CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
|
|
Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Paul Edward Scattergood and Martin John Richardson, Institute of Creative Technologies, UK
Subject to Change Without Notice: How Advances In Modern Holography and Digital Imaging Have Altered Our Understanding of Vision and Perception
This paper explores the role that digital holography, within the arena of man-made light, has played in generating previously impossible types of visual spaces. It examines the impact novel visual experience has in shaping our understanding of vision and perception.
By replacing colour and surface with ‘real’ light, digital holography is a medium that explores the relationship between material and light. As such, it offers the possibility of a fundamental shift in our understanding of this relationship. Progress within the generation of man-made light, and the possibility offered by holographic optics to reconstitute and form this light, allow for a renewed examination of the relationship of light to the surface of solid matter.
Contemporary digital holography has established the production of full colour, three-dimensional depictions of both real and imagined spaces and actions. A two-dimensional view may now form part of a multiplexed image, which when viewed from a particular angle, will afford a three-dimensional depiction. Work has been carried out in this area to produce full parallax, auto-stereoscopic output for 3D digital imaging. It examines the role and impact of parallel technology including digital printing and digital image recording devices, for both still and time based media.
The work details transitory experiences, interdependent with the nature of man-made digitally-projected light. This alteration in the nature of experience, insofar as it relates to vision and perception, has produced an adjustment in the relationship between artwork and viewer. Driven by the development of artificial light and its use within art, modern holography has built upon the progress of both photography and the science and engineering of light production. The interconnectedness of many otherwise disparate disciplines within digital holography places this work in the enviable position of being able to assess, at an early stage, the effects of media convergence upon the role and perception of the artwork in a digital epoch.
With reference to the work of a diverse range of artists including James Turrell, Bridget Riley and Dieter Jung, and an exploration of contemporary developments within science and industry, the paper will extend a critical appraisal of how realities, which rest outside traditional image-making techniques have been utilised to form light, thus transmitting and shifting mass, as well as substantiating materiality.