Academia 2007 - 2016
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In 2006 a friend said to me something akin to: Why not give up the struggle and take the Kings Shilling? I said why? He said, because the Arts Council has about 100 million and the Film Council the same - whereas the Research Councils had about 3 Billion. The change from 'M' to 'B' did the trick and I applied for an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship which I got and I was told be a variety of professors at University of Bristol that this was a high accolade as only about 3 were given each year.
I had been doing visiting lecturing since the mid 90's (notably at Duncan of Jordanstone with Steve Partridge as head of course - the job was to get the kids who were too often in the dark (literally) out into the daylight. I understood both states and so was happy to do this and lectured at many places. Now I was to be a full time academic. I had written a variety of trade articles about analogue video, digital video and HD - and also in 99 as previously said marshalled in for Du Art labs in NY a film out from the very very new Sony HD camera (a mod which George Lucas was using) which swapped off luminance for resolution such thsat HD at that time was like shooting reversal film with zero tolerance of the wrong Fstop. The point is I knew what I was doing on all practical levels and was also forumating ideas about HD being 'a portal' through into an age beyond film (to where we are today). So my basic problem was to learn to write academically so that 'The Academy' could grasp what was happening.
Fortunately I came a across a planetary dust cloud astrophysicist, Amara Grapps, who told me about the very important Wavelet Transform created by Fourier, which had only just become an operable tool to effectively power the incoming (though short) digital age. Previously Fouriers Discrete CoSine Transform had been used but fundamentally it was a 'meat grinder' of an algorithm and was not kind nor clever - whereas the Wavelet transform was both (and encoded echoes of todays so called AI back propagation - which simply means when the algorithm gets to the back end it checks with the beginning of the maths to keep it on target). AT this point most signal processing engineers will be squirming because that's a ridiculous description - but the main skill I have had in academia is being able to frame an idea for academics from what engineers tell me - so that both can carry on in the same room as if they understand eachother (in fact I used this technique when we were proving HDR and 3D without Binocular Stereoscopy (an anaglyph 3D effect is a form of stereoscopy that creates two distinct red and blue images to produce a single 3D stereo image).
I finished the AHRC fellowship, won a knowledge transfer fellowship and by 2013 I;d transferred Universities to become a Professor of Cinematographj and Director of the Centre fro Moving Image Research. We had a variety of successes, ran two cinematography festivals and I was asked to come to LA to consult with AMPAS on HDR production and attended the ASC Cinematography Summit where I spoke in front of around 100 ASC members including Vitorrio Storarro who shot Apocalypse Now...
I had been doing visiting lecturing since the mid 90's (notably at Duncan of Jordanstone with Steve Partridge as head of course - the job was to get the kids who were too often in the dark (literally) out into the daylight. I understood both states and so was happy to do this and lectured at many places. Now I was to be a full time academic. I had written a variety of trade articles about analogue video, digital video and HD - and also in 99 as previously said marshalled in for Du Art labs in NY a film out from the very very new Sony HD camera (a mod which George Lucas was using) which swapped off luminance for resolution such thsat HD at that time was like shooting reversal film with zero tolerance of the wrong Fstop. The point is I knew what I was doing on all practical levels and was also forumating ideas about HD being 'a portal' through into an age beyond film (to where we are today). So my basic problem was to learn to write academically so that 'The Academy' could grasp what was happening.
Fortunately I came a across a planetary dust cloud astrophysicist, Amara Grapps, who told me about the very important Wavelet Transform created by Fourier, which had only just become an operable tool to effectively power the incoming (though short) digital age. Previously Fouriers Discrete CoSine Transform had been used but fundamentally it was a 'meat grinder' of an algorithm and was not kind nor clever - whereas the Wavelet transform was both (and encoded echoes of todays so called AI back propagation - which simply means when the algorithm gets to the back end it checks with the beginning of the maths to keep it on target). AT this point most signal processing engineers will be squirming because that's a ridiculous description - but the main skill I have had in academia is being able to frame an idea for academics from what engineers tell me - so that both can carry on in the same room as if they understand eachother (in fact I used this technique when we were proving HDR and 3D without Binocular Stereoscopy (an anaglyph 3D effect is a form of stereoscopy that creates two distinct red and blue images to produce a single 3D stereo image).
I finished the AHRC fellowship, won a knowledge transfer fellowship and by 2013 I;d transferred Universities to become a Professor of Cinematographj and Director of the Centre fro Moving Image Research. We had a variety of successes, ran two cinematography festivals and I was asked to come to LA to consult with AMPAS on HDR production and attended the ASC Cinematography Summit where I spoke in front of around 100 ASC members including Vitorrio Storarro who shot Apocalypse Now...
New Retrospective: Terry Flaxton: A Life in Video Art
Roseberry Road Studios Preview 6th October (6pm - 11pm) Then showing Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 11am until 5pm through to 5th November 28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX Upcoming Exhibitions in 2024
- UK RWA Open Bristol September - December - Australia, Adelaide July, A Life in Video Art, Retrospective, July - Sedition International, Online Release, Un Tempo Una Volta, April - Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello & Palazzo Bembo, Exhibition titled Visions, Venice, March Between 2008 and 2023 Terry exhibited work in the China, USA, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Iran, Turkey, Slovenia, Sweden, France, Norway, Malta, Madeira and the UK - some of these countries many times. A complete list of Exhibitions between 2008 and 2023 follows beneath the section on exhibitions beneath 1978 and 2007. EXHIBITIONS Between 1978 onwards
In 1978, the Fashion show, (made in 1977) was exhibited at the Long Beach Museum by Kathy Rae Huffman, (curator of moving image work). Next came the Fourth Tokyo Video Festival where Flaxton, Cooper and Dedman's piece (written by Flaxton) Talking Heads, won a prize. From then on Flaxton's work was shown at many festivals, notably the Worldwide Video Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands, but many, many other places including Moscow, Tokyo, Algiers, San Francisco, Locarno, Montbeliard, Paris, Milan, Rome, Seoul, Amsterdam - and many other places around the world. In 1986 the British Film Institute as well as Channel 4 asked Flaxton to Shoot “Out off Order” the 3rd electronically produced and released on 35mm ‘film’ in history (after “Harlow” starring Ginger Rogers, 1965 and 200 Hotels, 1972). Though travelling as a cinematographer and occasionally exhibiting between 1992 and 1998 there was a hiatus in Flaxton's work between Zagorsk (1992 and Skin Deep (1999) Flaxton in fact worked on many artists pieces and brought a high level of lighting to many people's work. Having come across HD in 1990, between 2000 and 2007 Flaxton concentrated on HD as a developing production form and tested cameras for Panasonic and Sony and by 1999 he had shot an HD work in the US which was mastered as a 35mm output at Du Art Labs in New York - and from then on spoke at many seminars including the NFT to speak about the transition form Standard Definition (720 x 576 pixels) to the then low level HD Standards of 1280 x 720, the faux HD of 1440 x 1920 and finally the full 1920 x 1080 standard that we all know today (2023). So in eventually entering academia in 2007 with an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship - where the candidates charge was to discover how technical and creative innovations feed upon each other, Flaxton then began a second wave of production as an artist - where, having spent many years on moving camera cranes and dollies - Flaxton chose to use HD and the camera itself as a window, a portal on, not only the world - but importantly on the very thing that looks: the self. By 2015 Sedition Art had arrived and was a perfect fit for what Flaxton later called his 'Chamber Works’. Flaxton also began producing long form moving image artworks during this period characterised by “Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age” (began in 1992 and finished in 2018) , “To Sand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape” (2011 to 2018) and latterly “Mexico: Landscape of the Heart” (2023). |