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On Wednesday 7th May 2014,Terry Flaxton decided to show the beginnings of a new piece of work that he shot whilst lacking in adequate equipment. He happened to be in Kings Canyon, Australia – at least 450 kilometers from decent kit.
"Reaching back towards a piece of work I'd done in Los Angeles a year earlier (I was trying to get a plate of the LA skyline at night from Griffith Park) I found a route towards a new form which I currently call 'datamontage' – a form of vertical rather than horizontal montage (the first is Goodard – a can of coke and a picture of chairman Mao in the same scene was a visual contradiction, as distinct from Vertov or Eisenstein’s sequence of shots which come to mean something in their order and aggregation). So this form has many images to view at the same time – but it is 3D as well. The key comment in this presentation by one of the participants is: "I’ve never seen anything like this before’" and what this indicates to me is that we are on the boundary of discovering a new way of perceiving visual images that was not available before. In a sense this will become applied research: discover practical mechanical principles and then to role them out into the community. So the video below is an encapsulation of the presentation and below I go on to consider what happened in this work". |
There was an excitement around the presentation because I’d already had the key response ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before’ from one other person in a persanal screening. Sarah Sparke was helping me deliver this as there was a degree of fuss around switching from 2D to 3D and we’d asked to have the event recorded – just in case there proved to be something more to be had from a simple experiment – even the possibility of applied research. So if you’ve watched the video you saw what happened – you haven't seen the actual effect but you should be able to trust the responses you see captured.
I decided to ask one person what they thought they’d seen: Mike, a technician, looked into the distance and thought; then, recollected once more and tried again to summarize the experience in language… but gave up for a moment - and then tried again by finding a different distance to look into to find the words. Eventually he said falteringly, forming the idea for the first time in his recent experience: ‘I was trying to find a way to look at the image’. This implies that the image form was new and that there was a struggle in the individual to conceptualise the experience for language based examination/reflection.
It also implies that when encountering ways of seeing the unfamiliar, we are then forced to find a new way to look – and if we are going to transpose the looking to conscious analytical mind, then the form that the analytical takes, is language based and therefore needs new language to refer to the experience. Equally the implication carries forwards, that there may be other moving image forms that will arrive that are equally indescribable. We have to do a proper study to illicit whether or not there is a common response to this new image form.
In terms of cultural value – in the valuation of culture - the unfamiliar does not have language based constructs surrounding it. The theoretic mode of address (the specialized bureaucratic language based mode beloved of academics and other mediators of meaning for the general public) is not completely suited to reveal the new. But language constructs go both ways. It may very well be that packaging, sorting and filing cultural forms renders them less powerful because they are now attainable through reference, rather than the experience they offer.
So there is now a clue here concerning a set of questions that need answering: Why is entrainment as a form of response gaining greater traction than educated responses to art and culture? In other words we are not required to form an analysis to experience art, but to allow ourselves direct perception of the work – and this next caveat is very important: together with others.
Why is the mind (or experience) constructed in a way that it seeks to familiarize oneself with an experience to render it as lesser than at first apprehension? How can we store and get at experiences that precede the affordances and concordances of mental accommodation – when the mind categorizes it also dis-empowers – or lessens the power of the immediate?
Is it a human contingency that the minds processing of information and familiar and unfamiliar images has to be through the language centre? Are there other pathways? Can we create new pathways by experiential means (study of gamers shows that players neuron systems accommodate the experience offered so that the player is more competent to deal with the flow of information).
Why do we use the front brain to understand the world by breaking the known into a familiar patterns or set of reasoning's? Is there another way?
Do Engineers, Artists, Writers and Plumbers all use the same frameworks of understanding to apprehend art and culture?
Is what is not said and what is not done more important in measuring cultural value – than what is?
Is it true that you can only be surprised the first time?
Does familiarity mean that we learn new ways of seeing – or that we dilute the parallel powerful experiential response that we have when the image is new to us?
We need now to map subjective responses to get derive a ‘bandwidth’ of responses so that we can place results on a recognizable map (albeit theoretically rather than experientially driven). We also need to map the changing response over time as seeing and packing away meaning is learned.
So now we should have asked more people questions but there was a series of presentations and that wasn’t to be had. Also we should do a longitudinal study of the response i.e. something that inquires over time how the subject encodes the experience in their behavior and mindset – how initial inabilities to ‘read’ the image become a familiar trope. You’ll have heard at one point in the video one person say: 'It’s like Hockney’s Polaroid photos of landscape'. So by this point in the viewing, that person had found a comparable experience to relate this current one too. But this one has a 3D element and therefore a sense of wrap-around that other 2D forms do not deliver.
The key point in all of this is that we've demonstrated a moving image visual form that has not yet been experience elsewhere (until the virally spreading web makes others create the same). But the implication for me is that we are on the boundary of exploration into the digital. This after all is just the moving image area and the digital surrounds and permeates all practices at the moment. So if this is true in the moving image subject area, it follows on some levels that this must be true for other subject areas.
The work itself will be pursued – I sometimes think that ‘art’ is the Research and Development department of industry, but it's also the R7D department for the common mind– so I sense, from my previous experiments which turned into applications in the real world (such as the HDR experiments with University of Bristol and the Bristol Vision Institute - and BBC R&D) that though at the moment what I’ve managed to do can be filed under ‘strange and wonderful’, it will soon enough have application within industry.
Watch this space.
I decided to ask one person what they thought they’d seen: Mike, a technician, looked into the distance and thought; then, recollected once more and tried again to summarize the experience in language… but gave up for a moment - and then tried again by finding a different distance to look into to find the words. Eventually he said falteringly, forming the idea for the first time in his recent experience: ‘I was trying to find a way to look at the image’. This implies that the image form was new and that there was a struggle in the individual to conceptualise the experience for language based examination/reflection.
It also implies that when encountering ways of seeing the unfamiliar, we are then forced to find a new way to look – and if we are going to transpose the looking to conscious analytical mind, then the form that the analytical takes, is language based and therefore needs new language to refer to the experience. Equally the implication carries forwards, that there may be other moving image forms that will arrive that are equally indescribable. We have to do a proper study to illicit whether or not there is a common response to this new image form.
In terms of cultural value – in the valuation of culture - the unfamiliar does not have language based constructs surrounding it. The theoretic mode of address (the specialized bureaucratic language based mode beloved of academics and other mediators of meaning for the general public) is not completely suited to reveal the new. But language constructs go both ways. It may very well be that packaging, sorting and filing cultural forms renders them less powerful because they are now attainable through reference, rather than the experience they offer.
So there is now a clue here concerning a set of questions that need answering: Why is entrainment as a form of response gaining greater traction than educated responses to art and culture? In other words we are not required to form an analysis to experience art, but to allow ourselves direct perception of the work – and this next caveat is very important: together with others.
Why is the mind (or experience) constructed in a way that it seeks to familiarize oneself with an experience to render it as lesser than at first apprehension? How can we store and get at experiences that precede the affordances and concordances of mental accommodation – when the mind categorizes it also dis-empowers – or lessens the power of the immediate?
Is it a human contingency that the minds processing of information and familiar and unfamiliar images has to be through the language centre? Are there other pathways? Can we create new pathways by experiential means (study of gamers shows that players neuron systems accommodate the experience offered so that the player is more competent to deal with the flow of information).
Why do we use the front brain to understand the world by breaking the known into a familiar patterns or set of reasoning's? Is there another way?
Do Engineers, Artists, Writers and Plumbers all use the same frameworks of understanding to apprehend art and culture?
Is what is not said and what is not done more important in measuring cultural value – than what is?
Is it true that you can only be surprised the first time?
Does familiarity mean that we learn new ways of seeing – or that we dilute the parallel powerful experiential response that we have when the image is new to us?
We need now to map subjective responses to get derive a ‘bandwidth’ of responses so that we can place results on a recognizable map (albeit theoretically rather than experientially driven). We also need to map the changing response over time as seeing and packing away meaning is learned.
So now we should have asked more people questions but there was a series of presentations and that wasn’t to be had. Also we should do a longitudinal study of the response i.e. something that inquires over time how the subject encodes the experience in their behavior and mindset – how initial inabilities to ‘read’ the image become a familiar trope. You’ll have heard at one point in the video one person say: 'It’s like Hockney’s Polaroid photos of landscape'. So by this point in the viewing, that person had found a comparable experience to relate this current one too. But this one has a 3D element and therefore a sense of wrap-around that other 2D forms do not deliver.
The key point in all of this is that we've demonstrated a moving image visual form that has not yet been experience elsewhere (until the virally spreading web makes others create the same). But the implication for me is that we are on the boundary of exploration into the digital. This after all is just the moving image area and the digital surrounds and permeates all practices at the moment. So if this is true in the moving image subject area, it follows on some levels that this must be true for other subject areas.
The work itself will be pursued – I sometimes think that ‘art’ is the Research and Development department of industry, but it's also the R7D department for the common mind– so I sense, from my previous experiments which turned into applications in the real world (such as the HDR experiments with University of Bristol and the Bristol Vision Institute - and BBC R&D) that though at the moment what I’ve managed to do can be filed under ‘strange and wonderful’, it will soon enough have application within industry.
Watch this space.