Flaxton Terry 2012- The Softmachine Wilderness

7/27/2019 Flaxton Terry 2012- The Softmachine Wilderness

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Flaxton, Westminster 22.03.2012 http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ 1

THE SOFT MACHINE WILDERNESS

Ive been looking at the world from a professional viewpoint for most of my

life and sometimes Ive spent 16 hours a day with the paraphernalia of

cameras to aid in the exclusion of the world, in search of the meaning of the

dark surround, and what lies luminously within it. It is my experience that any

form can be transcended to produce variants of the form or even its opposite -

so to me, the idea of a frame, or a boundary, always includes boundlessness.

Ian McGilchrist, All Souls, Oxford, tells us in his book, The Master and his

Emissary, that the brain is asymmetric in some of its functions and

consequently the right-brain governs left-side operations and left-brain

governs right-side operations. Though vision occurs in both hemispheres of

the brain, its said that left-brain levels a narrow-focused attention on the world

and right-brain utilises broad attention.

Significant then, that 99% of cinematographers construct an image with their

right-eye, focused 2 inches into a viewfinder, using their left-brain narrow-

focused attention, whereas cinema audiences watch the output of the

cinematographers endeavors at a multiple of the cinematographers distance,

with their right-brain, left-eye, broad-attention view of the world.


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Flaxton, ISEA Albuquerque 20.09.2012 http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/ 2

The academic would mainly use the frontal ratiocinatory function and the artist

utilises intuition: a catch-all description of the many spontaneous and

improvisational strategies that can supersede the systematic response of the

frontal lobes managed by the back-brain. The cinematographic mind of

course, uses both capabilities.

Now watch that conundrum: Portraits of the Somerset Carnivals 1 minute

40 seconds This was produced with 4k equipment and displays 20 feet by 10

feet in a continuous loop. http://www.visualfields.co.uk/carnivalembed.htm

Early on I realised that had I lived in the medieval period as a painter I would

have known how to prepare canvases and mix pigments, so when I took up

moving images as a medium of practice, film around 1971 and in video in

1975, I had realised that I should remain continuously conscious of the

construction of the medium I was creating within.

Television had originated in a way that differed from most contemporary art

media in that its means of dissemination had originated before its means of

inscription. Now we could record our acts and wondrously, when you turned


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the electricity off all of the traces of its content had disappeared, yet the inert

container of its form remained. So I made work, won prizes and exhibited in

Festivals. In an early group called Vida, from 1977 to 1980 we put together

150 shows in many, many contexts - I realised then, that spaces outside of

the gallery and museum could be more interesting than the traditional black or

white cubes.

In 2006 after many years of practice, I wrote a 3 year AHRC Creative

Research Fellowship where the research artworks would become acts of

navigation that each work would plot a position, that would then become a

building block towards my argument to answer my core research question:

In what ways will High Resolution Imaging change the work

produced in the convergence of art and visual technologies and

consequently, our experience of that work?

Deep down as an artist, the fact that I was creating work with a research

driven imperative, felt wrong: surely the artistic mind should be driven by inner

knowledge that is discovered at the moment the gesture of creation was

made? The key to righting that feeling resided in something Georgia OKeefe


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a local of this parish - had said on becoming blind around her 90th year:

Creativity is like an abyss and it is only when you have dived into

the darkness that your fear might turn into wings."

By saying this OKeefe demands that we remain spontaneous by acting upon

internal knowledge - yet academic research presupposes absence of

knowledge. So as for many of us, practice as research became a subtle

balancing act to accomplish, and all the time Ive been researching, I have

kept in mind Bill Violas deceptively simple statement:

Duration is to consciousness, as light is to the eye.

Amongst other things, hes saying that as light activates the eye, so time

activates consciousness. As I worked on, I began to realize that:

Resolution is to consciousness as Luminance is to the eye.

Because resolution can be said to be a quality of light, it activates

consciousness in a qualitative way and so these twin facets of the same thing


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become equivalent. Therefore one could finally say:

Time = Resolution.

For 30 years of gazing at the world, I was often physically hung off the end of

a crane or perched on a dolly in constant motion so in many ways I just

wanted the image-world to stop. So with that in mind, my three-fold strategy to

reveal the answer to my core question was:

i) to photograph non-specific parts of the real world - a table, a bed, a chair -

and present those things projected back onto themselves at different

resolutions, then note the times of engagement people spent with them - then

correlate increased resolution and times of engagement. Through this method

I identified that engagement and immersion increases in quantum jumps

rather than simply increasing bit by bit.

As an As an artist Ive found that one makes certain signature works every

so often - In the seventies I made Talking Heads, in the eighties Prisoners

and The World Within Us, in the 90s The Object of Desire - all works that

characterize the nature of ones artistic enquiry at certain points along ones


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timeline. On beginning my fellowship, my first strategy to answer my research

question produced a signature work which I called In Other Peoples Skins.

This is a sculptural work thatheightens the confusion of the senses about

what is real and what is not, in which I shot 5 dinner parties from above

Indian Asian, Western European, Chinese Asian, African and also 1st

Century

mid-eastern - and then projected them back down on the same-sized table.

Around the table there are 12 seats, on the table are 12 white plates twelve

white screens to catch the virtual food, thus evoking the Last Supper of

Christian mythology. The audience sits at this table and imitates the gestures

of others placing their hands in other peoples skins they can connect

through the meniscus of the screen and entrain and exchange their conscious

energy with that of the virtual guests. People often speak about how they feel

moved after engaging with the work. In Other Peoples Skins was eventually

shown at 10 cathedrals in the UK, attracting 150,000 visitors to sit and engage

with it and then after a few European shows (Sweden, Malta, Italy) and also

Xian in China, it went on to a 5 month run in the Cathedral of St John the

Divine in New York attracting another 150,000 visitors.

My 2nd strategy to answer my core research question was to go from the


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interior to the exterior world to re-photograph places where iconic images

have been made, then re-interpret them in a way that reflects an enquiry into

my research question. Here the cinematographer bursts out and is at peace in

the new medium. This work relates to high resolution photography and is

called: IN RE ANSEL Adams. http://www.visualfields.co.uk/ANSEL.html

My 3rd strategy was to create a series of portraiture works where the subject

was as aware of us as we are of them, and that the resolution were

sufficiently high to present them life-size so the audience could scrutinze the

portraitees and allow the idea that they too might scrutinize us across time. In

these works the subjects remain still for one minute to reference early

photographic exposure times. Portraiture Projects have been now been shot

in 9 locations including Beijing, Bristol, New York, London and Venice and

display at life size on screens 20 feet by 10 feet.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/centenary/look/art/portraits-film.html

In December 2010 I exhibited 18 new works at University of Westminsters P3

gallery in the center of London including a 60 foot triptych of the portraiture

projects. What the exhibition described is that I had realised that entrainment

uses synchronisation through resonation to perform artistic alignment ,that


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places the audience on a par with the artist - and interpretation and reading

then follow, as opposed to leadingthe process.

So I am now trying to develop work that insists on the conscious-awareness

of the audience of their own gaze, to amplify the energy present within that

engagement to then enable the audience to take time to look. I now believe

that artists should enter into a negotiation with the audience whilst

acknowledging their intellectual autonomy, by going beyond forms of

interpretive contract between audience and artist, which so very often involve

a degree of disempowerment for the audience.

In Sculpting In Time, Andrei Tarkovsky points out that: There is another

advantage in our approach. The method whereby the artist obliges the

audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on further than

has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist

in their perception of the film. And indeed from the point of view of mutual

respect, only that kind of reciprocity is worthy of artistic practice.

My research strategy now centers around our physiological specificity. I shall

be investigating the emerging capabilities of the moving image through higher


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resolution, higher frame rate and higher dynamic range images.

At University of Bristol, by collaborating between Departments of Drama

Theatre Film and Television, Experimental Psychology, the Department of

Philosophy, and the Faculty of Engineering we shall be trying to produce

The Perfect Picture through combining variants of frame rate, resolution and

dynamic range capture and especiallydisplay, to then calibrate these to

produce the combination that best resonates with the conditions of our

physiological sensorium and consequently our conscious awareness.

As I mentioned before the mechanical functionality of the production of the

image activates consciousness in a qualitative way and so I had concluded

that Time Equals Resolution: But if we can manipulate allthe factors of the

construction of the digital image so that it then activates all of the factors of

conscious immersion, then we can go one step further and time will equal

consciousness:Time = consciousness

It is important to me that the artwork goes far beyond what the artist intends

and is in some ways separate from him or her in the way that it is read by the

audience. This in itself is the redefinition of the idea of the artist that the work


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of Warhol and those that followed him who effectively bankrupted Duchamps

notion of the artist as author.

We are now at the moment that the artist no longer matters providing their

idea is transformative enough - the artist themselves can now become be

anonymous and the soft machine will finally be liberated.

Documents

Flaxton Terry 2012- The Softmachine Wilderness