Flaxton gets his scroll to become an official Academician of the RWA
Terry Flaxton, RWA, FRPS |
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Below a third person description of myself as an academic 2007 - 2017, to the right a practice as research presentation which seeks to reveal to some assembled academics and researchers how I continually discovered and rediscovered what practice as research actually meant.
Another step change in view will be that of plenoptic capture where the idea of the lens and the camera together may become surpassed. If one can treat the data of a scene as a form of sonar, then one should be able to re-assemble the data into an image of any resolution, any frame rate and any dynamic range - and most impressively - from any point of view. Position may become a property of display, rather than capture. All of this raises deep questions about the meaning and significance of the act of capture and display that reach right into the heart of the human condition: Why do we make the images that we make? Why do we tell the stories that we tell? Why do we wish to reproduce the world - already so perfectly realised - in a form mediated by the human hand, eye and mind? As a grounding for his Research Flaxton did not undertake the traditional academic route and instead worked as a Cinematographer and Artist for 30 years prior to joining academia. He shot his first 16mm film in 1971, began making Video Art in 1976 (won a prize in the 1979 Tokyo Video Festival for 'Talking Heads') which was followed by various prizes over the years including the Locarno, Montbeliard, Prix Nike Amsterdam as well as nominations such as the Prix Italia, Bafta and Grierson. He covered Ridley Scott’s ‘1984’ for Apple and created 'Prisoners' from that experience. From 1986/89 Flaxton directed 'On Video' a series for Channel 4 on Video Art in Europe and was commissioned by Channel 4 and BBC to make many projects for transmission (many airing internationally) including working with Noam Chomsky on the Cold War Game: The USA and then 'The Cold War Game: The Soviet Union' on the subject of Soviet foreign policy in the 3rd World. Early on in in 2013 as I'd become a professor of cinematography at UWE in Bristol, I was well versed in the understanding of practice as research through my experiments driven by fulfilling an AHRC Creative Research award given in 2006 which kept me occupied until 2010 (and then followed by a knowledge transfer fellowship for two years until 2012). So I was busy not only finding ways to use the acts of practice as a route to originating new research by also finding ways how to articulate how I engaged with practice as research. You can see the final outcome by going to the top right link to my PhD. So in 2013 as practice as research had taken some time to be understood by scholars who had previously been bound by text based behaviour, I decided to try to reveal what it actually meant in a presentation where my understanding would be revealed by osmosis. My thinking was that I should describe a new trajectory I was on - discovering how to make composite 3D landscapes and their relationship to David Hockney's polaroid works, themselves a response to Braque and Picassos's invention of cubism. In this presentation I simply lay out how I discovered this new form and then show the assembly how to 'see' it and how that then could be the basis for an entirely new research behaviour - part of which was the presentation itself. The silence of the audience as it 'sees' this new form reveals the impact that it had on them - and In talking with people from that time on I could see that the delivery of new forms, with an attendant description of how that might then fuel new research would also affect how they them treated their own practice as research in future.
In 2007 he won a prestigious Creative Research Award, in 2010 he won an AHRC Knowledge Exchange award, then various other funding wins totally around £750,000. From this his work on resolution in installation form was exhibited in 8 Cathedrals in the UK and then on to China, Italy, France, Japan and various other countries until a large scale exhibition at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York for 6 Months in 2010. In October 2013 he exhibited at the RWA in Bristol and was invited to become a Royal West of England Academician in January 2014. In 2015 one of his research works exhibited at the Cathedral of St John the Divine for 6 months to around 650,000 people - and the same installation returns to ST John's for another 6 month run in October 2016.
His latest publication is a chapter in Sean Cubitt, Nathaniel Tkacz and Daniel Palmer's 'Digital Light' which can be downloaded by clicking here. Please click here for Flaxton's full publication list with access to documentation from 2007 onwards. My work can be found in various collections including:
AICE InVideo (Milan) The Film and Video Artists Study Collection (Central St Martins, London) The Lux Centre (London) The Rewind Study Collection, (University of Dundee) Video des Beaux Jours, (Strasbourg). The Arnolfini holds a copy of ‘The Fashion Show’ Neuer Berliner Kunstverein holds Prisoners and also The Object of Desire The Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, holds a copy of ‘Prisoners’. A relevant piece of radio was created as television was being introduced into America:
'My Favorite Husband', the long running early Lucille Ball comedy series aired on October 14 1949 - Episode 58, Title: Television To the left a showreel from Flaxton's cinematography work circa 2004 As a cinematographer Flaxton shot drama, documentary, commercials and concerts on many film and digital formats and in 1986 shot 'Out of Order', the 3rd electronically captured feature worldwide for cinema release (1st being 'Harlow' in 1965, 2nd '200 Motels' in 1971) presaging the current era of electronic and digital capture. Terry began working with European HD in 1992 and shot Japanese HD for transfer to 35mm in 1999 for Du Art Labs in New York.
In 2007 he was awarded a prestigious AHRC Creative Fellowship, followed by an AHRC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship to investigate the effect of increased resolutions, frame rates and higher dynamic range which eventuated in the creation (together with BBC R&D and BVI Bristol) the worlds first HDR/HFR movie. His work can be found in international collections. Recently he has chaired panels at ISEA Sydney 2013, ISEA Vancouver 2015. He has spoken at various conferences and to various research communities in Zurich at ETH, in Xi'an at Digital Art Weeks and exhibited his research and artworks in Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Rome, Paris, London and various locations around the world. Examples of his work can be found here Papers Website Art Academia.edu Cinematography COMMENTS ON ARTWORKS
"Terry Flaxton's shrewd and paradoxical installation contributes to the deconstruction of traditional video. The restless and versatile british filmmaker refuses usual interactivity, and displays, instead of a normal screen, a laid dinner table; then invites the viewer, through a very precise projection, to try to match the virtual guests' gestures. An unforeseeable and bewildering end follows." Techne Catalogue October 2005 - May 2006 "Terry Flaxton has been an impassioned, indefatigable presence in British Independent Video for almost two decades. During this time he has assembled an impressive body of work encompassing powerful, polemical documentary (produced as a member of ground-breaking outfits Vida and Triplevision) and highly personal, poetic video art." more "It was great to see your piece as it is supposed to be seen. Interactivity in the best sense: perhaps the only meaningful sense at this point in history." From a fellow artist on seeing In Other People's Skins for the first time. 2015 In Other People's Skins, (to the right) an Installation plus In Re Ansel Adams (above)
This applicant academician exhibition enabled me to join the RWA. |
ABOVE an academic presentation on the nature of Practice as Research and how to develop artistic projects and 'the artefacts' then produced as part of a practice as research portfolio (PARP)
BELOW: 2024 Testing to Destruction, Installation for the RWA Open (and this column each years art works that I presented at the RWA Open) 
BELOW: 2023 God's Love is Eternal a 60 x 75 inch print derived form my art work on Sedition of the same name click here to see this
2022 Entangled a long for artwork which visualises and describes the transitions from the Analogue to the Digital (Part 1 of 4 parts) through to the transition from the Digital to the Quantum Realm (Part 2 of 4 parts)
2021 - Video work "For Bridget Riley: Ecclesia 11" single screen video work.
2020 Metempsychosis six 24 x 16 Photographic Prints BELOW
2019 Re-Imagining New York (a Diptych of Video Screens) BELOW
2018 Re-Imagining Venice (a Triptych of Video Screens) BELOW
2016 - Video work, single screen
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