HIGH DEFINITION IMAGING: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTUAL, THE VIRTUAL AND THE HYPER REAL

Digital technology is everywhere, from the cinema to the living room, from the classroom to the shopping precinct. Our children want digital phones with cameras attached, and iPods that can store their school calendars so that they can listen to their music, anywhere, anytime whilst finishing their homework. Shopping precincts and underground stations, airport lounges and urinals all now carry methods of display to bring the digital world home to us - wherever we are. These technologies are now central to how we live our lives.

Large media corporations, whose success depends on introducing new commodities into the world, have begun to unveil a new range of high resolution equipment which is the vanguard of much higher levels of resolution. This current technology has fundamentally four to five times the resolution of preceding broadcast technology which means that a viewer can no longer see the line structure inherent in the video image when projected on a cinema screen. This apparently simple, and apparently inevitable, technological development makes the gold standard of feature film production / 35mm film / far more widely available than ever before. It also brings in its wake image resolution which is finer than the eye can perceive. Thus the context and the nature of moving image making has the potential to change fundamentally.

We are already witnessing the beginnings of a sea change in the nature of film production on one hand but also the beginnings of the change of domestic production in which more and more people are enabled to produce and circulate very high quality images.

The aim of this project is to investigate - in practice and in theory - what is happening for the artist and the audience as these new technologies spread over the next three years. This investigation will proceed through the production of a series of digital installation pieces which test various production platforms, the collection of best practice data from leading practitioners and the production of a series of articles that will eventuate in a book for the Leonardo series on Art, Science and Technology with the MiT press.