Full Color Video

The following is a short account of three related videos that I made between 2004 and 2007 [1]. These videos arose out of a practice-led PhD project based at the Royal College of Art in London.

I began my project with the intention of working through an investigation of the implications of structural/materialist film theory, and related practices, in the context of digital video aesthetics [2]. Initially my efforts were taken up with thinking about how concepts relating to representation and indexicality might be reformulated to fit what seemed to be the most pressing issue concerning digital media. This preoccupation manifested itself in a video that I made entitled Black and White (2001) in which the difference between minimalist camera-recorded imagery and stark graphic compositions is difficult to disinter. Later I put aside my camera and began making work that used material that was generated wholly within the computer.

Colour Bars (2004), Thirds (2006) and New Ratio (2007) each deal with investigations regarding the interplay between color, movement and abstract form. Each piece draws on the same palette of colors provided by the 'color bars' associated with the standard television test signal. In commenting on these videos Sean Cubitt has suggested that the equal mixture of additive and subtractive hues (derived from the color bars) could be described as 'a democratization of color' [3]. The test signal image comprises seven stripes of equal width. From left to right these stripes are white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red and blue. This sequence runs through the seven possible combinations that use at least one of the three basic color components of red, green and blue: blue cycles on and off between every stripe; red cycles on and off every two stripes; and green is on for each of the first four stripes and off for the last three. The videos that I will discuss here involve a rather different type of weaving.

Colour Bars

Colour Bars perverts the function of the stable test signal by rapidly cutting between different configurations of the image. In certain sections there are two layers of video superimposed, which suggests a palette of 28 colors, but the pace of the cutting—together with the effect of visual persistence and the after-images that are induced—makes it im-possible to say how many colors one might actually see. Besides the aesthetics of color mixing, I was also interested in the relationship between the perception of movement and form in this piece, especially in relation to 'intervals'.

Fig 1.

Colour Bars (2004, video, 8 mins). (© Simon Payne)

To use an analogy from painting, the lines along which the seven colors are butted up could be described as intervals. Certain paintings by Gene Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Bridget Riley work along these lines. Some of Josef Albers' didactic studies also advocate using vertical stripes. In this configuration the color seems 'almost shapeless', he suggests, and hence it is the 'interaction of color' that one attends to rather than the interaction of form [4]. In Colour Bars there are intervals between the colors in each frame, but there are also time-based intervals between one frame and the next [5]. What one sees in the video isn't exactly the movement of the color bars, but the interaction of color along lines that apparently weave between frames.

Besides some analogies with the aesthetics of modernist painting, another reference point is early abstract cinema, particularly the films of Walther Ruttmann and Hans Richter. The most significant aspect of Ruttmann's Opus II-IV (1922-24) and Richter's Rhythm 21 (c.1924) is that the apparent motion in these films is due to an engagement with the edge of the screen rather the animation of given forms. This was key for Richter especially: 'When I say that there is no Form in Rhythm 21, I mean that by taking the whole movie screen, pressing it together and opening it up, top, bottom, sides, right, left, you don't perceive form anymore but movement' [6]. The contingent nature of form in Rhythm 21 and...