loRES
It is hard to define the loRES projects because they are still very nebulous.
The eM Djinn CD
is a loRES production. loRES
concerns itself with a qualitative approach to our world today, the way
we perceive it, and the media through which we see ourselves, our culture
and our existence. Heavy going? Not at all, that's part of the point. Low
resolution is easy! 1 We use our
technology, whether in art or science, to break down our world into a form
in which it can be communicated. The technological revolution that makes
this process possible is not new, it had certainly started by the time of
the first formalized descriptive languages. Words allowed us to break down
experiences into commonly agreed upon quanta of meaning, reducing what had
been a continuous and subjective spectrum of experience into a short-hand
representation. Such technology made human society, culture and civilization
possible, but it also changed the nature of our world. Now we are stuck in the same web...
bibliography......
yellow snow
Below are four texts from a limited edition postcard set. They should serve
as an adequate introduction. The first accompanying image came off of a
television screen.
2 Our world is
increasingly virtual. The sources for our sensory input are often secondary,
brought to us by telepresence, through some variety of audio transmission
or via print. This gives the information we receive a pre-digested quality,
because it has already been filtered, flavoured and quantified by whichever
media outlet is bringing it to us. We impose the same biases, of course,
when we experience something firsthand, but then it is our own sensibilities,
not a third party's, that are in play.
3 While analog
technology may be characterized by lower fidelity in some respects, digital
technology simply leaves out information. Where analog systems use a scale
of continuous values, digital processes use a spectrum of discreet packets
of quantified data. We experience a similar "editing" process
in media transmission of information. When we surrender control over what
information we receive, how we receive it, and even when we receive it,
we are also accepting an omission of whatever data is deemed by the media
to be extraneous. Sometimes these omissions may seem to be subtle and/or
unimportant, but they affect our perception, and therefore the very nature,
of our world, subjective and objective.
4 The human eye
sees at a very high resolution. Starting with approximately seven million
cones and 10 million rods in each retina to sense colour and light, through
a variety of connecting cells, to specialized shape recognition neurons
in the brain, we are blessed with very complex and overlapping processes
which allow us to distinguish circles from squares, red from blue and still
objects from moving ones. Compared with our vision, the media which bring
us visual information every day are very low fidelity. Printed photographs
commonly range from 85 to 150 lines per inch of resolution. CRTs present
lower resolutions. Television shows us 30 frames a second, to simulate motion,
with 480 lines in a screen (regardless of screen size), of which we see
240 at any given moment. Computer screens, which are bringing us very detailed
and precise information, are usually 480 lines per screen, but can range
as high as 1000 lines per screen. Another medium, film, though much higher
in resolution than CRTs, generally runs at only 24 frames per second. All
of these media depend on our mind filling in, or ignoring, the many gaps
in information.
words......
sounds......
pictures......
links......
info......
reviews