My new TV arrived yesterday. Like most modern Americans the arrival of a new TV for me is an exciting moment. The last one, while only 4 years old and having an LCD display, seems like a relic from from a television era in the distant past. At the time I spent around $2000 on the thing, but it now has ghost images, no LED backlight and poor Resolution. So spending less than half of that price I got a new Samsung, with all of the features to bring my household up to date. The first thing I watched was the ending of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” with my daughter, as watching a Technicolor favorite of mine would be a way to overwhelm both of us with the brilliance of the color depth and all around qualities of the new TV. We were happy enough with what we saw, but it was different. I have seen this movie so many times that I can’t count them, but I had never seen it like this. The experience actually made me a little bit uncomfortable. The image looked less glamorous and less cinematic. It looked more real. Wasn’t this a good thing? Hadn’t I written about how Edison’s invention of the motion picture was as much a science and anthropological record of human behavior as it was an art? Hadn’t I been a producer of an early digital film, because of its naturalistic potential? I had of course, so I guessed that this response was simply nostalgia for a film that I had seen in movie theatres and on poorer quality TV screens. I then watched an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager”. It looked to me like someone had filmed it with a camcorder on a garage set. There was also the issue that every movement of the camera was observable, which distracted me from the experience. I still thought that I had just become habituated to inferior technology. Then my wife came home. She is the ultimate early adopter, having used the internet before anyone in the French city of Bordeaux (maybe an exaggeration, but not by much), and she said the same thing. I played around with settings and I think I have the imagine de-resolved enough to make us both happy, but the jury is still out. We might send it back to buy a lesser television that makes us feel better.
This is where generalization about cultural and technological advances can be overly simplistic. When I first heard that the best TVs allowed you to see individual blades of grass on a football field, and every eye movement of a pitcher on a baseball mound I thought that this was a natural progression from Edison’s boxer films (see below). We would experience more, and future viewers would know how 21rst century athletes behaved with near perfection. This is where science, art and pleasure seem to diverge. This already happened for me with video games, where graphics became so crisp and life like that play was no longer play. I retreated from a lifelong love of video gaming to a chess board, the most ancient form of gaming. Was technology taking away the great love I have for watching movies at home?
As someone who makes imaging software and microscopes, my goal is not only to resolve as well as the eye, but to do much better. It is to see the world the way it is, on a deeper level than our limitations allow us to. This is a good thing when it comes to creating nanotechnology and understanding nature. This lets us progress. Art however has for the last 150 years moved in the opposite direction. That is until very recently apparently. The impressionists changed the world by de-resolving, and leaving it to our minds to reconstruct, and our emotions to feel. Abstract expressionism went beyond this, and let meaning become a personal connection with otherwise chaotic or at least nonfigurative bursts. Live theatre went through a similar evolution, towards minimalism, especially in my favorite of 20th century works such as absurdist plays. It is not the realism of the sets or even the dialogue of “Waiting For Godot” that makes it so powerful. Instead it is the truth that is constructed in our imagination with the guidance into another world by Beckett.
As I contemplate all of this, and how to deal with my TV situation, I think that ultimately it is not about the viewer and consumer but instead it is about the artist. With these new tools it is important to remember what makes movies and TV shows artistic at all. It is not that they are direct mirrors of reality, but that they are constructed and painted versions of reality. It is not then the TVs fault, but rather a new challenge to film and television directors to recognize that naturalism requires an impressionist and expressionist eye. I am certain that this is already happening. For the moment though I must figure out a way to resolve the issue of resolution, and again have a TV watching experience that transports my imagination.
