Panel Statement

“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psycho-analysis to unconscious impulses” (Walter Benjamin); what might new forms of capture and display reveal about our unconscious state? Moore’s Law applied to image capture is as profound a change as the invention of slow-motion in Benjamin’s day. Increased capture quality and speed, handling and display of data, and the dissipation of bottlenecks in data flow, open new possibilities for how and why images are captured and displayed. In the UK, work is being undertaken on the world’s first higher dynamic range, higher resolution, higher frame rate systems to examine the psychological immersive point at which human perception is ‘activated’. There is an underlying conviction in this research that something will be revealed about how these accelerations perturbate or excite the human perceptual system. Traditional forms of exhibition are already accommodating these developments with 4k projector systems, delivery of higher resolution television via terrestrial digital and higher resolution narrowcasting via the internet. Business as usual; but what might this all mean for images outside commercial circuits? Artists’ groups, the R&D departments of commerce, have already arisen to project in non-cinema situations where the idea of the screen is becoming antiquated; but on the test bench and in the research labs, greater innovations are queuing to be released. New interfaces are already being designed to control high-resolution, high-frequency images, and new research is being undertaken to explore the relationship between humans and their works. What does this mean for the electronic arts community?

• Terry Flaxton, DIRECT, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK