Dear list:

I'm working on the completion of a research MA, at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. The master¹s programme involves both a production and an exegesis of roughly 20,000 words. I'm using computer-generated modelled forms to produce a short animated film consisting of very ordinary things. (A bucket, some apples, a broom, wardrobes. - suspended in the void of blackened screen-space and separated from each other spatially, these objects perform simple operations. ŒPaintings That Move¹ is the title of the MA, more about which later).   
Working with 3D animation software to create Œdigital realism¹ has raised many questions for me about the nature of the media; in particular how one might articulate what it is about computer-generated, 3D objects that give them that Œlook¹: seamless volumetric forms complementing the illusion of perfect recessional space. 
On-screen, computer-generated 3D digital objects (as opposed to their printed-out or scanned-in counterparts) constitute a specific kind of image. It is not film, but cannot, I think, be likened merely to a kind of electronic painting. At certain levels I feel I¹m looking not at an image at all but into the screen, at virtual sculpture, or film-architecture.  
The written work is a discussion of some of the philosophical and aesthetic issues that my exploration of digital media has raised in, say, the context of a comparison with the ways in which Œconventional¹ media (paintings, photographs) inscribe or depict, across the surface of a work, the spatial relationships between objects and their surrounding space. The classic Œobject:ground dialectic¹. 
I¹m intruiged by the (typically) default photorealistic look of computer-generated software, speculating on whether programmers might have opted for an alternative Œscopic regime¹ to the conventional Œobjective realist¹ one, on which to configure the pictorial outcomes of all those millions of floating-point calculations that, in the end, are what produce the image that appears on the monitor. 
This kind of 'realism' (or representational naturalism) is not exclusive to digital media. But there is one aspect of digital realism that, I think, is so, and it inhabits the illusion of there being Œreal¹ (virtual) things in Œreal¹ space. This constitutes a sort of Œhaptic experience¹ of the image on the screen: one looks as though at objects within space. Here, objects are autonomous entities within their virtual space, I think, in a manner that does not occur for objects within the surface space of a painting or a photograph or cinematic film.

The problem of articulating this look has taken me down some interesting research paths. What I regard as Œisotopic¹ screen space, and the cool, seamless reality of computer-generated things constitutes a pictorial code that is not found in photographs or cinematic film. I think. Surprisingly, I found Dutch 17th century interiors among those the nearest in look and feel to digital realism. 

Now it seems to me that digital realism - that is, the on-screen moving image - has attracted very little in the way of, dare I say, 'scholarly discussion and debate' as to how it operates at the philosophical and theoretical levels in terms of its Œreading¹. Film (and photography and painting of course) have a long and intense continuum of careful consideration and analysis: through Marx, Bergson, Adorno, Metz, Deleuze, and so on, film has been thoroughly, though contentiously, investigated. Digital media seems to be appropriated mostly as a subject for socio-cultural theory (i.e., cyberspace and its relation to problems of identity and place; gender issues that coalesce around the nature of the interface, etc.). At its worst (in my view) discussions of cyberspace, and virtual reality in particular end up in the hazy rhetoric of Timothy Leary-like utopianism. 

My thesis aims to articulate the peculiar visuality of on-screen objects, to account for, in the end, what distinguishes digital realism from the photo, from cinematic film or realistic painting. I feel the best approach would be to draw from certain branches of film and media theory - perhaps those that are informed by phenomenology and ontology. But I¹m not sure. 

I hope to attract some response from others who might be interested in digital, film-like issues, and in giving me some feedback. It would be most helpful to get information on the whereabouts of appropriate texts, and to get in contact with contemporary film-media thinkers who might have explored a similar aspect of computer-generated visual iconography.

I appreciate that many of you are busy working on your own projects, but if you do have time to write back, I'd be very grateful.

Regards,

Rose Woodcock
Masters in progress  (Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC)

Contact details:
97 Barrow St
Coburg, 3058
Victoria
Australia
Tel: (03) 9383-2993
Fax: (03) 9378-8473


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