended (baring in mind that the artists intentions are very wide of the mark in terms of what’s good for their own work – it’s a minefield)

4.What do you think when choosing an angle to film?

So far I utilize western aesthetics – ‘the golden mean’, said to derive from our sensory condition and how ‘beauty’ is derived from the fact of photo-sites, optic nerve weave, data rates of transmission, receptor cells, brain capacity – all that western stuff which like everything else is simply a narrative to tell ourselves how it is for us within the human form. For 30 years I’ve been pointing a camera in professional situations and therefore have experienced the norms of depiction. If you’ve done this enough you can frame with your eyes closed, just listening.

Having said that – I go for pure and direct naturalistic framing with a balanced frame simply to acknowledge the above and not be mired in any of the various ‘problems’ of alternative framing choices.

5.Which is more important to you, the subject for your film, or how it was filmed?

These two are one.

6.What moves you most in life? (Inspires or upsets you)

Art is the only important thing in life. It is the eternal in the now. This very moment, the acknowledgement of which, is the art of the moment. Whether contemporary art school training is turning out artists or ‘noticers’ of the fashions of the mammals and the apes is another question. For those that have managed to not be bogged down in that question – everything is possible. The collegiate of artists, greater or lesser, are people I understand. Anyone who has realized that this is not all that there is is moved to speak about that – and ehat they speak about is art, with greater or lesser talent. The rest are the ones that didn’t volunteer for the job, for one reason or another. Art is a painful route sometimes – as you’ll no doubt know.

I should’ve written this up as a blog…..

End-