In his new series Reimagining the already Imagined, Terry Flaxton has developed a collage form which could be called cinemontage or perhaps datamontage. Technically in this piece there are over 100 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 Reimagining New York. Initially the image is stable and then slowly reveals – both upwards and downwards on both sides of the screen - the entire contents of the timeline.
The demand to imagine beyond what’s known, to create images of old things in a new way is a demand on all artists. Often with 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 1 gigabyte of read and write speeds, but even so this still requires long periods of rendering before the corrections the artist makes can be seen and examined to achieve the required result.
This work follows on from Flaxton’s Landscape collection and will eventually be the first piece in the Cityscape collection, Reimagining the already Imagined which will include works based in Venice and Tokyo.
