Pigment, light, paper, screen; formats as interacting multi-dimensional creative works

Tess Baxter

doi:10.4000/interfaces.3905

Abstract

Formats have an interacting range of qualities that practice based research can explore, so testing and questioning theory; they are more than dimensions. Video art can play with space, light and sound, through a choice of materials, including visuals and audio. I make video art out of the virtual world of Second Life with its interplay of two-dimensional textures and three-dimensional objects. Editing this virtual world digital video with digitised archive film, contemporary music and literature explores how the formats used by multiple creators across time can interact, so exploring meanings through reinterpretation and translation. Taking still images from that video art into printmaking using photogravure etching, a hand-crafted method of mechanically pressing ink on paper, considers the translation of light on screen to ink on paper, and explores format from another position. Going from moving image to still images changes the relationship with time and distance, and from ratios in pixels to dimensions in millimetres.

Highlights

All images in the illustrations are copyright of Tess Baxter, sometimes under the pseudonym of Tizzy Canucci
31 An important idea that I wanted explore in Future City (Canucci), apart from connecting archive to contemporary, was human presence in virtual and actual space, and the visual results of this are shown in all the images of finished printmaking (Figures 4, 5 and 6)
The video art that works across virtual worlds, literature, film and archive material, so spanning the digital to digitised, which I have transferred back to print, has been rich

Summary

Tess Baxter

ISSN: 2647-6754 Publisher: Université de Bourgogne, Université de Paris, College of the Holy Cross. Electronic reference Tess Baxter, “Pigment, light, paper, screen; formats as interacting multi-dimensional creative works”, Interfaces [Online], 46 | 2021, Online since 15 December 2021, connection on 23 January 2022. This text was automatically generated on 23 January 2022. Light, paper, screen; formats as interacting multi-dimensional creat. Light, paper, screen; formats as interacting multidimensional creative works. All images in the illustrations are copyright of Tess Baxter, sometimes under the pseudonym of Tizzy Canucci. The overlaid archive images within them are in the public domain; Illustrations 1-6, The City (Steiner and van Dyke) and Illustration 7, The Great Northern Sea Route (Frolenko). Illustrations 2 and 7 have been published as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons)

Introduction

From digital image format to still image printmaking format

Concluding thoughts

Works cited

Film cited