Predatory vision : 3D imaging and the transformation of screen-space

Despite Wheatstone’s academic interests in the device, the stereoscope languished somewhat as an optical toy. Yet the advent of 3D screen-spaces for home and mass entertainment suggests today’s consumers and practitioners of screen culture hold the view that screen culture will be ‘improved’ through 3D imaging technologies. Like cinema and photography, stereoscopic 3D imaging has the potential to transform visual culture. But what is transformed, as optics and electronic imaging techniques deliver Alice in Wonderland in 3D? This paper links the advent of 3D cinema and TV to the notion that vision is itself a ‘technology of the visual’. As such, our innate binocular stereoacuity is ripe for exploitation by developers of 3D imaging technologies. I argue that contemporary 3D imaging marks an epistemological visual-perceptual shift: toward screenspaces becoming spaces for potential action. Such a shift entails seeing as doing rather than seeing as thinking. 3D imaging exploits binocular vision’s spatial acuity (stereopsis), but is effective only for objects within near distal space. The 3D effect tapers off dramatically for objects only some metres away, because the two retinal images lack significant lateral disparity (difference) to trigger stereopsis: the imagery flattens out and becomes ‘monoscopic’. Information available from conventional 2D media entails a peculiarly unspecified spatiality. Perceptually, the contents of a conventional cinematic screen are like those of a painting: they are situated neither near nor far, and constitute a shared and ambiguous visual space. Our own eyes are like those of a cat: frontally placed for predatory action. The visuality of 3D screen-spaces assumes a perceptuality of the near-by and close at hand, since this is the structure of the visible information to which stereopsis is adapted to respond. Noting the binocular acuity of predatory animals, as well as some etymological links, this paper examines the implications of perceptually ‘capturing’ the sensation of visually solid objects in one’s immediate space. Stereopsis is about decisive action within an immediate environment: but it also presupposes the single viewpoint of an active observer toward which the 3D imagery is targeted.

It came to pass

Peter Booth`s apocalyptic Burning City and Head stemmed from wartime experiences in Britain. Employing Friedrich`s Wanderer in the Sea of Fog as a portent of Germany`s imperialism, my painting collapses vision into nightmare, drawing in German artists Beuys and Rauch, caught up in a horrendous and inescapable legacy.

Recovering the hidden through found-footage films

In the early nineteen seventies materialist experimental film was cogently rejected by feminist theorists for its inability to deliver a feminist counter-cinema addressing its political agenda. The concomitant development of feminist psychoanalytic readings of “dominant cinema” against its grain also discounted such work. This split is marked by Peter Wollen’s formulation of “two avant-gardes”, one narrative and explicit about its political position and the other non-narrative and focusing directly on implicit perceptual processes. Materialist film’s fixation on structure jettisoned content, and extended post-war painting’s essentialist move to pure abstraction manifest in abstract expressionism and minimalism. The emergence of trauma theory and the recent explosion of moving image digital media with its non-linear bias and the complex layering of “technical images” have created a new situation opening up alternate readings of such discounted materialist practices. As well as a historic precursor for digital media, it is suggested that a materialist cinema, represented here by the found footage films: Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Arnold 1998) and Dreamwork (Tscherkassky 2001), signposts a belated return for materialist film within the context of trauma studies. This materialist turn rescues such experimental film from its traumatic excision and extends an understanding of what has been termed a “trauma cinema” by Janet Walker. Rather than pure, abstract or visionary such practice is read here through trauma theory as performing implicit mechanisms of denial and erasure.

Black Caviar

A painting created for the conference Celebrity Aura, hosted by The Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University at Burwood. Exhibited at the Phoenix Gallery as part of this conference.

Liquid landscape (Headland)

A complex structure floats on an undulating colour field. This could be a description of any landscape painting where the built environment, human culture, intersects with the natural world. In Stephen Bush's "Cumberland" (2010) an appropriated landscape supports a log cabin - centrally and ideally placed in a picturesque, alpine landscape. The cabin though, has no relationship to the ground plane, above which it hovers, while its shadows fall in the opposite direction to the buildings and mountains behind it. Bush fetishizes paint, exploring its plasticity and exploiting the viewer's gullibility (as do I). My work realises Bush's aesthetic in three dimensions, extending it to meet with the act of looking, and asks the viewer to merge with the work of art.

Instrumental vision

This chapter interrogates stereo-immersive ‘virtual reality’ (VR), the technology that enables a perceiver to experience what it is like to be immersed in a simulated environment. While the simulation is powered by the “geometry engine” (Cutting, 1997: 31) associated with high-end computer imaging technology, the visual experience itself is powered by ordinary human vision: the vision system’s innate capacity to see “in 3D”. To understand and critically appraise stereo-immersive VR, we should study not its purported ‘virtuality’, but its specific visuality, because the ‘reality’ of a so-called ‘virtual environment’ is afforded by the stereoacuity of binocular vision itself. By way of such a critique of the visuality of stereo-immersive VR, this chapter suggests that we think about the ‘practice’ of vision, and consider on what basis vision can have its own ‘materiality’. Pictorial perception is proposed as an exemplary visual mode in which the possibilities of perception might emerge. Against the ‘possibilities’ of vision associated with pictures, the visuality of stereo-immersive VR emerges as a harnessing, or ‘instrumentalisation’ of vision’s innate capabilities. James J. Gibson’s ‘ecological’ approach to vision studies is referenced to show the degree to which developers of VR have sought — and succeeded — to mimic the ‘realness’ of ordinary perceptual reality. This raises a question concerning whether the success of stereo-immersive VR is simultaneously the source of its own perceptual redundancy: for to bring into being the perceptual basis of ordinary ‘real’ reality, is to return the perceiver to what is already familiar and known.

Duoscope

The ambiguous representation of spatial depth in Thornton Walker’s painting The Homage creates a peculiar sense in which the ‘whereness’ of depicted objects and atmosphere cannot be ascertained by, either perspectival convention or perceptual strategies. This visual-spatial ambiguity resonates with my interested in ‘broken’ stereography. Hence, ‘duoscopy’ refers to the limitations of binocular vision when the object of perception is itself duplicitous.

A/r/tography and place ontology

Through lived experience, I learn how my education, life habits, changing abodes, and different career trajectories are intertwined with my identity and place. A/r/tography is a way of exploring these interconnections through reflexive practice as a visual artist, creative arts therapist, art educator, and researcher. Knowledge emerges from contemplating my artistic practice, my art education, the drawings of clients who participate in my creative art therapy sessions, and the work of students who attend my art classes, from which I contemplate early art images as shapes or figurative forms floating on the page. This paper asserts that creative art therapists are able to use the creative-artistic processes of living inquiry found in a/r/tography to make connections between identity and place.

Hollywood flesh

This was a major exhibition that received many online and printed reviews and described  John Forrest as a leading Australian artist. It also resulted in television interviews on ABC 7.30 Report and Inside Art.
Works were also published on the covers of two editions of The Melbourne Review.
Visual documentation can be acessed via Metro Gallery or via  Google (John Forrest Australian Artist)

The eye

An oil painting in 2 panels on Cherrywood

Virtue

An oil painted diptych on 2 panels of a replicated portrait

Riviere

'Riviere' (2012) was created in response to the painting 'Man in a Green Coat' (1998) by Kylie Wren, held in the Deakin University Art Collection. This artistic response was produced for the Face to Face Exhibition held at Deakin University Art Gallery.

Dreamweavers

Dreamweavers is a touring show Curated by Simon Gregg at the Gippsland Regional Gallery, touring Nationally from 2011 until April 2013.

The exhibition explores the contemporary preoccupation for the Fantastic through a range of national and international art practices, that are united by an enduring fascination with darkness and dark places. Dreamweavers is a multi-sensory experience that is more like entering another world than an art exhibition. It combines sculpture, digital media, photography and painting, in an intoxicating visual feast.

Dreamweavers features the work of six artists. James Gleeson (1915-2008) was Australia’s pre-eminent Surrealist, and one of the country’s most acclaimed twentieth century artists. In his work massive, heaving and largely unidentifiable forms meld with apocalyptic skies and earth in twisted biomorphic shapes.

RGB Wattle Park chalet

New technologies have arguably displaced the hegemony of painting within the hierarchies of contemporary art. Projectors and other digital imaging technologies in particular continue to expand the contemporary artist’s aesthetic and conceptual possibilities beyond canvas, paper, and stone. Yet painting - the practice of smearing coloured mud about - far from being superseded, simply continues to cannibalise these powerful technologies extruding them into its own analogue processes. Whether intentionally or as an by-product of this cannibalisation, painting tends to create a critical distance in which the tacit aspects of these technologies – their representational language and ‘special effects’ - are made fully visible. Of course 'easel' painting practices persist not only to critique new technologies. Rather new technologies inevitably fold back into the now souped-up vocabularies of contemporary painting, expanding the medium’s physical boundaries, formal strategies, and modes of display.

YGR Fontainebleau

New technologies have arguably displaced the hegemony of painting in the hierarchies of contemporary art. Projectors and other digital imaging tools in particular continue to expand the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual possibilities beyond canvas, paper, and stone. Yet painting, (the practice of smearing coloured mud about) far from being marginalised, simply continues to cannibalise these new technologies extruding them into its own analogue processes. Whether intentionally or as a by-product of this cannibalisation, painting creates a critical distance in which the tacit aspects of these technologies – their representational language and ‘special effects’ - are made fully visible. Of course ‘traditional’ easel painting practices persist not just to critique new technologies. Digital imaging technologies inevitably feed back into the souped-up vocabularies of contemporary painting, expanding the medium’s physical boundaries, formal strategies, and modes of display. The work for this project explores the ways in which projection and virtual geographical mapping invite new configurations for the practice of landscape painting.