ANALOG WINDOW
Analog Window is a project exploring the 35 mm slide format in spaces such as clubs, galleries and restaurants.
The aim is to generate visually rich environments that offer opportunities for stimulation, enjoyment and contemplation.
Conventional photography has been replaced by techniques that involve working directly onto prepared slide mounts.
What emerge are surprising yet familiar hybrids of colour, texture and form – what you see is what you get, and what you get is what you see.
Disorienteering
Analog Window evolved from my interest in photographing things such as water, stone, lichens and plants from above at close range to remove any sense of scale or perspective. I realised after a while that these complex forms and others like them could be seen not only through the camera at close range, but also in the surrounding landscape and even when looking through aircraft windows and microscopes. From this floating perspective the human sense of scale became an almost arbitrary point on a much larger continuum, and in these close-up photographic images I identified a new visual world, that of the micro-landscape.
A Breath of Fresh Light
Some time later, a chance viewing of a TV programme about the New Zealand film maker Len Lye’s animation work using discarded film stock prompted me to abandon photography and begin applying materials directly onto prepared slide mounts.
Immediately, 35 mm slides were transformed from implausibly small photographs into miniature stained-glass windows. When projected, there was no loss of resolution because there was no grain; in fact, more detail became visible rather than less.
The vivid colours of brightly lit stained glass are often enhanced by tiny flaws that catch the light, adding extra texture and brilliance. These beautiful imperfections are particularly prominent in older glass, and there is evidence that glassmakers at one time encouraged their formation. Similar irregularities can be seen in slides made using directly applied materials – these slides are stained-glass micro landscapes.
Transient Photoglyphs
The word photo-graph means light-writing and usually refers to a permanent chemical reproduction of an absent subject, rendered on a light-sensitive surface. However, Analog Window slides are not reproductions of anything; they are the subjects themselves. Each is a unique three-dimensional artefact, a photo-glyph or light-carving, and its projected image, written temporarily on the wall, is the photo-graph.
Windows of Analogy
Analog Window slides are analogs, formed by the same processes as the things they resemble – star clusters, river systems, coral reefs, plants, micro-organisms. The effects of surface tension, accretion, compression and abrasion are physically present rather than being represented pictorially. From macro to micro, the same forms and structures pattern our world, differing only in scale. We are part of the world and the world is part of us – there is no separation.
New Landscapes, New Maps
Every landscape, as well as being a geological imprint left by the interaction of materials and processes, is a construct devised by those who inhabit it and pass through it; who change it and are changed by it. This is especially true when people travel through unfamiliar or uncharted places, territories where explorers and cartographers operate in perpetual Save As… mode, scanning the landscape for features they can name and record. Written, drawn or spoken, the process of mapping fixes things in place, making them meaningful and memorable.
In the micro-landscapes of Analog Window, viewers often encounter new yet familiar forms and devise names for them. The images on the wall are not really of anything, they merely are. What they are, or what they are like is up to the viewer.
This is why Analog Window includes no titles or names. In a world of anchored images, it remains free-floating – as much depends on the viewer’s internal map as on what is ‘out there’. Such maps are drawn using cognitive processes that predispose us to perceive certain forms, such as faces, and make particular shapes stand out in accordance with our personal interests and preoccupations. The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach charted similar territory using the ink-blot tests that bear his name.
The Feeling Eye, the Seeing Hand
Although Analog Window uses chance it is not entirely haphazard – having used a camera for 50 years it would be dishonest to discount the processes of selection and composition.
However, these processes are here applied to slices of the world itself rather than to representations of it. The similarity is to gardening, textiles or ceramics rather than to representational arts such as painting or photography. There is a correspondence especially with the zen-derived techniques of raku pottery, which at every stage accentuate the role of chance in the form and finish of ceramic ware.
Patterns of Behaviour
In caves and cathedrals, living rooms and palaces, humans have always expressed themselves on the surfaces that surround them. We are a pattern-making, pattern-seeing species, scratching, drawing, painting, carving and printing our way across the surfaces of our world to express our sense of what is significant or sacred.
Starting from Scratch
History begins with writing, when new patterns began appearing on new surfaces – clay tablet, scroll, codex, parchment, book and monitor screen. The process of writing externalised and objectified information, allowing it to be stored, transmitted and retrieved at will, transcending the limitations of time and space in ways that must once have seemed like magic.
In a sense, Analog Window goes back to prehistory and an earlier kind of magic. Much as we once looked up at the night sky and joined the dots to invent the constellations, each group of viewers can create private visual mythologies or negotiate a shared one.
In another sense, Analog Window is part of a very contemporary process. Although literacy underpins modern life, text no longer has the primacy it once enjoyed – the oral/aural technologies of the electronic media are now pushing text-based thinking to one side, and other new media are immersing us in a new, hyperreal visual world.
Extending over more and more surfaces, hybrids of text, pattern, colour, symbol, image and brand more than ever reveal our sense of what is significant or sacred – from oral prehistory to the electronic present it seems we have come full circle.
The Geometry of Nature, the Nature of Geometry
In his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot proposes a new way of thinking about dimensions. Traditionally we regard a point as having a dimension of 0, a line as having a single dimension (length), a plane or surface two dimensions (length and width) and a solid three dimensions (length, width and depth). Using a number of ingenious examples, Mandelbrot suggests that many phenomena actually exist in the gaps between these integers.
Between the dimensions of zero and one, a series of points or dots at some stage becomes a line. Between one and two, a design such as a spiral or maze changes from a line into a surface. Between two and three there is the relationship between surface area and volume, which affects many fundamental processes including the ways that heat, light, oxygen and water are obtained and processed within the bodies of living things.
In addition, because the brain can be fooled by various kinds of stimuli, markings made on paper or canvas can give that surface a false sense of perspective or depth, and markings used in the opposite way, as camouflage, can make things disappear.
Off the Scale
Such structural and visual complexities, present in many natural forms at every scale, can be seen in Analog Window. The eye can revisit these forms many times, seeing new shapes and making new connections. It is no coincidence that dots, spirals, labyrinths and the like have been used decoratively and symbolically in so many cultures around the world. These and other forms, including the familiar yin yang symbol, are simple but profound analogs of the class of complex forms described by Mandelbrot and named by him as fractals.
A fractal can be represented either mathematically (as an iterated equation in which the result of each calculation is fed back to become the starting point of the next) or visually (as a pattern). Here, the visual once again has primacy over the written – equation and pattern both encode the fractal, but the pattern releases it for everyone to perceive directly.
It was only by using a powerful mainframe computer as a digital microscope that Mandelbrot first saw fractals, but once he had done so he realised they were everywhere. Although digitally generated fractals have a complexity previously unimagined in computing, those that occur naturally are always richer, more surprising, more ‘organic’.
It is these naturally occurring fractal forms that form the basis of Analog Window – an analog window on the world.
