The impact of digital technologies on the production and consumption of moving images 2007-2016
PROLOGUE: My prior development as an industry practioner, artist and academic
*please be aware that if further context is required I have added information under the menu tab Conclusion in 'Extra Resources' to deepen, contextualise and outline my research behaviours and interests.
Since filming my first photo-chemically based work, a 16 mm film, in 1971, I became aware that making itself is an essentially interrogative factor in the creation of meaning and significance. For many years before entering academia, I had trodden two continuously intersecting paths:
I created many pieces of work to investigate the reflexivity of the medium. Early work identified the act of making within the actual work (Talking Heads, 1977, Documentary Rape, 1980). In the mid-1980s I directed a series on UK and European Video Art plus a documentary on Soviet Foreign Policy in the Third World (co-written with Jonathan Steele of the Guardian) 1989. In this project I'd realised that television’s use of Eisenstein’s fictional material in films such as Strike and Battleship Potemkin as if it were documentary footage offered me an opportunity. We shot our documentary in colour but then added black and white footage of two negotiators, Soviet and American, shot like The Ipcress File, in widescreen aspect ratio. I then interviewed specialists in American foreign policy relations in the Kremlin. First I played back the footage in colour, in English in 4:3 television aspect ratio – and then I faded through to the same answer in Russian, in black and white, in widescreen aspect ratio – thus bringing home the issue of how we represent groups with different ideologies in the West, which is of course itself an ideological choice. At that time in 1989 this was an experimental gesture. My television ‘video art’ commissions have been seen in Europe and the USA, some of which won awards at Festivals such as Locarno, Mill Valley, Tokyo and Montbeliard.
I'd championed a subtle lighting regime in video when it was still known for garish lighting at the beginning of the 1980s due to early television forms requiring a certain voltage encoded within the image that would enable focus to be achieved on transmission – but no longer necessary technically at that time. I'd also edited video in the analogue period (1976 – 1982) and in a semi-digital environment from 1983 onwards I shot the world’s third only video to 35mm film Out of Order funded by Channel 4 and the BFI (1986). My first activities with online video begun around 1990 when I managed to encode and display in a web browser video images of 40 x 30 pixels. This 30 second video took four hours to upload on old-style dial-up modems. Few servers and connections could stream the video fast enough to play without stuttering.
I then worked with an early form of Philips 1250 line MAC analogue high definition video (1992) and been asked to test new equipment by manufacturers such as Panasonic and Sony in the late 90s and shot the first ‘proper’ HD to 35mm project for theatrical exhibition in 2000. Here ‘proper’ refers to the hybrid Analogue/Digital system that George Lucas was next to start capturing Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002).
In 2007 I had begun academic research with some intensity and all the works from then until now are in fact research investigations or artefacts. Nevertheless, in their realization, the initial intent is transcended such that the work itself can be considered as art. Obviously this transmutation is more or less successful in different works.
My work is now held in various international collections and has been shown at over 100 festivals. I am one of the 140 Academicians of the Royal West of England Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. Examples of my work can be found on s[edition], an electronic platform: https://www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton. By the end of 2016 my research works had been engaged with by circa 1.6 million people internationally.
It is important to recognise that within both industry and academia between the beginning of HD with Philips analogue Mac 1250 line system in 1989 and especially between the early 2000s and the arrival of the Red One in 2007, there was much confusion as to what technical terms meant to the average television person and academic. Even people who were trained in film had very little idea of the terms, to the extent that they relied on video people for information even when they were in charge of trying to shoot a Hollywood movie electronically. The reader should try to remember the use of a dial-up modem when trying to get on to the internet until quite recently and transpose that experience of waiting onto the actuality of video and television at the beginning of the research period. I have had conversations with leading Director of Photography (DPs) working at that time who have spoken to me of their ignorance of any medium outside of film at this point. Film requires a radically different mindset for production and requires a different kind of preparation to ensure capture than being successful in capturing images in Digital Cinematography (by 2017 after the period of the research this had changed once again). Much of what I shall reveal about my research requires that constant memory of how basic the technology was when first encountering the almost monthly developments that I shall discuss. My research is situated initially within a new technological era where only standard definition images were available and my research informed the flow of dependable information about the new digital form.
Positioning
From the beginning of my research I have tried to explore the liminal space between experimental and industrial practices where both have co-informed one another. That consideration predicates a deep commitment to reconciling the individual specificities and affordances of craft, art and technological innovation and how their respective histories have intersected. These considerations can be framed by a specific idea of ‘technicity’ as framed in Merlin Donald’s book Origins of the Modern Mind and his chapter The Exographic Revolution: Neuropsychological Sequelae in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the boundaries of the mind:
Since filming my first photo-chemically based work, a 16 mm film, in 1971, I became aware that making itself is an essentially interrogative factor in the creation of meaning and significance. For many years before entering academia, I had trodden two continuously intersecting paths:
- being active in the experimental moving image art world
- having a career in the UK’s moving-image industries
I created many pieces of work to investigate the reflexivity of the medium. Early work identified the act of making within the actual work (Talking Heads, 1977, Documentary Rape, 1980). In the mid-1980s I directed a series on UK and European Video Art plus a documentary on Soviet Foreign Policy in the Third World (co-written with Jonathan Steele of the Guardian) 1989. In this project I'd realised that television’s use of Eisenstein’s fictional material in films such as Strike and Battleship Potemkin as if it were documentary footage offered me an opportunity. We shot our documentary in colour but then added black and white footage of two negotiators, Soviet and American, shot like The Ipcress File, in widescreen aspect ratio. I then interviewed specialists in American foreign policy relations in the Kremlin. First I played back the footage in colour, in English in 4:3 television aspect ratio – and then I faded through to the same answer in Russian, in black and white, in widescreen aspect ratio – thus bringing home the issue of how we represent groups with different ideologies in the West, which is of course itself an ideological choice. At that time in 1989 this was an experimental gesture. My television ‘video art’ commissions have been seen in Europe and the USA, some of which won awards at Festivals such as Locarno, Mill Valley, Tokyo and Montbeliard.
I'd championed a subtle lighting regime in video when it was still known for garish lighting at the beginning of the 1980s due to early television forms requiring a certain voltage encoded within the image that would enable focus to be achieved on transmission – but no longer necessary technically at that time. I'd also edited video in the analogue period (1976 – 1982) and in a semi-digital environment from 1983 onwards I shot the world’s third only video to 35mm film Out of Order funded by Channel 4 and the BFI (1986). My first activities with online video begun around 1990 when I managed to encode and display in a web browser video images of 40 x 30 pixels. This 30 second video took four hours to upload on old-style dial-up modems. Few servers and connections could stream the video fast enough to play without stuttering.
I then worked with an early form of Philips 1250 line MAC analogue high definition video (1992) and been asked to test new equipment by manufacturers such as Panasonic and Sony in the late 90s and shot the first ‘proper’ HD to 35mm project for theatrical exhibition in 2000. Here ‘proper’ refers to the hybrid Analogue/Digital system that George Lucas was next to start capturing Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002).
In 2007 I had begun academic research with some intensity and all the works from then until now are in fact research investigations or artefacts. Nevertheless, in their realization, the initial intent is transcended such that the work itself can be considered as art. Obviously this transmutation is more or less successful in different works.
My work is now held in various international collections and has been shown at over 100 festivals. I am one of the 140 Academicians of the Royal West of England Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. Examples of my work can be found on s[edition], an electronic platform: https://www.seditionart.com/terry-flaxton. By the end of 2016 my research works had been engaged with by circa 1.6 million people internationally.
It is important to recognise that within both industry and academia between the beginning of HD with Philips analogue Mac 1250 line system in 1989 and especially between the early 2000s and the arrival of the Red One in 2007, there was much confusion as to what technical terms meant to the average television person and academic. Even people who were trained in film had very little idea of the terms, to the extent that they relied on video people for information even when they were in charge of trying to shoot a Hollywood movie electronically. The reader should try to remember the use of a dial-up modem when trying to get on to the internet until quite recently and transpose that experience of waiting onto the actuality of video and television at the beginning of the research period. I have had conversations with leading Director of Photography (DPs) working at that time who have spoken to me of their ignorance of any medium outside of film at this point. Film requires a radically different mindset for production and requires a different kind of preparation to ensure capture than being successful in capturing images in Digital Cinematography (by 2017 after the period of the research this had changed once again). Much of what I shall reveal about my research requires that constant memory of how basic the technology was when first encountering the almost monthly developments that I shall discuss. My research is situated initially within a new technological era where only standard definition images were available and my research informed the flow of dependable information about the new digital form.
Positioning
From the beginning of my research I have tried to explore the liminal space between experimental and industrial practices where both have co-informed one another. That consideration predicates a deep commitment to reconciling the individual specificities and affordances of craft, art and technological innovation and how their respective histories have intersected. These considerations can be framed by a specific idea of ‘technicity’ as framed in Merlin Donald’s book Origins of the Modern Mind and his chapter The Exographic Revolution: Neuropsychological Sequelae in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the boundaries of the mind:
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This process has undoubtedly accelerated the long-standing symbiosis of the brain with the external symbolic world it has created, and put pressure on the young to assimilate more and more technologies. There is no longer any doubt that this symbiosis of brain with communications technology has a massive impact on cortical epigenesis and, with the rise of mass literacy, that this effect is present in a very large percentage of the human population. The driver of this increasingly rapid rate of change, human culture, can be regarded as a gigantic search engine that seeks out and selects the kinds of brains and minds it needs at a given historical moment.
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This proposes that not only do we invent tools to further our own purposes but that the tool itself affects our cognitive and physical levels. Similarly the practice as research proposition of creating experimental research artefacts might then affect the outcomes of that research in a way that standard research would not. This would mean that my research originally inhabited the more positivist ideological standpoint of Bristol Vision Institute (BVI) that argued that different disciplines which studied an individual subject area (such as vision) could contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how to manufacture an improved moving image experience if then augmented with those insights provided by those garnered from signal processing, where the project of engineers is to generate the smallest amount of data for the highest quality of representation, or cue gaze theory within experimental psychology, where cue gaze theory argues that ‘people tend to orient to and follow the gaze cues of others’. Indeed the first three portfolios derive from that position. Later as I worked through an AHRC knowledge exchange fellowship, the beginnings of a more dialogic approach enabled me to broaden my research framework, which will be demonstrated in the fourth portfolio. In this example from an early paper in my research I show the first leanings towards trying to understand the idea of technicity, where the proposition is that we seek to manipulate the environment by creating tools – but that in so doing we manipulate or change ourselves. Equally there are the signs that straightforward physiological evaluation of the act of seeing, of the gaze in fact, is not enough. This questioning suggests that in time I would have to discuss and debate this with others, from different disciplines:
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A basic question arises: Why does an image with many times less resolution than our optical system have an effect on us when an object directly perceived may have none? At the beginning of my work it seemed to me that High Definition should not be conceived so much as an image format, but rather a portal, a doorway through which we might look and see things differently. It is a doorway that enables a look into the future because it demonstrates and reflects back to us our current physiology and psychology. If technology should be ‘appropriate’ in that it arises through our imaginings (through our science fiction writers) and then manifests when it is needed, then High-resolution imaging is indeed a reflection of our state because it has become technically possible and therefore appropriate at this time.
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In total I will argue that my contribution to new knowledge over a ten-year period derives from a deep appreciation of the craft of engineering. As a practice researcher as well as an artist, I have been committed both to critical reflection on the task of creativity in practice as well as trying to articulate who or what is creating and, from that position, what is being created. In many ways as a continuously engaged academic and artist I have long valued the underlying medium that I have worked with and any serious approach to that meaning has meant to me a continuous engagement with the fundamental principles of creating moving images whether they be derived in film, analogue television, analogue video, digital video, data cinematography or digital streaming television. For me to be able to capture and display an image sufficient to induce the experience of movement has always meant having an understanding of the underlying nature of the media through the physical specificities and affordances that enables that act.
NEXT:
For Key Examples of Content of Portfolio 1: Portfolio 1 (Guide with key outputs)
a shortened selection of key artefacts in this portfolio wth links to the artefacts
For Critique and Guide to Portfolio 1: Critical Commentary on Portfolio 1
a discussion of the the research at each stage (you may wish to access this section first as an introduction to the concerns of the portfolio)
For a Complete List of All Artefacts in Portfolio 1: 1Portfolio 1 Complete List of Outputs
a full list of every artefact in this portfolio wth links to the artefacts
NEXT:
For Key Examples of Content of Portfolio 1: Portfolio 1 (Guide with key outputs)
a shortened selection of key artefacts in this portfolio wth links to the artefacts
For Critique and Guide to Portfolio 1: Critical Commentary on Portfolio 1
a discussion of the the research at each stage (you may wish to access this section first as an introduction to the concerns of the portfolio)
For a Complete List of All Artefacts in Portfolio 1: 1Portfolio 1 Complete List of Outputs
a full list of every artefact in this portfolio wth links to the artefacts
Moving Image Arts Research is concerned with exploring the histories, theories, technologies, cultures and politics of moving image art production, interaction and reception.
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small experiments in connectivity and how drama or documentary might be enabled |