Project description

Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. We propose a study of the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies through a combination of experiment and close analysis of their use and innovation among professionals and creatives. The research will test the hypothesis that techniques invented by earlier artists and artisans are embodied in contemporary digital media technologies, and that this process of incremental accumulation of skills into hardware and software continues today.

The CIs and RAs will trace the ways in which artists and artisans in the Western tradition since the Renaissance have overcome perceived shortcomings of available media through the development of technique, and how these innovations contributed to succeeding generations of light-based technology. We seek to analyse not only the designed capacities but also a) the role of inspiration drawn from historical antecedents and b) the unexpected and accidental qualities of which a given medium is capable. The primary research task will be to identify the capacities of historical and contemporary media technologies (specifically bitmap, 3D, vector graphics and animation software; digital photography, video and film production and editing; and output to print, screen and projection). The second will be to understand the productive capabilities gained and lost in the transition to digital, as a means to distinguish areas in which further innovation is desirable. We refer to this historical perspective as genealogy partly to signal its derivation from Foucault (1976), but more pertinently to identify its key task as one of studying the derivation of the contemporary from its antecedents.

We propose a user-centred approach, which looks at the domains of amateur, artist and professional production. By user-centred we mean a focus on the spectrum from end-user experience of software, through redesigning or repurposing hardware and software, to the origination of new tools. This use-centred approach to technological adoption and the evolution of technique is designed to test a subsidiary hypothesis: that how a given artist or technologist, or a given society's artists and technologists handle, depict, reflect upon and utilise light also tells us about the beliefs, meanings and values attached to light in different places and times (see for example Crary 1990, 1999), especially contemporary presumptions underlying both technological and technical innovation. The research will be grounded in experiment, archival analysis and interviews.

The project will focus on three families of light-based technologies: 1 the depiction of light in pigment and ink-based technologies and contemporary computer-generated imaging, 2. the recording of light in various forms of photography, cinematography and digital recording, 3. the use of light as the material form of communication. The CIs and RAs will share four case studies in contemporary and historical where these operations meet significant challenges and opportunities:

1. Clouds: The particular difficulty of capturing clouds, which Damisch notes among Renaissance painters (Damisch 2002), is evidenced in depiction (Constable's cloud studies), recording (Ansel Adams' landscape photography) and contemporary cinema. The use of physical effects like 'cloud tanks' in contemporary moving image media suggests that digital effects still not cannot produce convincing clouds. Problems typical of this case study include levels of opacity, reflectance and rates of change.

2. Water: The use of filmed reference footage rather than computer-generated imaging of water in many contemporary films suggests that water is likewise extremely difficult to capture. Leonardo's pencil and Renoir's paint attempts to depict fleeting effects did not produce verisimilitude. Many of the effects they did achieve, however, remain in place as desiderata in the depiction of water today, as do the effects recorded by the Lumière Brothers. Specific problems include the difficulties of scaling water, refraction, reflections, effects of spray and internal reflection in droplets, and the generation of turbulence.

3. Domestic interiors: Interiors provide the strongest example of successful deployment of digital light, for example in architectural visualisation and immersive VR. The historical genre depicting domestic interiors from Dürer to Hopper and its influence on photographic and cinematographic recording provide a test for such problem areas as texture, absorption, shadow colour, diffraction, luminosity and the projection of natural and artificial light into interiors.

4. The human face: The final case study will focus on what is generally conceded to be the most challenging object to synthesise. The notorious difficulty of skin-tones (Winston 1996), the colour and 'life' of eyes, the differential scattering of light from different layers of the epidermis, among others, provide the opportunity to discuss key digital techniques of colour, layering (in relation to underpainting) and tonal transitions. We will investigate the genealogy of vector and bitmap techniques, and the significance of the statement by Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar, that 'Reality begins at 80 million polygons per second' The case studies have been chosen in order to highlight the prioritisation of and relationships between technical issues faced by digital media in the 21st century, and the most significant responses to them, making it possible to identify in each instance particular combinations and priorities. Each case study will address the challenges of depicting, recording and preparing digital resources for specific outputs (print, screen, projection). By providing comparisons with and sources among the named artists and select others in historical genres, the case studies enable direct address to the historical inspirations and accummulation of expertise in contemporary digital practices.

Background

Some significant recent studies, such as Batchelor (2000) and Dalle Vacche and Price (2006), have indicated the poverty of the existing literature on colour. The same criticism is even more true of the literature on light. Most technical manuals in the media which we are investigating include an address to the handling of light, but few scholarly studies have followed their lead. The study of light in the history of the arts has been dominated by 1. histories of perspective (Panofsky 1991, Damisch 1994, Kemp 1990); 2. normative practices in cinematography and photography (Jacobson 1988, Salt 1992, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985); 3. the achievement of verisimilitude in digital media (Darley 2000); 4. the metaphor of light in Western philosophy (Jay 1993, Vasseleu 1998). Our work expands on the scholarship on perspective to look at other aspects of light; does not presume that either realism or the formation of norms is the goal of professional practice; and extends from metaphorical to material analysis of light technologies.

Social historians of media (Winston 1998, Briggs and Burke 2002) suggest, in tune with Marshall McLuhan's theses, that media history proceeds by breaks with the past and sudden leaps into the future. More considered work (Flusser 2000, Mattelart 2000, Debray 1991) suggests that while complex regimes of media forms are indeed characteristic of succeeding epochs, the discontinuities can easily be exaggerated. New technologies rarely if ever displace older ones. Instead, they are layered, providing contexts of use for one another. The notion of 'remediation' (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) is only partially successful in understanding the innovation and application of new media technologies. The historical studies we will draw on for an alternative model include the work of Stoichita (1997), for his extension of the study of light to include that of shadow; (Kember (1998) and Coe (1976, 1981), who provide fundamental tools for photographic and cinema history; on Zielinski (1998) and Grau (2007), who provide tools for understanding the interwoven nature of the histories of what are too often perceived as discrete media, and on Galloway (2004), for a preliminary theorisation of the affordances and constraints of digital code. The work is also informed by critical readings in the history and philosophy of technology, notably the works of Mumford (1934), Giedion (1948) and Ellul (1964) and Bijker (1997), who extend the definitions of technology to include its users; Feenberg (1995, 2005) and Mazlish (1993), who relate ontological and social understandings of technology; and Virilio (2007) and Stiegler (1994, 1996, 2003), who provide opposing views of the impacts of innovation on users. As with many of these authors, we emphasise the accumulation of techniques into technologies as typically a continuous process which we characterise as genealogical. We envisage that this perspective will distinguish our research from beta-testing models (see E3) through an emphasis on both unintentional innovation and innovations inspired by a desire to imitate the past rather than to create unprecedented qualities.

We will investigate material practices and their significance as statements concerning the nature, value and meaning of light. The normative theses of much art and media historiography risk constructing stable norms to facilitate periodisation. Teleological models focus on the goals of verisimilitude, authenticity, standardisation and, in the case of digital media, of warmth, texture and depth. By stripping back the presumption that all innovation is either normative or goal-oriented, we seek a clearer view of the day-to-day practice of technical innovation in such areas as the light-responsiveness of various materials, the colour palettes and gamuts of specific technologies, and the impacts these have had on the evolution of style and form.