During July 2021 my exhibition entitled phenomenon is at the Main gallery in Halifax St in the city of Adelaide. The. In that a phenomenon can be described as an event as opposed to something large and impressive, each work in the exhibition presents a moment in time when a statement could be made that this is what happened at that moment. However, the moment is this case is small enough to pass unnoticed or at least unrecognised for what it is. The clue is in the titles. Each title is a row of four numbers. When you shoot film through a digital video camera each of the frames is numbered – Hours, minutes, seconds, frames in order to help the editor pinpoint the exact moment to apply a cut or a transition. Given that there might well be 26 frames per second, the pinpointing of such a moment in many ways presents a logical impossibility. We don’t actually experience it. But film and television present us with a version of reality based upon such frames. You get an idea of a frame from traditional celluloid film. A 90 minute film would have 129600 such frames but other than in editing it all, the moment captured in the frame may tell you little. What you may not get is sharpness of image or in fact be able to recognise an image in the patches of dark and light depending upon the camera. At the other end of the scale though is what you see with cricket coverage. The camera used to show a ball in mid flight may well be recording at 1000 frames per second – certainly too fast for the human eye to isolate.

A painting such as this is just such a moment. The figure is caught in motion, in transition, while the other areas are motionless but enlivened with texture. Words appear as seeming dialogue – the visualisation of a soundtrack. In film recording, the sound and picture are treated separately and only brought together in the editing. Again, this is artificial. We experience sound and picture simultaneously however, while the picture can be isolated to a static image or still, words are traditionally spoken at three words per second meaning that the words in the picture cannot be literally experienced at the same time as the figurative and textural elements in the painting. This contradiction creates not so much confusion as layers of improbability.

As for the words themselves, each is a partial or fragmented message. We experience the spoken and written word continually in our lives and are forever processing that information. These words vary from the poetic to the mostly hidden – each giving only just so much information but not enough to create understanding. In places the words partially disappear between sections but even where you can see the whole words, the exact meaning or relevance is open to interpretation.

You will also note that the way the work is organised on the walls, looks somewhat like a film strip which can be read forwards or backwards. The viewer is led around the walls. So, time becomes a factor. The vertical divisions in the paintings become markers that record successive moments and the passage of the viewer around the gallery becomes a journey of time as well. In some ways the viewer becomes an integral part of the work.

 

There is a common misconception that the camera works the same way as the human eye. There are some similarities. The digital camera records areas of black, white and colour in each pixel but it is indiscriminate. Whatever information passes through the lens and onto the chip is not processed as anything other than black, white and colour. The human eye works somewhat similarly in that it too has a lens and a retina on which the image is recorded but that is where the similarity ends. What the brain records are symbols. Think of it like this. When we teach a child to read, it is shape recognition and associated sound that are the keys. The brain learns to record the shape/sound symbol so that it will remember it next time. This is seeing. What the brain is doing with that information is essentially creating an allegory from which meaning is derived. The camera is in one sense, one dimensional. The eye/ brain combination is multilayered. This is important in terms of the work produced by artists. All art work is allegorical in that it is inevitably a collection of symbols to be interpreted.  Renaissance painting is just this but even the most abstract of work requires the eye brain combination to interpret the information. It may be pattern; it may be simply colour or individual viewers may find images in their memory banks.

Another consideration is what might be called the absence of presence or the presence of absence. A space not occupied by a figure could be seen as a negative space but in the case of these paintings it is not. There are textural elements to each surface, however subtle, that act as a bridge. Each painting is divided into sections that connect with each other. The mind of the viewer makes the connections.

So what re these paintings about in the end? They ae not pictures of something such as a face or a landscape and they are not transcriptions of emotional states. In essence they are an attempt to  explore the dichotomy between the world as we experience it and the limitations of the medium used to make those connections. A painting can tell you only so much. A film can tell you only so much. Whatever we determine to be reality, it is only ever part of the story if in fact it can even be called a story.

 

Comparison of the Human Eye to a Camera

By Aaron Charles

There are the proverbial two sides to the “comparing an eye to a camera” coin. One side is merely factual — the human eye is like this, and the camera is like that. The other side is more metaphysical — and more controversial. But whatever side you’re most interested in, the eye-camera coin is an interesting feature in the progressing knowledge of optics and bionics.

Lens

Both the camera and the human eye have a lens that focuses light into an inverted image. One major difference between the two lenses, though, is that while a camera lens moves closer or farther from an object in order to bring it into focus, the lens of the human eye stay stationary. To bring an object into focus, muscles in the eye respond to instructions from the brain and change the shape of the lens, thus sharpening the image.

Retina (Film or Sensor)

Additionally, the eye’s retina is like a camera’s film or sensor onto which light is cast. In the eye, light passes through the lens and hits the retina, where rods and cones help transform the received image into electric impulses that are sent along the optic nerve to the brain. While both the retina and a camera’s film or sensor are all highly sensitive to light, the eye is much more so, and performs much better in the dark — even without a flash.

Iris (Aperture)

To allow the right amount of light, both the eye and a camera have an aperture. The eye’s version is its iris working together with the pupil, which, just like a camera aperture, widens or narrows depending on the amount of ambient light. Therefore, just the right amount of light hits either the eye’s retina or camera’s film or sensor so as to present a clear, discernible image.

The Metaphysics

The eye-camera discussion sometimes entwines with the creation-evolution debate. Creationists point to the eye as evidence of design in nature, while evolutionists point to the eye as simply a point of progress in evolutionary history. Interestingly, the publication “Popular Photography” asserted that “comparing the camera to the human eye isn’t a fair analogy. The human eye is more like an incredibly advanced supercomputer with artificial intelligence, information-processing abilities, speeds and modes of operation that are far beyond any man-made device, computer or camera.” Whatever your view is, the eye continues to be a source of inspiration in the optics and bionics fields.