Vivid Projects, Birmingham, B5 5RS
Launching 7 June 2019 6-8pm (Digbeth First Friday)
Exhibition continues 12-5pm Thu-Sat until 22 June 2019
‘You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness…’ (David Lynch in conversation on watching films on smartphones).
After enjoying the spectacle of Twin Peaks Episode 8 in Season 3, we were reminded of this quote, which brought us to consider the point at which Episode 8 was no longer Episode 8. Streaming video over the internet remains a problematic task for contemporary browsers and devices despite faster connection speeds, more powerful hardware and complex encoding/decoding optimisations. This process of compression, in particular, means that when experiencing versions of audiovisual content on any digital device, we are already ‘cheated’ by compromised versions of the content we are sold.
The original aim of Twin Pixel was to see what could be learned by re-presenting the episode at something close to its most reduced scale: in two-pixel resolution, with colour information reduced to the dominant hue of each side of the frame and sound reduced to the dominant frequency per frame. For ‘Vague but Exciting …’, we take the next logical step, re-engaging with Lynch’s point of contention, by developing a version to be live-streamed over the internet from Vivid Projects.
Photographs below by Marcin Sz
