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| Painting by Denis Peterson |
(1) Our visual perception is fluid and transient. We can capture very little detail from our vision, only as much as a couple of square centimetres at a meters distance. This limitation makes it impossible to observe much about the surroundings in any detail before they change into something else. Natural light, coming from the sun, changes throughout the day, and people move, change complexion and so on. The only way to reliably capture a whole painting in such exact detail, and still have a coherent overall image, is to take a photograph, or to study in detail the lighting conditions of a particular scene, transferring these to a new setting. But this, again, is only achievable by taking a photograph.
Our vision is intimately connected to the symbols which we overlay our reality with. Chairs are chairs and windows are windows, but this is only the case from a human perspective. Lighting and objects are in fact seen differently depending on what we think they are and what mood we are in. There is no such thing as a completely objective vision. Therefore the exactness of hyperrealism must depend on something very stable, something you can match pixel for pixel, drop for drop of paint. Like in photography...
In Hyper Realism the exactitude of our camera replaces the inexactitude of our visual perception. A similar process happens in The New Aesthetic where one sacrifices ones own selection of the visual to the machine - and our notions of beauty and "interestingness" are the only selection mechanisms used thereafter. Our vision is pushed entirely to the side in favor of the camera lens itself taking command over what should be taken in. This role of the camera is normally understated in photography, but in the new aesthetic it takes center stage - often by making adjustments to the camera so that the effect of the distortion of lenses or the digital become more visible. The only limitation to the power of the camera is found in the selection mechanisms of the artist. But a version of this selection mechanism also has it's place in Hyper Realism.
(2) Hyper Realism selects it's visual aesthetic on the back of the options available through camera technology. This we can clearly see in the painting above by Denis Peterson. Notice that detail in the woman's arm is lost because of the brightness of the sun. This effect wouldn't happen when just seeing something. Either it would be to bright for us to turn our eyes there, or we would see the detail. Only in cameras do you get the effect of "whiteout". This happens when the light sensitivity of the film or digital chip in the camera is adjusted for the median amount of light in the image. Any light that comes above the amount the film can handle in the time frame it is set to "expose" would, just be lost in a whiteout. The "information" of the different levels of light is lost, so that there is no difference between the second lightest and the lightest. This effect removes the contrast required to see the details on the arm. We can understand then that the visual expression chosen in the painting comes not from the artists perception of the world, but from an artifact of the technology he has chosen to use as his aid - the camera.
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| Jack Addis |
It is not a bad thing that he has done this. We are trained to think of photographs as real - they are the truth witnesses of our culture. Images are used as evidence in court, and trusted more than an eye witness. This symbolic truth can be made part of a painting, and so it is made truer than if the painter painted something real in front of his eyes, it has become hyper real.
But there is also something hyper real about The New Aesthetic, which is also freed in some way from it's subjective limitations. This aesthetic shows us the truth from two worlds - from the real and from the digital. It is a point that, though our programs are very abstracted from the transistors and hard drives from which they originate, anything we see on our screens is a manifestation of millions of binary signs. When these work as they should, as in our vision, they are invisible to use. We simply see the content and not the medium. But when these are mixed reality asserts itself, and comes to the foreground of our experience of them.
The glitched image on the right was made by Jack Addis (and his computer). The "first" layer of reality, which we seek to see, is the man, but the computer has made us experience him in a new way through it's interference. But the interference is as real as the man.
We might say that both these artistic expressions are a blend of our symbolic/visual field and a technologically determined reality - but they two are each near the ends of a continuum. What this tells me, is that technology is now such an integral part of our reality that we understand both it and us through it. The two are combined to create something new, something informational: Maybe it is The New Hyper Real Aesthetic of the Information Society.
