CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Eduardo Abrantes, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
Night-Coloured-Eye: Night Vision in Video or the Mediated Perception of Invisibility
Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, in their 1959 reference work The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, describe the distinct chromatic experience of cinematic night in western and eastern tradition. Whereas in the early colour conventions of western films night was expressed in a blue tint, in eastern films, namely Japanese and Taiwanese, the night scenes were coloured orange.
Why such a radical difference in twilight tonal perception? It is interesting to notice that blue-purple and orange are complementary colours, meaning that while it is mimetically clear that a night sky might appear bluish-purple to human eyes, if one were to suddenly look towards an empty white film screen, the brain would reproduce an orange colour, owing to the physiological trait that an afterimage is produced by the fatigue of specific colour receptors. Somehow, the visible in time seems to manifest its invisible counterpart, its complement.
But what happens to the colour of night in the digital age? How does video relay the chromatic experience of darkness unbound? The limited range of colour and light sensitivity that video still possesses, when compared to film, causes its technological role to become active more than passive.
The colour of night in video is green. The nightshot has become a common mode of our perception. It seems as omnipresent as night itself – in its military uses, in CCTV security arrays, in art, in music videos, in amateur and celebrity porn… mostly anywhere light has faded.
Considering that the green-coloured night of video in the digital age is produced by moving beyond the spectrum of visible light, to its infrared nethermost realms, the video camera has become literally an active technological eye. Brain-like, it produces its own light, and admits in its specific sensitivity the reality that rewards such a broadened perception.
This paper considers examples at large in amateur video paraphernalia, ‘youtubism’ and CNN style live coverage of the globe’s bellic state, as well as particular instances of the use of nightshot in contemporary art and videography, such as Spike Jonze’s 2002 music video for Björk’s song It’s in Your Hands. If, in its common use, nightshot is an exceptional access to a banal reality, just happening beneath the visible threshold, in Jonze’s video, it becomes a realistic access into an extraordinary reality – a nature set at wonder with its own scale and environment, where the human figure is at once comfortable and foreign.
Essentially, the question raised is that if night vision, made possible through contemporary digital means, has become a commonplace tool to venture into the previously invisible – the private, the obscured – an answer to riddles produced by our awareness of the limits of our perception, how does this manifestation shape our world view and the place of visibility itself in contemporary culture?