Papers
The Cinematographers Eye, The Academics Mind and the Artists Intuition
This paper was given at the 'Exhibiting Video Conferences staged by Westminster University on 23rd, 24th and 25th March 2012
In this paper I described the state of mind of those named and where these kinds of mind originate from - and where they lead to. It can be briefly summarised thus: An artist, a cinematographer and an academic go into a bar. The artist announces" I've had a really good idea". He then proceeds to outline the idea to the other two and the cinematographer responds: "I think we can achieve that". After thinking for a moment the academic says with a worried frown: "Have you really thought that through?"
13 views
Seen by:
Download (.pdf) Capturing the Hyper Real: The Cinematographers Eye
Given on 9th December 2011 to the Bristol Vision Institute and a variation of this given at University of York, February 29th 2012
In this presentation I discuss what it is that a cinematographer sees when he or she looks into the luminous frame. I shall do this by pointing out that language, myth and meaning surround the idea of communicating experience, of how todays understanding of what matters in art is governed by ideas derived from a remediation of the image, that requires interpretive thinking rather than direct experience. I compare ideas from both neuro-science and myth and discuss why ideas created some three and a half thousand years ago may have greater veracity than ideas created in the last twenty years. I also show short examples of my recent works which explore these issues, created whilst on two consecutive AHRC Fellowships in the Moving Image. All works are linked in this paper for internet access
The Developing Language of Digital Cinematography
I've found the system to have papers or articles published to be far too slow to cope with developing evolution of this subject area, so I humbly submit this work here and welcome emails and anonymous peer-review. I hope academia.edu develops this function very shortly. So the 1st publication moment is actually right here, right now.
This article is concerned with the developing language and idea trends used by data and digital cinematographers to discuss the topography of the post-digital landscape with reference to continuous changes in imaging technologies - which they are of course at the forefront of.
What they discuss and have had to invent new language for is constantly changing to accommodate rapid technological developments and actually, new ideas and new innovations are derived from the very discussions of what the subject area is and what it consists of. The language that is being developed is reflexive with those ideas and in some cases, idea affects generation of language, and in others, language affects new ideas. In the end this will inflect upon discussions amongst people involved in media theory. I say this in relation to the disarray that can be seen within pedagogy in relation to the teaching of moving image technique, craft, aesthetics and theory.
54 views
Seen by:
High Definition Imaging: The Paradox of Creativity Within the Academy
Given at 'Postdigital Encounters, creativity and improvisation' held at the Watershed Media Center 24th June 2011 a symposium held by the Journal of Media Practice
Terry Flaxton, Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol
In this paper I will examine the creative tension that requires academic research to generate creative acts and vice versa, when research requires a methodology and creativity more often requires spontaneous and intuitive behavior. I will do this by reflecting on the outcome of my 3 year AHRC Creative Research Fellowship through the experience of both creating and exhibiting the series of research works, as a combined creative, theoretical and research gesture, within the moment when some argue that the time is becoming ‘postdigital’.
My core research question was arguably couched within the digital: “How will High Definition Imaging affect the nature of art and entertainment from the point of view of both practitioners and audiences?” When I proposed my fellowship it was on the basis that the argument I would be making would exist within the work itself as opposed to within theoretical writing about the subject (which I would accomplish later with critical reflection). However, a deep question that pervaded my research process was implicit in the feeling that I was creating work with the wrong goal in mind and I struggled with that feeling until I felt I’d managed to balance the twin agendas of research and creativity.
The key to finding that balance resided within a re-reading of Georgia O’Keefe who had said on becoming blind in later life: “creativity is like an abyss and it is only when you have dived into the darkness that your fear might turn into wings.” This understanding of the creative gesture was framed within the analogue and stimulated me to remain spontaneous when everything that academic practice seemed to demand was to replace the spontaneous with contrivance – as a scientist might construct a hypothesis only to then go on to find the proof for that hypothesis.
In this paper I will describe my journey, show some of the work, describe the exhibition process and reveal the extent to which the spontaneous and the intuitive aided me in search of the creative gesture that enabled me to balance the creative act with academic practice.
30 views
Seen by: 
The Creation of Digital Art in a Post Digital World
Given at the Athens Conference for Mass Communication, May 2011
As far back as the introduction of the Greek myths – and specifically that of Echo and Narcissus (where Echo is Sound and Narcissus is image) appreciation of the nature of art has been derived from archaic and classical values that promote the idea of interpretation as a meaningful metric of the value of an idea or an object. In his ‘Poetics’, Aristotle posited that diegesis (Echo) is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with mimesis (Narcissus) which is the imitative representation of them: the distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. Together with discrimination and comprehension, both of these functions are part of the mechanism of interpretation. When Gutenburg created the printing press which enabled the beginnings of the mass production of text, the concept of reading and interpreting gained even greater historical purchase due to the encoding of meaning in actual objects: books. ‘Interpretation’ was given even greater power within the rise of modernism with the intervention of the Frankfurt School, which fore-grounded the idea of the ‘interpretation’ of art as meaningful and significant. Walter Benjamin reframed and reinterpreted the medieval belief of the power of the relic of the Saint in his famous question: Can the aura of the original be found within its replica? This question is even more pertinent now when art is created within the digital realm and must be reframed once again: Can the aura of the original exist at all, given there is no difference between the original and its copies? By examining new ideas of ‘entrainment’, where immersivity, resonance, synchronicity and direct response become the factors that reveal the potency of art, In this paper I re-examine how art or media events can function without dependence on the idea of interpretation.
THE IDEA OF DIGITALITY
Things are changing and we need to go beyond text - consequently I'm posting this series of talks that I organised in December 2010 as if they were a paper. Please click the button below 'View on flaxton.btinternet.co.uk' for access to all video online presentations
This series of talks was organised to examine the notion of digitality and the move towards identifying the stage we are in as being post-digital
HD Aesthetics
Published in Convergence Magazine, 2011
Professional expertise derived from developing and handling higher resolution technologies now challenges academic convention by seeking to reinscribe digital image making as a material process. In this article and an accompanying online resource, I propose to examine the technology behind High Definition (HD), identifying key areas of understanding to enable an enquiry into those aesthetics that might derive from the technical imperatives within the medium. (This article is accompanied by a series of online interviews entitled A Verbatim History of the Aesthetics, Technology and Techniques of Digital Cinematography. To access this please go to http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/KTV.htm This resource seeks to circumscribe and circumlocute the wide variety of interests and usages of incoming digital media with specific relation to the effects of increased definition being offered by incoming digital technologies). Having discussed the aesthetics of HD I will then proceed to look at the consequent artistic and cultural implications. The article con- cludes by challenging the current academic position of the digital as being inherently immaterial.
Notes on the developing aesthetics of digital technology and its effects on transmedial disciplines
This paper was given at the World University Network Symposium, Technologies of Transmediality, held by the University of Bristol between thursday 6th and Saturday 8th January 2011, organised by Professors Street and Jones of University of Bristol.
In the center of the is paper there is a short clip from delivered at TED by Blaise Aguera y Arcas which can be accessed here where you can find the ful presentation (in this paper only 3 minutes were used). The full TED talk is 7.33 and well worth a view.
http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html
I will try to upload a video version of this paper shortly.
The conference discussed ideas of transmediality and Intermediality and the final session approached the concept that the digital realm could be thought of, using a quantum metaphor, as having both particle and wave functions - that what it can be described as is dependent on which of its properties you want to know, and from where you, the observer, are positioned.
This paper draws upon the realms of both myth and neuro-science to investigate how developing digital technologies affect cross-disciplinary and transmedial practice. I examine current scientific arguments around the energy of the gaze and the concept of entrainment (the property that enables pendulum clocks to automatically swing together in synchronicity). I then examine if it is within the boundary between the two ideas whether the transmedial qualities of each might render something new of each-other or whether in fact the concept of a ‘boundary’ has become inappropriate in the post-digital age. As the audience observe together, they like Echo and Narcissus are caught in feedback-loops which raises issues concerning the fragility of exchange and entrainment between the maker and audience.
A synthesis of the fundamental ideas that lie beneath High Definition Technologies and Aesthetics
This is a pdf of a talk I gave to University of Westminster's CREAM research team just prior to Christmas 2010. Regard this as a placeholder for the video version of this talk, plus 4 other symopisa on the nature of the digital in the last month of the first decade of the 21st Century. Follow this link to see the presentation: http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/vhwestterryflaxton.htm
This is a synthesis of the fundamental ideas that lie beneath High Definition, it's technologies and developing aesthetics, from data capture, data handling, preparation and grading to display. At the end I start to open up the subject that leads from the above - the re-definition of the digital.
15 views
Seen by:
Myth and Meaning in the DIgital Age
When John Logie Baird lost the contract in February 1937 to EMI for the new BBC ‘high definition television service’ and then immediately called for a 2000 line television system, high resolution imaging has been a goal for industry, science, arts and eventually public desire. The bar that Baird set was related to his understanding of what might ‘satisfy’ the eye and brain when looking at a moving image. Now that we have the technology to achieve Baird’s dream, what does it mean when you view image resolutions that are near or above the physiological limits of eye and brain? How does this affect what is made and how it is received by the public? But this enquiry is not independent of our prior culture and history, of how we have attempted to solve similar questions with prior technologies and prior ideas - in fact if we reach into the realm of myth we will find correlation's with our current predicament: that of identifying the nature of an object before it has actually materialised. In this case, the object - or more accurately the state, is the digital domain. In this talk I will seek to try to understand the new technology and new aesthetic from cultural, arts and technological viewpoints to provide a synthesis and overview of the digital domain.
Active Links
View before reading:
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSELembed.html
View After Reading
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/carnivalembed.htm
New understanding of the mimetic and the diegetic in the creation of art, Xi'an Academy of FIne Arts, July 2010
新的理解在藝術的創作
Until now, in the West, appreciation of the nature of art was derived from archaic and classical values. This was then augmented with the rise of modernism which introduced the ‘interpretation’ of art as meaningful and significant because of its value when interpreted. But new digital technologies are changing the parameters of the discussion about what matters in terms of the display and exhibition of art. By examining new ideas of ‘entrainment’, where immersivity, resonance, and synchronicity and direct response become the factors that reveal art to a contemporary audience, I wish to re-examine how an art object or event functions with special regard to the identity of digital high-resolution technologies. As the worldwide audience develops beyond cultural definitions presented by either East or West this paper seeks to examine and reveal new ideas and concepts around the production, distribution, exhibition and display of art.
Here are the active links from the paper in the order they appear in the text:
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSELembed.html
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/cannaregio.htm
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/carnivalembed.htm
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/TORPORTRAITS.htm
166 views
Seen by: The Technologies, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Politics of High Definition Video
Published in the Millennium Film Journal, number 52 Winter 2009/2010
In this article I explore the rapidly changing face of HD and its impact, in terms of technical, aesthetic and societal perspectives.
http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ52/MFJ52TOC.html
Time and Resolution: Experiments in high definition image making
Published in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Media Practice, Intellect
As an AHRC Creative Research Fellow at Bristol University my research is concerned with High Resolution Imaging. The operative word in my title is ‘Creative’. My fellowship was awarded partially on my argument that ‘my methodological contention is that technical investigations have to be performed in the medium itself, using the form to inquire into itself, to speak in its own language side by side with the written word.’ The article that follows is a synthesizing of the understandings I have derived through practical and creative acts during my first year of research into the High Resolution Domain.
The Concept of Colour Space as seen from the Practitioners Standpoint
Given at the Bristol University Colour Conference at the Arnolfini Gallery July 2009 - text first with images at end - each image page refers to a number in the text
It is significant that in our model of electro-magnetic radiation, said to contain 80 octaves of values, that the human eye can only discern one octave of perception, sight - and yet this area is replete with all the meaning of human experience, most exemplified by film-form. Of significance within our octave of perception is colour, said to be a phenomenon of mind and eye and our understanding of this is embodied in theories of colour, which typically generate three-dimensional mathematical models entitled colour space. I wish to ask some questions around the generation of ideas that encode emotions and experience into psychological, physiological and perceptual frameworks. I also wish to discuss the nature of the underlying science and how that relates to the practice of film-making as it is delivered via contemporary means of display. In so-doing I wish to reveal the history of ideas that precede and lead to the development of the concept of colour space and how those ideas, generated in times typified by the prevalence of analogue technologies, like film, both engenders theoretical, social and cultural meanings and how these relate to the changing paradigm that now includes electronic cinematography within the digital realm.
Some notes towards the Theory and Practice of Innovation in Theatre, FIlm and Television Education
This article is concerned primarily with what constitutes the need to innovate and how it comes about in real world scenarios. I then discuss the teaching of lighting and some of the methods I had discovered to reveal the sensibility required by people entering not only theatre film and television industries, but also those who are involved in academic transmission. Lastly I conclude by appreciating two great Spanish innovators in theatre and film from the last century to try to bring together some of the ideas within the paper which centre around the complex relationship between practice and theory.
53 views
Seen by:
11 views
Seen by:
