Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
High Resolution Motion Imaging and the Iconic Image
High Resolution Motion Imaging and the Iconic Image consists of two main artefacts - ‘In Re Ansel Adams’ and ‘Un Tempo, Una Volta’ (both 2008) – and twelve subsidiary ones (see portfolio). For this output, the research was designed to defamiliarise iconic images through the simple trope of offering the familiar by first withholding its nature then revealing what has been withheld thus ensuring that audiences take longer to read and then recognize what has been offered. The installation ‘In Re Ansel Adams’ was constructed to immerse the audience as if deep within a waterfall before gradually pulling back to reveal a vista of the Yosemite valley that was then drained of colour, the huge black and white image connecting viewers to Adams’ famous photograph but with a fresh perspective that produces a reawakened engagement through the immersive potential of high definition digital imagery. ‘Un Tempo, Una Volta’ defamiliarised the iconicity of Venice by presenting the ‘underside’ of Venice, the city as seen by workers rather than tourists. Both installations explored the relationship between resolution and duration as each required the audience to engage with the image over a sustained period of time.
These installations were staged in nineteen public and academic exhibitions to an audience of over 6,000 in Italy, America, Norway and Japan as well as in the UK. ‘In Re Ansel Adams’ was acquired by the Harris Museum in Preston for the Digital Aesthetics 3 exhibition (October 2012) and is now part of its permanent collection. Flaxton discussed the research in an invited talk, ‘Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age’, ETH, Zurich (2010), in two conference papers, 8th International Conference on Communication and Mass Media (Athens, 2011), and the ISEA conference (Albuquerque, 2012) and in ‘HD Aesthetics’, Convergence, vol. 17, no. 2 (2011).
