Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
High Definition Video and Experiences of Immediacy and the Environment
This output is one of several deriving from Flaxton’s AHRC-funded Creative Research Fellowship (2007-2010), ‘High Definition Imaging: An Investigation in the Actual, the Virtual and the Hyper Real’, which examined how the advent of high-resolution imaging might change the work produced, its immersive properties and consequently audiences’ engagement with that work.
Output 1 consisted of five high-resolution installations, (see portfolio and Research Methodology) designed to explore the effects of high-resolution imaging of the immediate environment. For ‘In Other People’s Skins’, five dinner parties (of twelve people invoking the Last Supper) were filmed from above with different communities eating indigenous foods. Through extensive experimentation, the highest-resolution image was created for the installation, projected on to an equal-sized table covered by a white tablecloth (the screen). Plates were placed to catch the images of the food and twelve seats positioned around the table to allow the audience to interact with the installation. Flaxton monitored reactions anonymously observing audiences’ readiness to join in, enjoying the confusion between the real and the virtual. To explore whether this engagement was an effect of the installation itself or a result of the high resolution image, the installation toured for fifteen weeks (funded by the Arts Council) around UK cathedrals in a black light proof tent, during which it was modified several times.
Each of the five installations was similarly iterative in a continuously evolving programme of research, exhibited to over 300,000 people in the UK and abroad including New York and China. Flaxton discussed the research in ‘Time and Resolution: Experiments in High Definition Image Making’, Journal of Media Practice, vol. 10, nos. 2 & 3 (2009). It led to a partnership with the BBC exploring the immersive characteristics of digital motion imagery by creating the first Higher Dynamic Range motion picture (2012).
