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You ask what I (we?) may be looking for....For myself I think its about
a kind of honesty or integrity, or dare I even say a 'truth to materials'.
You can see the difference between analog and digital video physically
when fast forwarding and rewinding.....
If you blow up a streaming video and project it large, the image becomes
liquid, you can actually see, and visually understand the codecs working
as only the parts of the image that are changing alter (I did this recently
with live footage at Chapter in Cardiff).....this has a very specific (and
honest) image quality...it reflects what it is doing...you can almost see
the image being squished into the cable and unsquished at the other end....
A slippage story: I was at a big 'information revolution' conference
in Huddersfield in 1994. It was mostly for politicians and chaired by Jeremy
Paxman (Newsnight)...I was the only artist speaking (interesting that they
included an artist at all). It was also supported by British Telecom
who arranged video conferencing on a grand scale to beam in the (then,
Tory) minister for Science and Technology from Westminster by video link.
The minister started out by saying that he was glad that he could be there
by video link - the inadvertent implication being that he was glad he hadn't
had to travel to Huddersfield for the conference - fuelling those ever
present north/south tensions. While the minister was speaking the image
began breaking up on his face...red square blotches became almost the digital
equivalent of rotten tomatoes (being thrown)....the audience started giggling,
and as the blotches kept dancing around his face, the giggling became hysterical,
and he had no idea why as presumably the monitor at his end would have
revealed nothing...he couldn't work out what he had said that was so funny....
reiner strasser wrote:
Susan Collins wrote-"looking for the truth between the frames"
I think this is a very particular moment in time, really just a stepping stone to faster, bigger, wider bandwidth...and just as there is scarcely any delay now on long distance telephone calls, we will soon find the same with live streaming......For myself I have always been interested in the slippage, the particularities of the medium...its own material quality rather than solely as an online 'postcard' version of work which exists elsewhere.
looking at the wider bandwidth and streaming experiments with some doubts - falling back in the 'aesthetics*' of film and tv - where switching is switching and nothing else.
(what is the difference between 10 and 100 and 1000 and 10.000.000 channels - which all are flowing at the same time in a linear structure over the network - like the bits still are moving thru the cabels all the day? [even 10 millions is not random - but will rest in the stat of "Beliebigkeit" - 'optionality'])*aesthetics - new aesthetics --- noted here sometimes - what it is? and what it is good for? what are you looking for? looking for a new aesthesis - perception? leading to a 'adequat'/better handling of reality? ..................
R.
[art_is_tic idea_ist]
-- Susan Collins, Head of Electronic
Media, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/scemfa.html
http://www.susan-collins.net