CURSOR 7
CURSOR7: Towards a Resolution
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
CYCLE (WAVEFORM)
Let’s briefly summarize the trajectory of this essay sequence. We started with web design. I concluded the first CURSOR article with this question: “What does the computer, electric-based medium do best, and what does it not replace?”
Using new brushes from the Smashing website I executed a small suite of “pure” digital paintings. At this point these images only exist on my computer and in the various publishing forums I maintain online. The digi-paintings have not been output in a “hard copy” format.
For my presentation in Humanities 340, I will bring to class an acrylic painting on canvas, which we will compare to digital representations of the same painting, via projection and on the desktops of your web-connected laptops and other portable computing devices. The painting that I’ll be exhibiting in class (“Accomplishment and the Artist/Critic in 4 Iterations Over a 14-Year Timeline (Nashville/Austin/California x2) to Answer Question C” – see http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=809) will be accompanied by the extensive blog-published procedural explanations and documentations, as an accompaniment. I have demonstrated the multidimensional “life” of this painting, in its several iterations, and refer to the exhibition record as proofs. You will be able to learn a great deal about my aesthetics, studio painting strategies and methods, several nodes in the “art world,” and the nature of object migration (from concept or pre-object state to realization to presentation to exchange to documentation) through the “art world” nodes, such as galleries, institutions, projects and many web formats. The painting will serve as a prime example of the facets and components that contribute to an artwork (and the artist’s) dimensional identity over a timeline as a virtual not-thing and actual thing.
To add another layer to the perspective on the painting-as-meme, I’ll introduce those “pure” digital paintings for comparison.
The URLs of the digipaintings (on the AFH Blog) are:
http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=864
http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=865
http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=867
http://artforhumans.com/afhblog/?p=868
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In CURSOR2 we looked at the rhizomic nature of web navigation and the consequent features of social manufacture, as in linked interests characterized by networks that are metaphorically referred to as trees or webs. In the CONSIDERATIONS section I suggested the related questions of surveillance and control, after citing Eakins and Muybridge in the CONDITIONS section (for a good treatment of these issues, by way of linkage among artists Eakins and Muybridge to applications for photography as a tool for managing worker productive [Taylor, Gilbreth], see American Photography: A Century of Images by Vicki Goldberg and Robert Bruce Silberman). We will return to this point shortly. In CURSOR2 we continued on to examine some of the weaknesses/social dangers (see discussion of data mining) inherent in the digital medium.
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In CURSOR3 we continued our exploration of data mining, and the language of dimensional behaviors in that usage of new media. The question of artistic choice was raised early in the discussion to confront the exterior pressure brought to bear on the contemporary artist’s creative process by a multi-dimensional conglomerate of social, economic and political forces, especially over the past century. We began to trace the connection between old and new art media, as a migration or reasonable response to those external pressures and forces, in addition to inferring that the embrace of digital media by traditional artists might also be a simple function of curiosity about the New, and, further, a function of communal perceptual evolution. The framing of the discussion in terms of expanding hierarchies and sequences also comes into play here, as a revolutionary trumping of dualism, especially the epistemological versus the technical.
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In CURSOR4 we continued examining the dualistic construct (old v. new), acknowledged its lack of pertinence, then asymmetrically rendered it meaningful, using comparison as a vehicle for discourse on the intervening qualities of new media on direct experience. With the aid of an anecdotal illustration, we began to examine the ethics of vision, attaching the implications of mediation. In referring to linked sources, I endeavored to induce immediacy upon the unfolding narrative…
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Axiom: Summarizing is a subtle way of rewriting history.
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The digital medium is form of summary, in many of its applications, such as the JPEG. Compression is the medium of the digital summary.
This is helpful for formulating visual art strategies for the digital medium. It is important for the digital artist to study compression in the medium. Compression followed by expansion of digital image files produces pixilation, for instance. Print professionals have considered pixilation to be ugly. Resolution is the issue. This is also true in moving image media. The human eye receives visual data at a very high resolution. Cameras in the film media record visual data at a diminished resolution, compared to the human eye. Translating visual data to film (light impressions on chemicals) entails subsequent processing to produce an artifact. Depending on the scale of the film, the output may require expansion (“blowing up” an image). The image will evidence the artifacts of expansion. Photography people call the resulting artifacts “noise.”
The digital artist has the option to view these artifacts as other than ugly. Using software, the digital artist can develop strategies for enhancing artifacts, creating forms of digital texture. Filter and composite layering effects can serve this purpose.
But the bigger question is how does the quality of compression define the medium? Compression methods were invented as practical responses to limitations of bandwidth, memory and computing/processor power. Practitioners called the decision of what was enough resolution versus compression/image breakdown for the end user “optimization.” Reducing one’s palette to a small number of choices was one way a designer could optimize a visual data file.
What does digital compression have in common with, say, oil painting, or camera arts? First of all, one must recognize that these are issues of representation. A segment of the creative field focuses on exactitude in representation of a subject/object. Verisimilitude is a catchword. Representational painting is a medium that memorializes a moment on a timeline, ostensibly. On closer analysis, however, we can see this not really the case. My favorite example is David’s Napoleon. Here is the Wikipedia page:
http://fy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofbyld:David_napoleon.jpg
Note: Compare the “other versions,” especially the orthogonal version.
There are two. This is the enhanced version, which indicates a mapping process for painting that is relevant also to 4D practices.
Also, compare the color variations among the four examples, and the image quality, relative to resolution.
QUESTIONS, CONSIDERATIONS, EXERCISES: Do all these images represent the same painting? Consider them (each of them) as independent agents. What are the actual painting dimensions? Imagine the JPEG next to the painting. Print each of the images.
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Now, consider this documentary movie about Clayton Patterson.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa56l8_captured_shortfilms?from=feedblitz_523284_2302379
The scenes of Patterson’s archives for me are most telling. They contain thousands of hours of video and tens of thousands of images. Think of this relative to the span of time the artifacts encompass. The movie itself compresses the creative life of the artist into a document tens of minutes long. The ratios are probably similar.
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Now we can enter another domain, the digital humanities, and the question of history. Referring to David’s Napoleon: did this moment actually occur? The terms idealization and mediation are immediately relevant. The question of comparison of intent becomes relevant, for now we are focusing on the ethics of seeing. In the dualistic construct of Classical Western Civilization, this space is parsed over the CWC timeline and defined in many ways by many people. The term “humanist” arises in one era as a schema to proffer on the interpretive aspects of vision a set of guiding principles. Romanticism and Realism (or “pragmatism”) are two other schema, or schools. The artist and historian are in this respect in the same boat. As Patterson pointed out after and during the LES riots he documented notoriously, what’s at stake is Truth, at least the presentation of it, in the social medium (political, economic).
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What now of Jason Coulston’s observation, his concern, that his fellow witnesses on the beach were too busy documenting the beautiful scene to be in it? Here our comparison of old and new media is getting interesting, and pointing towards a dimensional solution. Namely, we are approaching the phenomenon of mapping, and the opportunity it suggests with regards optimizing or maximizing the activity of witnessing or determining truth, or at least a surface form of it.
Here is the axiom: The greater the number of witnesses, viewing an object in a spherical (360 degrees) or radial formation, the greater the likelihood that visual veracity can be obtained. In order to perpetrate illusion in dimensionally observed conditions, the illusionist will have to radically step up his game. So, we have Criss Angel (www.crissangel.com).
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It is no longer enough to paint something just like it looks. Here is what Socrates had to say on the subject, and this misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what painting is and does has plagued artists ever since:
Then consider this very point: at what does painting aim in each case? To imitate what is as it is? Or what appears as it appears? Is it an imitation of an illusion, or of truth?
What a jerk!
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…Which isn’t exactly right. Fundamentally, as explored significantly in my Thesis, what’s at stake here is the primacy of the intellect (Episteme) over the creative (Techne). We have been touching on the Timeline as a construct. Now is the time to employ it for effect.
What Socrates failed to realize in the immediacy of his analysis, great though it may be, is that the human perceptual evolution as it relates to vision, representation and accountability or integrity (or verisimilitude), is that the arc of the timeline he’s positing against is huge – to use a 3D term. To illustrate, along that arc – between Socrates and us, today - is trompe l’oeil. We can find great examples dating to the 1400’s. For a richer exploration of the genre, again, let’s look at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l%27%C5%93il
According to the entry, the term dates to the Baroque period (which is illuminating, considering our discussion of Stella’s pictorial theory in Working Space). The relationship between pictorial realism and illusion as an architectural device provides a bridge for our discourse. In trompe l’oeil we see skilled artists building portals where there are none, or expanding space. This practice is inherently dimensional. As craft and technology have progressed, human perceptual capacity to envision space beyond 3D has improved. What Socrates dismissed as imitation is in fact a procedural step in expanding material parameters – what is real, or not real.
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At this point, we can see why comparing a digital print to an oil painting is an exercise of very limited value. The question should be much bigger than whether x is better than y in conclusive, epistemological terms. The questions perhaps should be: What space are you designing for, what are you trying to represent, how much time do you have to execute your production? …And so on.
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Maybe most importantly, the question, “With what Truth are you concerned, and to what degree do you wish to represent it?” If this seems to beg the question, “What is your audience?” that is because it most certainly does. Or to refine the question/search further, “Who is your community?” and “What do you need to be working on, in order to survive, or better yet, serve?”
This last question is central to ethics of vision.
