• All the management of our lives depends on the senses,
and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and the
noblest of these, there is no doubt that the inventions which
serve to augment its power are amongst the most useful that
there can be.
- Rene Descartes
• The hungry difference between a flat image and the
external world perceived through human eyes has struck artists
repeatedly over the centuries, as they wrestled with the translation
of their experiences of the shapes, shades and trajectories
of a moving, stereo world onto a still, mono picture surface.
As it happens, it was quite a fruitful struggle. The persistent
renegotiation between the mark and the universe, between the
experience of seeing with two eyes and the translation of
that experience into two dimensions, has provided a fertile
domain in which to explore what it means to be in the world
as a human, a body in which being and sensing are intricately,
apparently inescapably melded.
Never more so than in the business of seeing, where a description
of the known mechanics of the operation fall so far short
of finally explaining what happens when we look. Our eyes,
from the somatic point of view, are not attached to the brain,
but are rather an outgrowth or extension of it, a fact which
offers a possible key for thinking about how they work, how
we make a smooth, intelligible image from the data flying
into them at light speed.
For seeing involves an active processing of two slightly different
streams of images entering each of our eyes, their focus darting
rapidly and constantly, selecting now foreground, now distant
objects before arriving at our retinas upside. But that is
not how we see the world. Because data acquisition is only
the tiniest fraction of the business of seeing. That superrich
jumble of data, that barrage of electromagnetic frequencies,
that shuddering involuntary montage of upside views is simply
our raw material. With it, we begin to test, we prototype,
we hypothesise, we interpret, we refine and rebuild a model
of our world, on the fly, again and again, only pausing occasionally
to blink.
John Mitton’s explorations with 3D represent, in part
of another episode in the struggle to think through the complexities
of seeing and how they merge with the experience of being.
It is an investigation which has often enlisted our relationship
with the technologies we bring into the world, to explore
those wet, visceral, at critical moments inscrutable machines
through which we experience it.
The artist, who began work as a sculptor, and moved into creating
3D images at the invitation of a machine, a device for making
stereo images which lay a few floors below where he was studying
at Liverpool Polytechnic. His artwork has often incorporated
machines, though usually of a type which look as though they
might have a precise and important function, but in reality
did nothing other than appear that way. It was his interest
in holographic photography that lead Mitton towards developing,
finally, a machine that not only looked the part, but delivered.
The Mitton Linear Rail 1 (LR1) looks rather like a black hurdle,
with a camera attached to its bar. The machinery within the
device allows the camera to move from right to left along
the rail, while precisely rotating the camera as it goes to
make sure it “toes in” – that is stays pointed
at the same spot on the object all the time. The camera takes
anywhere between 24 and 99 photographs on its journey, each
from a slightly different position.
The resulting set of digital photographs are then treated,
via software also invented by Mitton, which strips tiny slices
of visual information from each of the photographs and spreads
them out evenly across the picture surface. When the resulting
prints are laminated with transparent lenticular plastic,
the tiny lenses on the surface of the plastic sheet refract
the light so that, as one moves one’s head across the
picture, one retraces the steps of the camera, seeing the
image from a slightly different angle each time, giving the
sensation that one is in fact moving around the object pictured,
an object which, consequently, feels to our eyes as though
it belongs in the solid world alongside us.
3D imaging has had an astounding number of false dawns, moments
when it seemed as though some stereoscopic imaging technique
were about to usurp traditional two dimensional imaging for
common use. Indeed, from the mid-eighteenth century, the proliferation
of stereographs, stereocards, stereograms and stereoviews
(as the devices for presenting a 3D image promoted by various
inventors and manufacturers were called) sold in their millions.
Varied as their names were, most of the devices worked by
presenting the left and the right eyes with two different
photographic images, each taken from a slightly different
position, which when viewed together were interpreted by the
brain offering a glimpse of a solid world. The popularity
of this genre of devices did not truly wane until the 1930s,
when motion pictures successfully substituted time for space,
movement for solidity. Even then, however, descendants of
the original stereoscope survived, with devices such as the
ViewMaster, launched in 1939 and added colour photography
to the mix, surviving late into the twentieth century as toys
or gimmicks. The invention of holography in the 1960s, lead
to a number of artists beginning to consider the 3D technique
as a richly communicative medium. But while the productions
of this wave of the technology inspired a small group of collectors,
the attention of the art world was soon taken by the possibilities
and resonances of other new media, prime among them video.
That sputtering history forms a powerful contrast with that
other desire always provoked by still pictures: that they
move. In this at least, motion pictures were a twin of 3D
images. For an image that was flat or still was, whatever
its aura, always an image defined by its lack. But whereas
the twentieth century was defined by the technical appearance
and later domination by, the moving image, 3D imagery has
remained, until very recently, a technique always in its infancy.
For Mitton, the importance of the various 3D processes derives
not so much from the technical innovations involved, but from
an archaic balance they restore: “It is the 2D world
of reading that is unnatural. We are used to seeing everything
in three dimensions, and then suddenly we are forced not to
read that way. So, 3D photography is really just returning
everything to the way it should be.”
+ + +
In the artist’s series of portraits of the inhabitants
of Macroom we find exactly that sense of something restored,
something recovered, some put back on the correct shelf, through
the application of 3D photography’s very specific means.
It is noticeably that Jon Mitton’s preferred method
for creating 3D images (his shooting style and the manufacture
of lenticular prints) turns the picture itself into a machine,
rather than the software for a machine, as had been the case
in early stereoscopes, and indeed is the case with the latest
generation of 3D motion pictures. This technical choice in
turn throws the emphasis back onto the human eye, rather than
the prosthesis of an apparatus held over the eyes, a strategy
that hints again that the process of perception are of primary
interest here.
But the choice also provide the images with another significant
quality: interactivity. As each photograph offers a selection
of views, they also offer the viewer a selection of way of
looking, or positions of looking, making the composition flexible,
rather than fixed, something which in turn takes the emphasis
off the artist’s choices somewhat, and towards the content
of the picture. This seems a particularly apt move in respect
to portraiture in general, and Jon Mitton’s series of
Macrumpian portraits, in particular.
Macrumpians offers a technologically augmented approach to
portraiture, but does that as much by its treatment of space,
of territory, as of the ostensible subjects. Because what
grows in importance in this medium is the space a body occupies.
Sometimes that space is cluttered with stock that seems to
embrace and bolster the sitter, sometimes it is the space
itself that encircles them, wraps and defines them.
But the force of Mitton’s work is that nothing in truly
background, in the traditional sense, everything is more or
less offering itself for our attention in a way that leaves
the brain and eye exercised, and in the artist’s conception,
altered by simply looking. That sense of exercise, of work
done, of something akin to body modification, is heightened
by the other dimension, the fourth dimension the images represent
(given that they are composed of a sequence of photographs
which will take some minutes to complete): time.
It is this element of time that brings to Mitton’s Macrumpians
their gentle, persistent emotional force, their poised, thoroughly
dilute sense of melancholy. It is a force which seems all
the more exerted when we realise that some of the sitters
are, sadly, no longer alongside us in the solid world. And
it is in this case when something else unexpected happens,
when the magical space of the 3D image (and magical is always
the right word here, because encountering these images always
feels like encountering them as a child, as though some secret
is frozen here that careful, prolonged gaze, prolonged thinking
by looking, may suddenly reveal) seems to take on another
metaphorical task.
The aspect of memorial, that promise of the ability to hack
time which has often seemed to play around the discourses
of recording technologies here seems to gather a new momentum.
Moving our heads around in front of these images, looking
into the phantasmagorical space that is elsewhere, we might
be provided with flickering glimpses of our own machinery
at work, a fugitive image of us in the act of seeing, a sight
that might, paradoxically, jolt us for just a moment, towards
contemplation of the stilling of that machinery.
Copyright Luke Clancy 2008
•
RTE
Lyric FM's Artzone: Art Now, Programme 2. Luke Clancy's
series on contemporary art continues with Representation:
Even better than the real thing. Listen