Abroad: Peonies considered

There are many obvious advantages to digital substitutes: speed, accessibility, etc... And if digital media can meet or exceed the parameters of human perception what is lost in substituting digital for analog media can be unclear.

LED or RGB digital color is fast and convenient but it is inherently a programmed approximation. The spectrum of color that is visible when light passes through a film membrane reflects the spectrum of light captured during filming. Input reflects output. There is no approximation. Even though our eyes cannot recognize all of the colors in a film, the source of information is true. Digital color is programmed to mimic analog's infinite spectrum of color. Even if digital color is a very good approximation it can never be a true substitute. The digital experience is doubly mediated (first by human perception and second by digital approximation). The correlate analog experience is mediated by only human's physiological limits. It is hard to know what is lost by this secondary mediation but it can often be sensed, if not articulated. The colors in-between the colors we can register are imperceptible but they are there. Perhaps such imperceptible increments, whether they occur in social, aural, or color space, are more vital than we realize.

Abroad: Diana Thater's Peonies

Diana Thater's exhibition "Chernobyl" opened this past week at Hauser & Wirth in London. "Chernobyl" is an impressive video installation about the nuclear disaster that occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986. Rather than using editing cuts to convey Chernobyl's landscape Thater opts for film layers, superimposing images on top of one another. In doing this, Thater avoids linear time created by a sequence of images, in favor of time that is sculptural and has depth.


In an adjacent room is Thater's video installation "Peonies." As with "Chernobyl," "Peonies" also utilizes film layers, depicting 3 ghosted peonies on 9 video monitors. To make the video, Thater used her Standard 8mm film camera, which allows back-winding of film, to shoot a true double exposure of the flowers. The layers in "Peonies" were made with analog materials, as opposed to"Chernobyl," whose layers were made digitally. Regarding "Peonies," Thater states that she wanted to make the viewer aware of the difference between analog and digital techniques. Digital techniques may be analogous but they are never identical to the analog techniques they emulate. For example, digital media is pixelated and has only a finite number of colors. Analog media, on the other hand, provides an infinite spectrum of colors - many of which the eye cannot register.


To hear Diana Thater talk about "Chernobyl" and "Peonies" click here.