http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_notes.htm


NOTES ON RECENT DIGITAL WORK
Artist's Statement, Tim Head, 2008

Speculation on the elusive and contrary nature of the digital medium and its unsettled relationship with the physical world and with ourselves forms the basis for recent work.

Specifically designed computer programs generate events in 'real time' on screens, projections and inkjet prints whose focus is confined to certain basic intrinsic properties of these digital media.

The programs are written to work at the native resolution of the projector/screen (the number of pixels that make up the grid of pixels on the screen) or with the intrinsic distribution of the coloured ink dots that make up the inkjet print.

By operating at the primary one to one scale of the medium's smallest visual element (the pixel or inkjet dot) and by treating each element as a separate individual entity the medium's conventional picture making role is bypassed. You are no longer looking at a representation of an imported image in virtual space but are looking directly at the raw grain of the digital medium itself. The medium is no longer transparent but opaque. The slippery weightless world of the virtual is edged out into the physical world.

© Tim Head 2008



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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/bt_tim.htm

TIM HEAD
Ben Tufnell, Days Like These, Tate Publishing, 2003

Tim Head's work is about instability and uncertainty: of images, of perception and of the individual's relationship with the wider world. Over the past thirty years he has made work in an extraordinary range of media - including installations, photography, paintings and now digital media - guided and underpinned by a consistent set of concerns. His work might be characterised as a search for visual equivalents for the tension between what we perceive to be the truth and what we know to be the truth.

Head first came to prominence in the early 1970s with a series of subtle installations which he referred to as 'speculations about spaces'. [1] These works typically inhabited seemingly empty spaces which were activated by Head's intervention. Initially they employed just mirrors and projected light, but in doing so focused attention on the physical nature of the space they occupied. Head's installation at MoMA, Oxford, in 1972 entailed a series of projections of photographs of the walls of the gallery with mirrors leaning against them, onto the walls themselves. For the exhibition the mirrors were moved into different positions. The combination of physical space, projected space and reflected space created a highly ambiguous experience. Head has stressed that such works were not attempts to simply create visual illusions - the projectors were fully visible, the means by which the installation achieved clearly apparent - but rather to activate a physical and psychological space and in doing so to question our experience of that space. Critic Marco Livingstone has suggested that in such works Head 'took perception as a basic premise, while simultaneously throwing into question what we see, giving form to an essential mistrust of the process of vision as a way of gaining an understanding of the world.' [2] The installations were further complicated in the mid 1970s in works such as Displacements 1975-6, with the introduction of both real and projected everyday objects such as ladders, buckets and clocks. Later projected works, such as Appearance/Apparition 1977, included the human figure.

In the 1980s Head began to focus less on the space within the gallery, and more on the tension between 'real' and 'artificial' seen in consumer culture. This was paralleled by a move towards 'pure' photography (i.e. work in which a print would be presented as an object in its own right, rather than as a projected component of a larger installation). His photographs exploited the saturated colours of cibachrome and the high production values of advertising. Sex toys, erasers, pills, pocket calculators and such like were combined to create future cityscapes, apocalyptic landscapes and heraldic devices. Head's 'toxic landscapes' such as Alien Landscape 1985 and Petrochemicaland III 1991 make explicit the tension between the artificial and the natural; both highly seductive and repellent, they evoke the contemporary crisis in the environment.

Towards the end of the 1980s Head made the surprising decision to start painting. That he took up painting simply as an expeditious way of achieving a particular kind of surface in his work points to an ongoing concern: that of finding the appropriate medium to test an hypothesis or present an idea. Head's paintings in flat, decorative colours use the repetition of generic motifs including a milk company logo, cuts of meat and chromosomes to evoke a world of multiples, loaded with the possibility of genetic mutation. The paintings were anticipated by his interest in different kinds of pictorial space, particularly the flat space of scanning technology (such as photocopying), and the use of machine processes in works such as Digital Alarms 1985. This fascination with space has led, in turn, to his digital works.

Since the late 1990s Head has been working with a multi-media developer, Simon Schofield. [3] One of his first digital works was A Hard Day's Night 2000. [4] It featured animated areas of saturated colours presented on a computer monitor, and clearly referenced Modernist abstractions by painters such as Josef Albers. Since then Head's research has led him to use the technology in ways that force it to its (currently) available limits. Treacherous Light 2002 is a projection in which each pixel of the computer screen has been enlarged to become a distinct visual element. He describes this process: 'The work explores certain features of electronic space, specifically the digital space generated on screen by a computer program. It attempts to isolate some of the intrinsic properties of this electronic space stripping it down to certain prime elements to carry a raw skeletal electronic message. Attention is focused on the peculiar and unique physical properties of the digital medium itself and specifically on the computer-generated array of light-emitting pixels that form the illusive fabric of the screen's surface.' [5] Colours are randomly generated (from a palette of over 16,000,000 colours) at the edges of the screen and then move, pixel to pixel, across the image, both horizontally and vertically. The work is 'live' - not pre-recorded or looped - and takes place in real time in front of us, never repeating itself. It resembles a vast kaleidoscope, or veils of colour which move past each other in an indeterminate space. Close up, the process is clearly visible and the sensation of movement is strong. At a few metres distance the image becomes a swarming amorphous mass. Areas of colour and density coalesce and disperse before it is possible to fix our attention on them. From further back it is a pale grey, still rectangle of light. One is reminded of the pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat, or the densely marked spaces of Mark Tobey or Jackson Pollock. Indeed, Head feels that the experience of this work is as much like looking at a picture as a film or computer screen.

The work is motivated by the search for a kind of pictorial and spatial reality which is intrinsic to the computer, and a desire to expose the 'treacherous' nature of the digital space. Head is fascinated by the supposed perfection of the computerised image and the fact that much effort is devoted to creating ever more refined images which eliminate any evidence of the pixel. However, Head is not opposed to such technology per se. Treacherous Light is not about subverting the computer. Rather, in common with so much of his work of the past thirty years, it is about taking a medium (or an idea) and 'laying it bare, making it transparent, showing it for what it is'. [6] It is a part of an ongoing project: a probing but non-judgemental questioning of the world we live in and the technology we surround ourselves with.

Notes:
[1] Tim Head quoted in Marco Livingstone, 'The Return of the Body-Snatcher', Tim Head, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery 1992, p.19
[2] Ibid., p.22
[3] With initial support from DA2 and the Slade Centre for Electronic Media
[4] Published by www.eyestorm.com
[5] Tim Head, unpublished statement, 2002
[6] Conversation with the author, 19 July 1992

Ben Tufnell

Published in Days Like These: Tate Triennial of Contemporary British Art 2003, edited by Judith Nesbitt and Jonathan Watkins (Tate Publishing, www.tate.org.uk). © Tate 2003. Text is not to be reproduced without the permission of the publishers.

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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_explo.htm

AN EXPLORATION INTO DIGITAL SPACE
Artist's Statement, Tim Head, 2003

The recent work explores the physical ingredients of digital space. It focuses on the space generated by a computer programme on screen in real time.

The work attempts to employ only those prime material elements that seem to be intrinsic to this encoded and disembodied space making clear its essential differences from other forms of represented space (i.e. in painting, photography, film and video).

It exposes the raw mechanics of the digital medium and its computer-generated array of light-emitting pixels that constitute the elusive fabric of the screen's surface.

© Tim Head 

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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/sb_biog.htm


THE WORK OF TIM HEAD
Stephan Berg, eyestorm, 2000

While British artist Tim Head's work encompasses installations, paintings, photography and works for public spaces, as well as light, slide and video projections, his concerns center unerringly on a world in which there is no meaning beyond the surface - only blank spaces and shifting shadows.

The positive uncertainty and double meaning inherent in his work was already evident in early exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1972) and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1974). Using mirrors, light and slide projectors, Head created installations which shifted between fact and fiction, between virtual spaces and real rooms. After being included in 1977's major international survey exhibition Documenta VI, and representing Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1980, Head began to concentrate increasingly on photography and painting - more traditional media, which he nevertheless exploited in disturbing and innovative ways. His photoworks from 1987, for example Toxic Lagoon and Petrochemicaland, present poisonous chemical waste as dangerously seductive landscapes, while his paintings from that period - synthesized images of chromosomes and sperm, brains and breakfast cereal - suggest the possibility of modification and mutation in all things.

Works such as these communicate Head's love for the trivial and the trash of everyday life, material he incorporates into and then transforms through his art. The ironical optimism towards 'consumer reality' expressed in his earlier works - influenced by Pop artists Richard Hamilton, his tutor at Newcastle, and Claes Oldenburg, for whom he briefly worked as an assistant in New York - here gives way to a darker skepticism.

This more unnerving absence of meaning is reflected with particular clarity in his slide and video projections Exquisite Corpse and Pale Fire, both from 1994. Exquisite Corpse depicted idealized farm animal silhouettes punched with industrial holes, all of which were then overlayed so that the holes lined up: producing mutant organic forms where the silhouettes overlapped. A set of photographic prints were also made from these works.

In his large installations of the 90s - most importantly his 1992 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, and Blue Skies (1997), a site-specific work created for the huge Historic Dockyard in Chatham, UK - one entered rooms which, despite their physical impact, seem virtual in the extreme. These are worlds, made up of artificial grass and fabricated flowers, in which it appears that any exploit can be painlessly mastered. But they also suggest that the enormous potential for imaginative play could get out of control at any time: with monstrous results.

Head's work articulates a general belief that the natural world can only be perceived in its 'untypical' form, through an artificial abstraction of an already artificial structure. The stage designs involving artificial trees that Head has produced recently, for the productions of renowned English choreographer Laurie Booth and the 'Peace' world tour by pop group the Eurythmics, have brought this vision to a wide audience.

For Head this conviction is not a source of despair but a motivation for his curiosity. Although his designs are dominated by a skeptical view of the world, one discovers in them, besides the desire to demystify appearances, the joy of indulging oneself in the elusive promises of the enticing surface.

Stephan Berg
© eyestorm 


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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/mh_xygen.htm

X Y GENERATION
Martin Herbert, Two-Minute Interview, eyestorm, 2000

eyestorm: A Hard Day's Night is your first work for CD-ROM, is that right?

Tim Head: Yes. I wanted to explore the electronic space of the computer screen - to isolate the properties that are intrinsic to the electronic space and get rid of the things that I felt were borrowed from other mediums. You're left with something that is purely electronic, so it really uses the medium - it's like electronic Modernism. The other aspect is that it's using a real-time program; it's happening at the time that you're looking at it, and will never do it the same way twice. A Hard Day's Night is also a variation on some things I've worked on previously.

How do you think that this indeterminacy relates to the work's very evident seductiveness?

Well, because of the various randomized aspects of it you get things coming up that look really beautiful - and everyone has their own view of what's interesting and beautiful - but it somehow works because it's random, not a composed configuration. If you felt that it had been pre-selected, it wouldn't work in the same way. And of course it's there and then it's gone Yes, you can look at it as a moving painting. You can probably name painters who it relates to, but it's also doing the opposite of what modernist painters did - which was to say 'this combination is the right one' - because it's never static.

As for the title, I wanted something generic. It's like an off-the-shelf title - everybody's heard of the Beatles - and it allowed the work to get on with its own stuff [laughs].

Tell us about the 'Exquisite Corpse' prints.

I made a projection work entitled Exquisite Corpse in 95, in which hybrid images were created through buildups of four overlaid slide projections. Each projection had an image of an animal in black silhouette, with a white hole in it whose form originated in industrial processes. Images of four different animals were then projected onto each other so that the holes lined up and the animals' forms were arranged around the hole. By projecting on top of each other you get that part of the image where all four silhouettes overlap in pure black, and the rest in gradations of gray; they become like shadows.

Then I made a set of black and white prints doing the same thing in reverse; they were made up from separate negatives each printed on the same sheet, but because of the overprinting these are building up areas of darkness, rather than light. This work is an equivalent to the projections in a photographic print.

What was more important - the depiction of nature or the expression of doubt, or was the issue the intersection of the two?

I was thinking of them in terms of you not being able to tell which part of the animal, or which animal, you were looking at. I think it was important to choose very familiar images - textbook farmyard animals - but they're all animals used in genetic manipulation, and I really wanted to say that we're building up something that's very removed from its origins; we're treating nature in a new and very different way.

Martin Herbert
© eyestorm 