matt:littlemore

Thomas Joshua Cooper, a white Cherokee Indian was born in San Francisco, California, United States in 1946 and is one of the world’s most celebrated and respected photographers. He currently resides in Glasgow, UK where he founded the Fine Art Photography Department at the world renowned Glasgow School of Art in 1982. He is now a senior researcher in the faculty of Fine Art, holding a Professorial role and Head of Department. He was in Brighton to talk about his remarkable landscape photography project ‘The World’s Edge (Atlantic Basin Project)’ and the equally remarkable method and medium he uses. Since April Fool’s Day 1969 Cooper chose to take his photographs using one particular antique camera – a 111 year old AGFA. Struggling to operate the MacBook to control his presentation, he avoids modern technology and does not even own a mobile phone. It seems incredible with this knowledge that he has travelled the entire Atlantic Basin to some of the most remote places on Earth to take a single shot from under the cloak of his vintage camera. Inspired by the writing of Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing – 1994) the resulting images of sea and landscape are striking documentation of the very edges of the planet and the places where the old world meets new and mankind has seldom laid eyes upon. The photographs portray a stillness and serenity which seems paradoxical to the raw and inhospitable places they represent. Cooper deals with matters of time duration and evokes emptiness, loneliness as well as awe inspiring documentation of the most powerful seas and land formations of the Atlantic Basin. The 79 works in the project were taken in the North and South poles, the northern most land points of Norway and Greenland and the most northerly point of the Antarctic Peninsula, Prime Head – a 250-foot-high ice wall reached by a perilous sea journey – which has incredibly had fewer human feet upon it than the moon.

McLuhan Today Show \'76
In perhaps his most popular work, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, McLuhan elaborates upon the sensory manipulation of the electric media. Like most of his writing, Understanding Media was criticized for its indigestible content and often paradoxical ideas. Ironically, it was this work which captured the minds of the American public and triggered McLuhan’s metamorphosis from literary scholar into pop culture guru.
Understanding Media contained the quintessential McLuhanism: “the medium is the message.” McLuhan explained that the content of all electric media was insignificant; it was instead the medium itself which would have the greatest impact upon the socio-cultural environment. This perspective was contested by all members of the mass communication paradigm–empirical researchers rejected McLuhan’s grand theorizing; critical cultural theorists felt McLuhan undermined their agenda by discounting the power relationships inherent in and perpetuated by media content.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan proposes a more controvesial frame for judging media: “hot” and “cool.” These categorizations are puzzling and contemporary technology renders them practically obsolete. In simplest terms, “hot” is exclusive and “cool” is inclusive. Hot media are highly defined; there is little information to be filled in by the user. Radio is a hot medium; it requires minimal participation. Cool media, by contrast, are low definition and thus highly participatory because the user must “fill in the blanks.” Television is the ultimate “cool” medium because it is highly participatory. This categorization is extremely problematic to those who consider television viewing a passive activity.
To illustrate this concept, McLuhan analyzed the Kennedy – Nixon debates of 1960. Kennedy’s televisual victory was due to the fact that he exuded an objective, disinterested, “cool” persona. Nixon, better suited for the “hot” medium of radio, was considered victorious by those who had listened to the debates on radio.
- Sharon Zechowski
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McLuhan Today Show \'76

Early Pioneer of digital computer art Roman Verostko visited Brighton from the States to discuss his work, processes and influences with the art world. The talk at Lighthouse was an interesting insight into the formative years of one of the world’s foremost instigators of the Algorist art movement.
Before the existence of the huge array of digital visualizing tools now available to the artist working within computer assisted art, Verostko developed his own algorithm interface to allow him to harness a new style of ‘painting’ that in it’s very nature was previously out of reach of the traditional artist. This new form of mark-making was art using pure visual form, without reference to other objects or images, non-objective and non-representational. Using computers to translate code into printed article executed by an industrial plotter took bold new steps into the relevance of digitization as an aid to visual practices. The process itself certainly did not eliminate the need for a human, conceptual beginning – Verostko would begin with a calculated symbol (although perhaps autonomous) created by his own hand – an homage to his study of Chinese calligraphy – the mathematical information of which could be programmed into a computer to repeat this information based upon an algorithm and upon reaching the end of the cycle would have plotted using paper and inks a work of art unattainable by human hand but entirely based upon it. He would take an entirely human act, apply its data to stark logic and produce an end result of grace and beauty. The resulting artworks would have an unplanned and initially unpredictable visual output which as controlled by algorithmic routine realised some of the spatial tension techniques of Mondrian, using as a base the expressive energy of Chinese Shufa & the abstract expressionists Robert Motherwell & Franz Kline.
This was the beginning of the computer’s role in assisting the artist to realise his visual idea.
“The use of algorithm in & of itself does not constitute algorist work – It is the inclusion of one’s own algorithm that makes the difference.’
Read more about Roman Verostko