I wanted to discuss further how we see. I wanted to show you in a more clear way what I've been on about for the last few years. I've included a video by Kosheen which encompasses the way lenses and computers work. First watch it with the sound up. The song is essential in providing understanding of the visual elements. The music provides a cohesiveness to the images - it provides a context - much like a lot of video and installation art today - context is provided outside or in addition to the visual elements. In fact this is how programmed lens based art works. Context is everything to cohesiveness. Take the sound away and the images become loose and unattached - without the audio the images float becoming stylized and mannered without deeper meaning or connectiveness. It is like the idea of pure consciousness, unmoored from the aspect of human flesh - like in Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire angels appear instantly, moving through time and space simply by will - vision allied to electronic programming is almost this transcendent - subjectivity, interiority and non-presence. The lens captures pure light and movement, the programming captures speed and space . The speed of the images heighten the visual violence of the video. The programming cuts through time and space ripping meaning from the mooring of the images so that the speed becomes the context.

Now I want to lay out the ideas of the programming itself. The main points are that images move forward and backward in time, there are quick jumps through space compressing time, we move in and around figures changing the dimensions of sight as we do. These programming quirks give us a different visual understanding of form, space, light, movement, time and dimension. What interests me about the speed is not that it transfers from point a to b but that point a and b exist in the same point. It is cubist. Front and back at once but with the added element of "feeling" the space "in-between." It is not visual but tactile. So in order to see both a & b we see aspects of the journey of the movement - it is the element of "bullet time". Now this works well in the programming world, but how do we "see" in our world? How do we see when we enter a room? How has this technology changed our understanding?

Ok as an example, let's say your lover is lying across the bed asleep and you've set up your easel across the way. The traditional view is to frame the still life, to transfer what you're seeing in front of you. You take into account the changes in time, light, air, color etc. You draw through time using both eyes seeing things in the peripheries, changing as you turn your head or move from looking at the paper to the figure. That is the traditional way, but our understanding of sight, how we use our eyes has been changed by the programming we experience above. What do we look for? Where do our eyes go? How do we understand the lover across the room? We begin by folding the spaces. Our eyes move from the foot, up the calf, then breaks and looks at the fluttering eyes beneath the closed lids, the sheets crumpled beneath the figure. Then we catch the pitch of the shoulder, the curve of the hip, the breeze that moves the lock of hair on the forehead - we visualize all at once - without sequence or context. Space is folded over and over, the points coming to exist in the drawing before us. The rendering quickly becomes a series of closeups, ground and figure pulling together to create a "feeling" of the visual experience of the whole scene before us. We wind up using our eyes like our hands, we "touch" our way around the figure, ground and space.

I want to be quite clear. This is not collage, nor is it cubism. We are dealing with a continuous space, a renaissance space if you will. What we are doing is using our eyes differently - as we do today. We are enhancing tactile vision and trying to find "sense" or meaning as we do so. This tactile vision allows us to get to emotion extremely quickly, the way music or sound can involve you in a process of meaning immediately. Abstraction as Kandinsky saw it - was brilliant at this. But without the visual world of Western Painting there is no visual joy to it. It becomes a hippy spectacle. What is important is the connection to the history of Western painting, the visual spectacle of space and form. Flatness, SuperFlat, Surface and Side are not important, but form, space and contour are. At this point we break the Mannerism of Postmodernism.

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