Critical Commentary on Portfolio Three: Images of High Resolution Portraiture
Portfolio 3 from Studio VisualFields on Vimeo.
Above I’ve described this portfolio as being created:
to investigate whether increases of resolution with life-sized moving image portraiture increases audience engagement
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In Portfolio 1, I was concerned with nearby elements in our domestic landscape (discussed in Time and Resolution). I’d also identified other issues in the representation of familiar things in an unfamiliar way and I'd identified a correlation between resolution and engagement times.
In Portfolio 2, I was concerned with how iconic imagery might be received by an audience when higher resolutions than the public had previously been familiar with, coupled with an imaginative repositioning of the audience’s expectations of the familiar. I'd realised that how we view an object or scene not only engaged our reception of that work in terms of our empirical senses – but also our minds.
At this point in my research it became necessary for me to deal with the human form given that it was widely held by evolutionary biologists that the optical system we utilise, combined with the data the brain receives, would be interpreted by a set of constructs around whether or not potential threats in the distance offered danger. Not only might that distance contain animals or disasters that might put paid to us, but also other humans. Now the potency of the human gaze became a primary issue for me and also the peripheral alerts we might receive from a part of the eye that had limited response to colour but far better response to movement.
In Portfolio 2, I was concerned with how iconic imagery might be received by an audience when higher resolutions than the public had previously been familiar with, coupled with an imaginative repositioning of the audience’s expectations of the familiar. I'd realised that how we view an object or scene not only engaged our reception of that work in terms of our empirical senses – but also our minds.
At this point in my research it became necessary for me to deal with the human form given that it was widely held by evolutionary biologists that the optical system we utilise, combined with the data the brain receives, would be interpreted by a set of constructs around whether or not potential threats in the distance offered danger. Not only might that distance contain animals or disasters that might put paid to us, but also other humans. Now the potency of the human gaze became a primary issue for me and also the peripheral alerts we might receive from a part of the eye that had limited response to colour but far better response to movement.
As the light falls at dusk and you are driving along, you might notice that the tail lights of the car in front of you seem much brighter than in daylight, and the traffic lights seem too bright and too colourful. The simple explanation for this phenomenon is that your brain is switching between two technologies in your eyes. The rods (inherited from our distant ancestors), which were evolved for the insect eye to detect movement, are numerous at around 120 million. Through them you see mainly in black and white. The second technology is much more sensitive to colour: these are the cones, which are far less numerous at around 7 million. Colour is a phenomenon of mind and eye - what we now perceive as colour, is shape and form rendered as experience. Visible light is electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. It is remarkable that so many distinct causes of colour should apply to a small band of electromagnetic radiation to which the eye is sensitive, a band less than one ‘octave’ wide in an electromagnetic spectrum of more than 80 octaves.
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As previously mentioned, the concept of unheimlich might be productively employed again as ‘the distance’ might contain clues to the whereabouts of other humans or other concerns that were relevant to us. Equally it might be that we could actually see those humans but we had to be wary of their intent (if one concedes the argument of evolutionary biologists). I read various studies of the idea that clues about threat might be encoded in the movement of the eye:
The study is the first to our knowledge to explore the effect of intergroup threat on gaze cueing. Our findings suggest that gaze cueing under intergroup threat is an involuntary process, because the effect of intergroup threat on the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect is evident only at the 200 ms SOA, which is consistent with previous findings.
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The concept here is that as the eye scans it consists of a series of short movements called the saccade. Our physiology is such that we can measure and process the evidence rendered within the speed of the saccade faster than thought. An arc of gaze from one subject to another can consist of a series of many steps. These can be long or short in duration and if short there will be many more steps. According to cue gaze theory longer duration steps indicates a more languid attitude and that we can trust the individual, more steps indicates the mind of the opponent working faster and therefore indicates a potential being deceitful of intent. This sense of being on the edge of danger may also have promoted a sense of unheimlich as well.
My first engagement with higher resolutions had begun in 1990 with the analogue HD system with 1250 lines of resolution. By the late 1990s I was shooting test projects for Panasonic in the short-lived US HD system at 1280 x 720 (with the Panasonic varicam system). Then I moved on to Sony’s Cine Alta 1920 x 1080 system – a hybrid camera which exchanged high sensitivity to light for more resolution. By the early 2000s I was using a Red camera system notionally at 4096 x 2048 pixels. In all of the above manufacturers could not capture all of the data as the write-speeds of recording media could not keep up. Therefore the manufacturer needed to lessen captured data and it did this through compressing data not only in capture, but also in display. Manufacturers were not always honest about what they were doing, because they needed to sell their equipment as being better than others. I saw it as part of my job to reveal inconsistencies of claims of manufacturers in pursuit of truth.
So the resolution of the artefacts included in Portfolio 3 is notionally four times that of those in Portfolio 1, and sometimes 16 times. I continued to test the previous proposition that engagement could be increased by using higher resolutions, as well as the additional proposition that engagement could also be increased by including humans as subject matter. All were intended to have a physical presence in their staging. To this end the artistic form of the tableau vivant was employed. Not only, as with Portfolio 2, to distinguish this work from standard cinematic display forms to interrogate forms of audience engagement, but additionally to heighten engagement. In this case the method chosen was through life-size representation of human form in a resolution high enough to withstand audience scrutiny. The intention was yet again to prolong engagement by further deepening suspension of disbelief. This meant the display of life-sized human subjects within a frame at 20 feet by 10 feet such that the audience could approach a life-sized representation of a human and scrutinize them without fear. I asked the subjects to stand for one minute without moving (except for walking into and out of the frame) holding something that meant something to them. This request was a twofold reference. The first was to 16th through 19th century portraiture (such as work by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Van Dyke or Vermeer ) where the subjects posed in front of their home, which then spoke about their social status or perhaps their occupation. The second reference was to early exposure times within photography where the subject had to hold a pose for a considerable duration.
Please view any of the portraiture projects such as:
The apogee of this form that I achieved was a 60 foot triptych presented at the cumulative exhibition of my AHRC creative research fellowship held in collaboration with Universities of Bristol and Westminster, where subjects from six of the listed portraits projects from as far afield as Italy and America, China and the UK were represented in some 200 life sized portraits.
The act of exhibiting and watching how the audience received the work (as well as the act of evaluating this from a positivist viewpoint) was to affect my reflection on what was actually happening. As a result of this insight, I gave a paper at a conference at the Academy of Fine Arts In Xi’an China in which I tried to open up the debate on not what is being looked at and with what ‘equipment’, but on what does the looking – my use of the term ‘uncle’ was a nod to the hierarchy of relevance of Chinese Ancestors – and what is the character of that looking? I was now undergoing a transformation in the intent of my research framework:
My first engagement with higher resolutions had begun in 1990 with the analogue HD system with 1250 lines of resolution. By the late 1990s I was shooting test projects for Panasonic in the short-lived US HD system at 1280 x 720 (with the Panasonic varicam system). Then I moved on to Sony’s Cine Alta 1920 x 1080 system – a hybrid camera which exchanged high sensitivity to light for more resolution. By the early 2000s I was using a Red camera system notionally at 4096 x 2048 pixels. In all of the above manufacturers could not capture all of the data as the write-speeds of recording media could not keep up. Therefore the manufacturer needed to lessen captured data and it did this through compressing data not only in capture, but also in display. Manufacturers were not always honest about what they were doing, because they needed to sell their equipment as being better than others. I saw it as part of my job to reveal inconsistencies of claims of manufacturers in pursuit of truth.
So the resolution of the artefacts included in Portfolio 3 is notionally four times that of those in Portfolio 1, and sometimes 16 times. I continued to test the previous proposition that engagement could be increased by using higher resolutions, as well as the additional proposition that engagement could also be increased by including humans as subject matter. All were intended to have a physical presence in their staging. To this end the artistic form of the tableau vivant was employed. Not only, as with Portfolio 2, to distinguish this work from standard cinematic display forms to interrogate forms of audience engagement, but additionally to heighten engagement. In this case the method chosen was through life-size representation of human form in a resolution high enough to withstand audience scrutiny. The intention was yet again to prolong engagement by further deepening suspension of disbelief. This meant the display of life-sized human subjects within a frame at 20 feet by 10 feet such that the audience could approach a life-sized representation of a human and scrutinize them without fear. I asked the subjects to stand for one minute without moving (except for walking into and out of the frame) holding something that meant something to them. This request was a twofold reference. The first was to 16th through 19th century portraiture (such as work by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Van Dyke or Vermeer ) where the subjects posed in front of their home, which then spoke about their social status or perhaps their occupation. The second reference was to early exposure times within photography where the subject had to hold a pose for a considerable duration.
Please view any of the portraiture projects such as:
- Portraits of Glastonbury Tor, High Resolution Digital Installation, Various (1st, Somerset Rural Life Museum), 2008. http://www.visualfields.co.uk/TORPORTRAITS.htm (Time: 00.00.01)
- Portraits of the Arrow Tower, Beijing, High Resolution Digital Installation, Various (1st Exhibition, London), 2010. http://www.visualfields.co.uk/sixscreen.htm (Time: 00.21.50)
The apogee of this form that I achieved was a 60 foot triptych presented at the cumulative exhibition of my AHRC creative research fellowship held in collaboration with Universities of Bristol and Westminster, where subjects from six of the listed portraits projects from as far afield as Italy and America, China and the UK were represented in some 200 life sized portraits.
The act of exhibiting and watching how the audience received the work (as well as the act of evaluating this from a positivist viewpoint) was to affect my reflection on what was actually happening. As a result of this insight, I gave a paper at a conference at the Academy of Fine Arts In Xi’an China in which I tried to open up the debate on not what is being looked at and with what ‘equipment’, but on what does the looking – my use of the term ‘uncle’ was a nod to the hierarchy of relevance of Chinese Ancestors – and what is the character of that looking? I was now undergoing a transformation in the intent of my research framework:
Eight million years ago, when our oldest primate ancestor sat and gazed across the tree canopy in an absorbed, reflective and contemplative act, the look our uncle was engaged in was full of sentient conscious energy. That attentive gaze has been with us ever since and is now resident in the gaze of the visitor to the museum, cinema or art gallery - and that energy is met by the gaze looking back out at us, captured in every image where the subject stares back out at the world. I’m interested in the energy of our gaze. I’m also interested in the gaze of the subjects of portraits who send a similar energy back towards us. Because of this I’m also interested in the surface of the image, the meniscus of the meeting point of those two energies as they are displaced in time by the surface of the screen. When we represent the world we sometimes show the self captured in the medium looking back out at us with an extra-diegetic gaze, with an energy that is mediated by the surface of the medium, be it paint or pixels. The energy is shifted in time by the surface of the screen from when the subject was captured to the moment of ‘now’, when the audience sends its energy to the subject.
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The scaffolded development in knowledge between portfolios one, two and then three, though confirming that increased resolution produces longer engagement times, asked whether offering the human as subject would increase engagement – and if so, would the placement of the subjects gaze from intra-diegetic to extra-diegetic then promote further engagement from the audience? This enquiry was driven through researching developments within other disciplines. Mirror neuron theories from Cognitive Neuroscience evoked imperatives of empathy and concern yet the Biological Sciences argued for even further engagement via the idea of the ‘imperative of the predator’s cue gaze’. Humans are watchful of the behaviour of their own and other species and therefore further engaged through oppositional ideas of empathy, suspicion, antipathy and aversion. But in all of this I was forced again and again to address the issues of meaning and significance outside of the positivist position:
Prior strategies of deriving meaning such as interpretation, because it separates the self from experience through the act of intellectual discrimination, has the problem of potentially developing an old-style feedback loop, which then renders the strategy as dysfunctional: In the past, not only were we captivated by the reality of the image, by committing ourselves to suspending disbelief and believing the reality of the moving image, we then were deceived by it; Now by accepting the reality of the illusion and realizing that the transmedial through its key function of migration and its chameleon-like nature are properties of the digital, we can begin to experience a paradigm change that enables the manifestation and manufacture of what was once virtual, as real.
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Here I am beginning to turn my own intellectual gaze on the idea that evidence with regard truth has limitations. I began to realise that a step-change in my understanding of all the processes of the act of seeing needed to occur and that I had to find ways to describe what those insights were and this lead to the change of mindset I next began to develop with regard Portfolio 4.
NEXT: Portfolio 3 Complete List of Outputs
NEXT: Portfolio 3 Complete List of Outputs