Re:Imagining Venice is the second piece in Terry Flaxton's Cityscape collection (together with Re:Imagining New York) which follows on from his earlier Landscape collection. Cityscape and Landscape together form the project Reimagining the already Imagined, for which Flaxton developed a collage form which could be called 'cinemontage' or 'datamontage' and applied it to landscapes and cityscapes. Reimagining the already Imagined will include works based in the USA, Italy, Norway, Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan.
Re:Imagining Venice is a composite of over 180 High Definition images which require their own layer on a 4k timeline. A lot of rendering time was necessary to output what is seen in both Re:Imagining Venice and Re:Imagining New York. Initially the image is stable; over time, the entire contents of the timeline are slowly revealed.
The challenge to imagine beyond what is known, to make new images from old or to create images of old things in a new way is one which compels all artists. Often when representing iconic images there’s a tendency to reproduce what’s been done before because the iconic embodies a potency recognisable in the original; but emerging technologies offer new ways of re-constituting and re-presenting the known.
Flaxton is currently working with solid state raid arrays capable of delivering incredibly fast read and write speeds, but which still require long periods of rendering before the corrections the artist makes can be seen and examined. The works in Reimagining the Already Imagined explore the aesthetic effect of these temporal contradictions.
