Critical Commentary on Portfolio One:
High Definition Video and Experiences of Immediacy and the Environment
Portfolio 1 from Studio VisualFields on Vimeo.
In 2006 in my application for an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship I had laid out my stall thus:
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We are yet again at the beginning of a sea change in our imaging technologies. This technological moment thus connects us with the revival of Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ as a model for understanding cinema. This implication leads us into a second contextual field of theoretical research which takes Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as a starting point and develops through McLuhan’s Understanding Media to a series of key works such as Jonathan Crary (1990) Techniques of the Observer, Lev Manovich (2001), The Language of New Media, and Brian Winston’s (1998) Media, Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Thus, my research focused on the historic claims to realism (and now hyper realism) connected to each new wave of imaging technology and to how these claims relate to the ownership and dissemination of technologies.
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I had then proposed that I create a series of research artefacts, exhibitions to evaluate them, journal arguments to critically reflect on the process and then giving papers at conference to further disseminate and debate the propositions I was coming to. My aim in creating research artefacts was to investigate in practice and in theory what is happening to the audience gaze as it shifts from the analogue, to the digital, to the higher resolution by creating works in HD and examining audience response. From the outset, I realized I had to ‘take the screen off the wall’, because its location as either a cinema or a television screen carried with it the associations which rendered it familiar, To re-present and, in Brechtian terms, to de-familiarize the familiar, I realized I had to provoke a sense of the unfamiliar in the belief that the potential aspect of unheimlich or uncanny might reveal something of the changes between standard definition (which we had accommodated in our familiar acceptance of moving image) and high definition, which itself was defined in relation to the standard delivered by the limitations of early twentieth century manufacturing competencies.
In fact after this period of experimentation with artefacts, installation art in general became dependent on what I had chosen as a standard for experimentation with research artefacts – projecting images onto many types of surfaces rather than vertically situated surfaces. My screens would therefore be the very objects I would ask people to look at to see what kind of engagement I could obtain if I increased levels of resolution. This would necessarily deal with the hyper-real, which could exist within the liminal boundary where suspension of disbelief might become activated. This first AHRC fellowship therefore included the reference to ‘the Actual, the Virtual and the Hyper Real’. For example, if I looked at a dinner scene projected onto a table, what level of resolution would be convincing to an audience beginning with standard definition as my measure (720 x 576 pixels)? At that level, photographed from overhead a fork then projected at life size only revealed its prongs as a grey blur. In HD at 1920 x 1080 – or roughly four times the resolution, then the individual prongs were revealed and this level of enhanced resolution would enable audiences to engage with the audience much more than if it were blurred.
What this fundamentally means is that there is a connection between an increase in the resolution of moving images and the time an audience member is prepared to stay watching or experiencing an artefact due to the higher level of veracity to the object represented. Implicit in this is that the audience may become used to a level of representation and that an increase in resolution will more deeply engage the person. It therefore represents a refreshing of that initial engagement. On this note please also reflect on my work in Portfolio 3, which itself is concerned with the refreshing of engagement with ‘Iconic images’.
A key paper in portfolio 1 is Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making (2009) where I make the following argument:
In fact after this period of experimentation with artefacts, installation art in general became dependent on what I had chosen as a standard for experimentation with research artefacts – projecting images onto many types of surfaces rather than vertically situated surfaces. My screens would therefore be the very objects I would ask people to look at to see what kind of engagement I could obtain if I increased levels of resolution. This would necessarily deal with the hyper-real, which could exist within the liminal boundary where suspension of disbelief might become activated. This first AHRC fellowship therefore included the reference to ‘the Actual, the Virtual and the Hyper Real’. For example, if I looked at a dinner scene projected onto a table, what level of resolution would be convincing to an audience beginning with standard definition as my measure (720 x 576 pixels)? At that level, photographed from overhead a fork then projected at life size only revealed its prongs as a grey blur. In HD at 1920 x 1080 – or roughly four times the resolution, then the individual prongs were revealed and this level of enhanced resolution would enable audiences to engage with the audience much more than if it were blurred.
What this fundamentally means is that there is a connection between an increase in the resolution of moving images and the time an audience member is prepared to stay watching or experiencing an artefact due to the higher level of veracity to the object represented. Implicit in this is that the audience may become used to a level of representation and that an increase in resolution will more deeply engage the person. It therefore represents a refreshing of that initial engagement. On this note please also reflect on my work in Portfolio 3, which itself is concerned with the refreshing of engagement with ‘Iconic images’.
A key paper in portfolio 1 is Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making (2009) where I make the following argument:
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In trying to explain my research to an audience I use 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?
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With this insight concerning engagement and the proposition of the ‘Hyper Real’ (that representation of the world that forces extra engagement through according the real world with an unfamiliar acuity), in terms of resolution and the creation of artefacts that might reveal new knowledge, I devised a series of works to be made with High Definition equipment for public exhibition. The series comprises both installations and single screen works, representing two sides of the increasingly blurred line between visual art and cinema. I created the idea of projecting virtual objects in an installation setting back on to the real object the representation had been made of. In the case of In Other People’s Skins, it consisted of projecting a moving image of a table from above, with the virtual guests’ hands moving around that space back onto a real table. The ‘impossibility’ of the presence and actuality of the hands having no third dimension was used to heighten the liminal and flickering suspension of disbelief discussed.
Thus through the series that explored various domestic objects, I aimed to draw out of myself something that was intuitive that might crystalize into new knowledge through the comparative nature of modes of configuring “reality” (the real and the virtual). Here I was keen to explore the unveiling of ‘the photographic moment’: that is, the redefinition of the ordinary into the extraordinary by the act of separating that moment and showing it using the tactic of extended duration. Cartier-Bresson had identified ‘the decisive moment’ of a sequence of photographs by using the idea of the journalistic essence of the story, which requires a stable single frame. By contrast, Conrad Hall used the term 'the photographic moment’ to denote the essential aesthetics of a frame amongst a series of frames. Hall would admonish cinematographers to make sure that all of the frames they shot needed be at this quality (in essence arguing that one could switch intuitively and skillfully, to a control of the image many times faster than normally assumed).
At 24/25/60/120 frames per second the implication is that we humans are equipped at a much higher level than interpretive reasoning allows to recognise that increase in aesthetic skill (see reference to the cue gaze later). He argued for an early form of entrainment with the world because cinematographers and artists need to operate all possible functionalities of the image. Entrainment is the physical property for instance, where clocks with pendulums will swing in concert after the time it takes to ‘entrain’.
The defining characteristic here is the sensibilities that can be evoked by a stream of images switching suspension of disbelief on and off rapidly. Here Hall accords with the ideas of Andrei Tarkovsky and later Bill Viola and asks the audience to accompany the cinematographer in the display of a higher aesthetic response operating above normal thinking, such that they too see and engage in an aesthetic response to the photographic moment.
This last point becomes increasingly important as I further investigated the relationship between duration and resolution. Bill Viola had rightfully proposed a tactic buried in his aphorism which was also familiar to Andrei Tarkovsky before him:
Thus through the series that explored various domestic objects, I aimed to draw out of myself something that was intuitive that might crystalize into new knowledge through the comparative nature of modes of configuring “reality” (the real and the virtual). Here I was keen to explore the unveiling of ‘the photographic moment’: that is, the redefinition of the ordinary into the extraordinary by the act of separating that moment and showing it using the tactic of extended duration. Cartier-Bresson had identified ‘the decisive moment’ of a sequence of photographs by using the idea of the journalistic essence of the story, which requires a stable single frame. By contrast, Conrad Hall used the term 'the photographic moment’ to denote the essential aesthetics of a frame amongst a series of frames. Hall would admonish cinematographers to make sure that all of the frames they shot needed be at this quality (in essence arguing that one could switch intuitively and skillfully, to a control of the image many times faster than normally assumed).
At 24/25/60/120 frames per second the implication is that we humans are equipped at a much higher level than interpretive reasoning allows to recognise that increase in aesthetic skill (see reference to the cue gaze later). He argued for an early form of entrainment with the world because cinematographers and artists need to operate all possible functionalities of the image. Entrainment is the physical property for instance, where clocks with pendulums will swing in concert after the time it takes to ‘entrain’.
The defining characteristic here is the sensibilities that can be evoked by a stream of images switching suspension of disbelief on and off rapidly. Here Hall accords with the ideas of Andrei Tarkovsky and later Bill Viola and asks the audience to accompany the cinematographer in the display of a higher aesthetic response operating above normal thinking, such that they too see and engage in an aesthetic response to the photographic moment.
This last point becomes increasingly important as I further investigated the relationship between duration and resolution. Bill Viola had rightfully proposed a tactic buried in his aphorism which was also familiar to Andrei Tarkovsky before him:
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‘Duration is to Consciousness as Light is to the Eye'.
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What is being described here is that as the eye is bathed by light and so becomes active, then the mind can also be bathed with the quality of ‘duration’. Simply put, the act of agreeing to pay more attention to an image than the audience was used to in either cinema or television would deliver additional benefits. Even now, mainstream film and television has the four second rule, which asserts that no image should remain on screen for longer than four seconds lest the audience lose interest. Often one of the conditions of the presentation of the medium (i.e. cinema, television or the ‘Silver Screen’) is of having the intent to create a consuming spectacle, so paying attention to a particular constituent element of the medium – to duration itself – which might then reveal the essential and constituent parts that came together in the understanding of Digital Cinematography as a primary expository technology of new digital media.
Using these artefacts, I worked through the effects of increasing resolution such that by the end of that first fellowship I could then formally recommend in peer-reviewed articles two main propositions. The first was with regard the relationship between resolution and durational attention:
The second was with regard to how professionals, academics and students of the discipline could wield the new technology effectively and appropriately by:
These are:
This list took various forms and this is from Flaxton T, (2011) Notes on Digital Workflows, Page 8 http://www.visualfields.co.uk/DIGITALWORKFLOWS.pdf
A key artefact within this portfolio is the installation In Other People’s Skins, a table set for 12 evoking Da Vinci’s The Last Supper which toured eight cathedrals in the UK and was exhibited in other countries including China, America and Italy, In total, over 300,000 people had engaged worldwide with this work during its early lifetime. Two further periods of exhibition in the Cathedral of St John the Divine in 2010 and 2014 was viewed by 650,000. This installation is a life-sized image projected from above of five dinner parties from different parts of the world, onto a table covered by a floor length tablecloth which displays images of the ‘virtual guests’ hands, with 12 white plates to catch images of food and 12 chairs for the audience to sit upon to engage with and experience the work. This was first displayed in both Standard Definition (SD 720 x 576 pixels) and High Definition (HD 1920 by 1080 pixels) for comparison. Recording audience times spent with this work showed that people stayed twice as long with the HD version compared to SD: therefore a multiple of four times the resolution doubled the amount of time spent looking. The prongs of forks were a grey blur in SD, yet were well defined in HD, which inferred that veracity of reproduction was a key issue (an inference ratified in the other Practice as Research Portfolios (PARPs).
My findings from the three installations were discussed and expounded upon in two peer-reviewed journal articles, a book chapter and conference presentations. The article Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, is a comprehensive discussion of my research at that time (and is relevant for the first three Portfolios) and sets the scene for the later questions to be asked through to the end of the research period in 2016. It discusses the potency of the unfamiliar to rejuvenate an image enabling the subject to be received anew by an audience. I employed that concept here to find a way to refresh an already much seen image, the common or garden table. With Portfolio 2 however I decided to open out my research to include what I would term ‘the iconic image’, which in this case, though acknowledging the idea of a well known-image, much seen and much travelled to, here I was to examine whether the act of representing the image in higher resolutions was to render them anew both in creative and also in technical or engineering terms.
Many of the ideas postulated are quite difficult to encode in words. Often in presentations I engaged in demonstrative forms of research exchange and I offer here an example: were I to describe the issues around multiple image capture and display in 3D on the same screen, such that on the display itself depth at different levels was revealed, which then confused the brain – then this description may not be completely meaningful. Here however is an eight minute presentation where the research group demonstrates the seeing of a new form with a degree of revelation and insight. This in itself should show how ideas about liminal boundaries are often better experienced than explained – and this behaviour in itself lies at the root of my propositions of both Immersive Learning Environments and also Advanced Innovation Laboratories. As one researcher says as his take-away from the presentation: "I've never seen anything like this before".
First watch the 8 minute presentation by clicking the video below - but the final image will seem out of focus without 3D glasses, so after you've watched the presentation, for a clear non-stereoscopic view of the Kings Canyon Image in this presentation, click here.
This following presentation occurred in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=rU35wQnO-J
NEXT: Portfolio 1 Complete List of Outputs
Using these artefacts, I worked through the effects of increasing resolution such that by the end of that first fellowship I could then formally recommend in peer-reviewed articles two main propositions. The first was with regard the relationship between resolution and durational attention:
- that a four-times increase in resolution produces twice the length of audience engagement
The second was with regard to how professionals, academics and students of the discipline could wield the new technology effectively and appropriately by:
- the creation of a set of rules for the definition and practice of Digital Cinematography
These are:
- the optical pathway is 35mm or above (derived from technical and industrial limitations possible at the time of origination for manufacturing photo-chemical negative).
- it generates a progressively based lossless data/image flow, at 10 bit depth or above, which relates to a specific time-base as opposed to an interlaced image flow (one full frame of information at a time rather than a field-based workflow)
- like one of its predecessors, film, it holds the image in a latent state until an act of development (or rendering) is applied - but unlike film is nondestructive of its prior material state
- itʼs capture mechanism though generating a nondestructive, noncompressed data pathway from which an image can be reconstructed, is not its sole intent as a medium or method of capture (but is distinguished from digital video, the sole intent of which is to generate images in a compressed manner from less than 35mm optical pathways)
This list took various forms and this is from Flaxton T, (2011) Notes on Digital Workflows, Page 8 http://www.visualfields.co.uk/DIGITALWORKFLOWS.pdf
A key artefact within this portfolio is the installation In Other People’s Skins, a table set for 12 evoking Da Vinci’s The Last Supper which toured eight cathedrals in the UK and was exhibited in other countries including China, America and Italy, In total, over 300,000 people had engaged worldwide with this work during its early lifetime. Two further periods of exhibition in the Cathedral of St John the Divine in 2010 and 2014 was viewed by 650,000. This installation is a life-sized image projected from above of five dinner parties from different parts of the world, onto a table covered by a floor length tablecloth which displays images of the ‘virtual guests’ hands, with 12 white plates to catch images of food and 12 chairs for the audience to sit upon to engage with and experience the work. This was first displayed in both Standard Definition (SD 720 x 576 pixels) and High Definition (HD 1920 by 1080 pixels) for comparison. Recording audience times spent with this work showed that people stayed twice as long with the HD version compared to SD: therefore a multiple of four times the resolution doubled the amount of time spent looking. The prongs of forks were a grey blur in SD, yet were well defined in HD, which inferred that veracity of reproduction was a key issue (an inference ratified in the other Practice as Research Portfolios (PARPs).
My findings from the three installations were discussed and expounded upon in two peer-reviewed journal articles, a book chapter and conference presentations. The article Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making, is a comprehensive discussion of my research at that time (and is relevant for the first three Portfolios) and sets the scene for the later questions to be asked through to the end of the research period in 2016. It discusses the potency of the unfamiliar to rejuvenate an image enabling the subject to be received anew by an audience. I employed that concept here to find a way to refresh an already much seen image, the common or garden table. With Portfolio 2 however I decided to open out my research to include what I would term ‘the iconic image’, which in this case, though acknowledging the idea of a well known-image, much seen and much travelled to, here I was to examine whether the act of representing the image in higher resolutions was to render them anew both in creative and also in technical or engineering terms.
Many of the ideas postulated are quite difficult to encode in words. Often in presentations I engaged in demonstrative forms of research exchange and I offer here an example: were I to describe the issues around multiple image capture and display in 3D on the same screen, such that on the display itself depth at different levels was revealed, which then confused the brain – then this description may not be completely meaningful. Here however is an eight minute presentation where the research group demonstrates the seeing of a new form with a degree of revelation and insight. This in itself should show how ideas about liminal boundaries are often better experienced than explained – and this behaviour in itself lies at the root of my propositions of both Immersive Learning Environments and also Advanced Innovation Laboratories. As one researcher says as his take-away from the presentation: "I've never seen anything like this before".
First watch the 8 minute presentation by clicking the video below - but the final image will seem out of focus without 3D glasses, so after you've watched the presentation, for a clear non-stereoscopic view of the Kings Canyon Image in this presentation, click here.
This following presentation occurred in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=rU35wQnO-J
NEXT: Portfolio 1 Complete List of Outputs