To present my experiments and give a clear insight into my process, I set up my laptop on a table with my video experiments alongside the printed image degradation. The big stack of paper became part of the communication giving a physical weight to balance the purely onscreen degradation animations.
It also encouraged an interaction and people ended up flicking through the pile because they found the degradation slightly unbelievable. I had done some previous experiments to see how my videos looked on a projector. I thought about how I could use the stack of paper and the surface to set the projector on. The physicality of the printed degradation series could infer the height at which the projector was set. This idea reflects my method which buys into “generative design”, creating the conditions which infer the design rather than designing everything firsthand yourself. This strain of thinking was perhaps inspired by Daniel Eatock and a more conceptual, fine art approach. However, I knew this would be dependant on the space I was given to present. I decided the clarity of image was more important and ended up showing my videos alongside my laptop.
Alongside this I talked about my process. I had planned to run the videos on a slideshow with timed slides and autoplaying videos so I’d be able to talk more smoothly over the top of them. However, this didn’t end up working on the day. This wasn’t too much of an issue, I think it highlighted a strength in my presentation method, having a mixture of the tangible pile of paper and videos communicated the method clearly. After been recommended by Max to look into Benjamin Wilson, I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of his philosophies. I mentioned how I used a lithography print as my starting image. I made a link to how in my mind it looked like a digital image, the quality of line made it look like it was made up of pixels and scan lines. However, there was another reference that found in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – “Lithography made it possible for graphic art to accompany everyday life with pictures”. Benjamin explains how lithography printing was the first major jump in technology that allowed for greater ease of copying images. This is similar to the leap in technology with digital printing.
I used my degradation as a way of commenting on Wilson’s theory.
“The whole province of genuineness is beyond technological reproducibility”
I thought that instead of stripping “genuineness” or what I interpreted as originality and uniqueness, the copying method invoked more of it. I think Wilson talks about the concept of a copy, however in actuality a copy is never perfect. The method leaves a mark on the copy. A copy degrades and evolves. I look at this passage in particular:
“The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everthing about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the hostorical witness that it bears. The latter (material duration and historical witness) being grounded in the former (the thing’s genuineness), what happens in the reprodiction, where the former has been removed from human perception, is that the latter also starts to wobble. Nothing else, admittedly; however, what starts to wobble thus is the authority of the thing. We can encapsulate what stands out here by using the term ‘aura’. We can say: what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be produced by technological means is its aura. The process is symptomatic; its significance point beyond the realm of art. Reproductive technology, we might say in general terms, removes the thing reproduced from the realm of tradition. In making many copies of the reproduction, it substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences”
I argued that the image gains multiple new “unique incidences” through copying. The copying method can create something new that the original image lacked. This was the basis of my project, celebrating degradation using a digital and analogue printing method, conditions of which inferred the visual outcome or imperfection of the copy. To complement Wilson I also looked at the contemporary fine artists Oliver Laric who in his video “versions” explains that it takes more work to interpret the interpretation than it does to interpret the original image. When something is copied it becomes multifaceted, not only in aesthetic but also in meaning. There is a reason it was copied, who was it copied by and for what reason.
I also mentioned how the physicality of the the digital can be somewhat intangible. When we save something to the cloud to us it has no physical presence. However, we don’t see it, but it’s stored in a huge server room somewhere. Even to a greater degree the digital to us seems so perfect. The internet is its own world. However, ultimately these aspects of the digital are dependant on the physical. Data on a computer is stored on a tiny magnet on a circuit board. I began to touch on this in an earlier chat with Marcus. He talked about the media archaeologist “Jussi Parikka” and how he talks about the physical components of digital technologies, all of which are subject to degradation like anything else.
My crit on the whole really well. I got some good ideas and feedback both from Max and the rest of the group. What came up quite quickly was the idea of making my degradation experiments into a huge flip book – an analogue animation method. I was told how I could go about this by using a drill and bolts. People came and interacted with the stack of paper flicking through the experiments. It seemed quite a natural thing to do. They liked the idea that no two copies (despite technically being “copies) were the same.
Max talked about “Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings.” In other words doing things without knowing how they work with the aim to understand when enough results have been attained. Whilst I thought the degradation was due to the printer not being completely level, I thought there was more to it. I tried to research how printers worked but still wasn’t entirely sure what caused the image to degrade in the way it did. I then did it on multiple printers which only stumped me more due to different visuals they created. I accepted this was fine, it adds a mystique to the process but is an area I can look more into if I want a more precise degradation.
I had some interesting suggestions to experiment further with the animation. Someone suggested to play it at 8.79 seconds, the speed at which it takes to photocopy and image. I thought about making a video that would be more than an hour and half long with each frame being 8.79 seconds to represent this temporal value. I like this suggestion more, it’s like the other extreme. It also means the imagery represents the scanning laser. This gives an insight into the digital printing process as image and method merge. On this line of think I also thought about what it would be like reversing the video. This is just out of pure visual interest, but it’s something I’d definitely want to try. I got the criticism that my smaller video experiments were weaker than my simpler animations. When I take it too far out of the degradation it loses clarity.
When asked how I could take it further, I said that I’d like to see how other analogue created image such as an oil painting with thick impasto paint, or photo taken on a film camera that has a grain to it and see how these translates. I said I was interested to see how colour worked, however, Max suggested the black and white would degrade in a better way due to the technology of the printer. It was really inspiring to see everyone’s interpretations of the subject. I loved this brief and it was affirmed my interest for choosing a topic within this area for my position brief.
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 