The aesthetics of gaming, virtual reality, and second life are beginning to have their way with reality. My particular concern is with cinematic 'representations' of everyday life at the moment. One very popular photographic technique called HDR (High-Dynamic-Range imagining) attempts to plasticize and pixelize reality in an attempt to make it conform to their own hyperreal fetish.
The problems with this technique, and the sensibility in general, are never more apparent as with this HDR short film (which is no doubt a mile stone in HDR cinema). The Chapel is a very queer film in that whilst its desire is to reveal the glories of the digital colonization of this abandoned church (Zeliszów, Poland, designed by Karl Langhans and built in 1796-1797) the ancient aesthetics of light refuse to go quietly into the night. Glimpses of 'the real' are felt in the play of dust in shafts of light and the texture of banal surfaces coming to life only to be dominated once more by digital sequencing.
Watch closely, the Light may be calling you too ...
I think we need to embrace the new digital bombardment and see it has a tunnel to endless possibilities.
Compare Champlain to Avatar, both extreme opposites but are in the forefront of their day. Just my 2 pesos.
Rich.
Posted by: Richard Batlle | May 23, 2011 at 07:27 PM