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Plasma Portraiture

May 1, 2007 12:00 AM, By Tom Patrick McAuliffe and Cynthia Wisehart

HD display technology opens up another channel for artists.

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Art Meets Technology: An Interview with HD Video Artist Robert Wilson

Renowned theater director and multimedia artist Robert Wilson was waiting for video to catch up to his imagination. Wilson has always brought fierce nuance and detail to his projects and now brings that sensibility to HD; in his hands, the intricacies of resolution, color saturation, contrast, and signal have been put to work in subtle, surprising ways. Wilson has successfully argued the case for HD as a truly articulate medium, while making a sophisticated statement about the history and nature of the captured image.

Wilson's Voom Portraits — of wild and domestic animals, celebrities, dancers, and Nobel Prize winners — hover at the polar opposite of the ubiquitous fast-cut video editing. The HD portraits, captive in 65in. and 103in. plasma screens (and, in one case, a Sanyo projector), pulse with movement that ranges from languid to barely perceptible. In some cases, the pixels seem to move more than the subjects do; but this is not a criticism of the video quality. Indeed, the resolution ranges from intensely detailed, as in the hair-by-hair closeup of a panting terrier, to deliberately soft and noisy, as in a surrealistic nursery rhyme starring William Pope L.

Wilson produced the touring exhibition of 36 portraits as artist-in-residence at Voom HD Networks, a leader in HDTV broadcasting for cable and satellite in more than 20 countries. Voom's network of 15 HD channels is owned by Rainbow Media, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems, which also owns popular national television channels such as The American Movie Channel (AMC), The Independent Film Channel (IFC), and Rainbow Sports Networks.

In addition to gallery shows in New York and Los Angeles, Voom plans to show the portraits as interstitials on its Gallery HD channel during an accompanying making-of documentary on Gallery's Art In Progress series this fall. The portraits, which feature personalities as diverse as actors Brad Pitt and Winona Ryder to Nobel Prize-winning writer Gao Xingjian and Monaco's Princess Caroline, are for sale, and Wilson has indicated that he may also do more upon commission.

“I've been thinking about this project since the 1970s when I first worked in video,” Wilson says. “Much of what I wanted to do was simply not technically possible before high definition. Once I saw what is possible in HD, I knew it was very appropriate for my work.”

“The HD picture offers true color fidelity and over five times the visual clarity of standard definition,” says Greg Moyer, general manager of Voom. “HD creates a sense of intimacy with the viewer that adds to the power and aesthetic pleasure of viewing the portraits — just as it does with a high-definition TV in your living room. The idea of turning to Wilson to work in HD was to show to the nth degree the beauty of the medium in the hands of a true artist. While this project won't contribute to our bottom line, it inspires everyone involved to create new and even more intriguing programming. We wanted others to become excited by high def by seeing the exhibit.”

Part of the power of the exhibition comes from Wilson's willingness to explore the effect of HD in the context of each of his subjects. While the editing of each portrait loop is minimal — even nonexistent — the cinematography is virtually a character in each of them. The black-and-white portraits, with their blown-out highlights, channel film noir, while the saturated color of an Elizabethanesque Jeanne Moreau fills a 103in. plasma like a painter's mural. The lighting and lensing — even the compression — are specific and deliberate. Wilson has talked before about collaborating with his subjects to establish an extraordinary vignette for each; the same level of detail seems to have gone into the technical approach.

Perhaps that should not be a surprise; as a stage director, Wilson has longtime lighting collaborators who have done remarkable work here; likewise, the cameras, lenses, media player, and plasmas seem to have delivered.

Over the past two to three years in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris — with no set schedule and as talent and subjects became available — Wilson and his team of assistants shot the portraits. Just like any major video or film location, the team had a full complement of lighting and staging gear for each shoot. Using a Sony HDW-F900 HDCAM CineAlta camera, Wilson captured video for each portrait at 1920×1080i initially with Canon zooms, then, when it became available, with the Canon 11×4.7mm Cine Prime lens. To enhance and help control the look of the images, the team used a Sony RMB-750 Paintbox to get the finest image with much more control than accessing the onboard camera controls alone.

Each video portrait was captured from 30 seconds to 30 minutes in length on HDCAM, and each is shot in 16:9 for cinema display, as well as vertically for gallery presentation on the flatscreen plasma monitors.

Once the images were created, it was time to mold them into an exhibition, says Al Irizarry, director of production services for Voom's parent company, Rainbow Media. Irizarry and his team spent more than two years developing and refining a pipeline that would allow detailed color correction and a finely tuned approach to compressing the HD for display. The loops — which could be as long 30 minutes — represented terabytes of data. Compression was both a practical necessity and an artistic tool, requiring what Irizarry describes as a labor of love to push the capabilities of various encoding technologies and the HD media player that would display the images. He describes a process of multiple iterations that was part experimentation, part alchemy, and part luck: The team successfully translated everything from saturated colors to deliberately blown highlights to deep blacks to luminously nuanced lighting. Because Wilson wanted everything from excruciating detail to whimsical signal noise, from sharp edges to painterly light, the compression had to be as specific as the lighting, lensing, and color correction had been.

Tapes came into Rainbow Media's vast 11 Penn TV Post department onto an Avid Unity Server. The Rainbow media facility is one of the largest HD facilities on the eastern seaboard, with more than 42 Avid editing rooms, seven Avid DS Nitris rooms, and three production stages. The Voom projects needed most of what the DS Nitris was capable of doing; Rainbow's experience as an early Nitris adopter came in handy, especially when it came time to take advantage of color correction capabilities. (Wilson is an expert at lighting, but, like any director, he could not resist the possibilities for fine tuning in the color suite). The team mastered to HDCAM and encoded to MPEG-2 Main Profile at 4:2:2. Audio — with compositions by artists from Bach to Tom Waits, narration, and effects — was encoded to a Dolby profile.

Most of the portraits are displayed on 65in. Panasonic plasma screens. Three of them — the Moreau, the terrier, and the Pitt — are on the new 103in. Panasonic plasmas, all the more dramatic for their vertical aspect ratio. Each portrait is served with a dedicated Electrosonic MS9200P MPEG HD media player, a Calypso high-resolution digital audio amplifier, and custom-made speakers from Leon Speakers. “Leon Speakers of Ann Arbor, Mich., and its president, Noah Kaplan, worked very closely with us to create a custom ‘single-unit’ stereo speaker that was custom finished to exactly match the Panasonic plasmas whether they were mounted vertically or horizontally,” Irizarry says.

The Winona Ryder portrait is projected via a Sanyo HD projector, and customized Screen Goo Systems Screen Paint technology allows the Voom team to use walls as screens sometimes as large as 35'1×7'. “Without the customized Screen Goo Systems Screen Paint technology, we would not have been able to get a screen made quickly enough to match the varied-sized gallery locations,” Irizarry says. “Screen Goo Systems Paint technology had the correct gain and grayscale to match the quality of our HD images when projected.”

The challenges of mounting a show of this size and sophistication are significant because art galleries differ in their layout, design, and construction — from wall structure and power availability to available mountings and staff. “Power alone was a challenge as the power needs for this many plasmas and a projector made for many, many 20 amp circuits that typically don't exist in the realm of an art gallery,” Irizarry says. “These venues are more accustomed to hanging paintings and sculpture, though this continues to change. Electrical requirements made for advanced scouting and outside electricians to make it all work.”

Then there's the sheer weight of the display monitors to consider. “Some galleries have walls structures that change as the need for an exhibit so that they are room dividers at best,” Irizarry says. “These are not designed to easily hold multiple 65in. monitors that weigh in excess of 175lbs. — then you have to add a monitor mount, a speaker, a media player, and an amplifier. It adds up.” Never underestimate the importance of a studfinder.

“The Voom Portraits push the limits of multiple disciplines all at once,” says Ali Hossaini, executive producer of the project who first invited Wilson to become an artist-in-residence at Voom. “It's a marvelous technical feat. They push portraiture in an entirely new direction, mixing elements of surrealism, drama, painting, and video art into something that, by virtue of its scale, is without precedent. We mixed high art and popular culture with complete disregard for the traditional codes of both mediums. Finally, we've reconceived the possibilities of commercial television through this project. What we've done with celebrity and the artistic subject, technology as well as the exhibition of Voom's HDTV programming, is quite unusual. I hope it inspires others in video production and television to get braver and more playful at the same time.”

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Art Meets Technology

An Interview with HD Video Artist Robert Wilson

Recently, DCP had an email interview with award-wining artist Robert Wilson to talk about his high-definition portrait project for Voom HD Networks.

Tell us a little about your content creation process. After the creative took place, how was the production handled?

Wilson: Producing one of my video portraits is much like shooting a movie. We have a crew of almost 30 people in the studio, with full theatrical lighting, make-up, and so on. We rely on Voom HD Networks, where I am the artist-in-residence, to help with the technology and the logistics of such a complicated project. I designed the video portraits with the time and space of television in mind, which is very different from the time and space of theater, where I've been doing most of my work. TV is all about close-ups, about getting really close to the image. Theater is more about distant images. These HD portraits are intimate pieces you can see in passing, in a public space, not necessarily while you sit in a dark room. I normally have a specific image in mind for each subject, but sometimes this changes once we start discussing the artistic concept. Once I have shot the material, we have long and intensive postproduction sessions where I add a soundtrack, correct the colors, turn the video into a perfect loop, and so on. Without the support of Voom HD Networks, this would be impossible to do.

Is or can video be ‘art’?

Wilson: Any medium can be used for an art work. Art is not about a material, but about creating a structure in which to frame a question. Whether that's movement, a sound, a video screen, or a canvas is not important. Our responsibility as artists is to ask questions — that is to say, “What is it?” and not, “What it is.” If we know what it is we are doing, there is no need to do it.

Are electronic displays such as plasma and LCD monitors the future of art, and does high-definition video make that more possible?

Wilson: Just as there's not only one medium of art, there is no single future of art. But being able to show images of this quality opens up one more channel. For example, I can also see these images everywhere in the public space — on a billboard, on the display of a cell phone, on the face of a watch.

As one of America's premiere multimedia artists, what attracted you to the HD video medium?

Wilson: I've been thinking about this project since the 1970s, when I first worked in video. Much of what I wanted to do was simply not technically possible before high definition. Noah Khoshbin, who has worked with me for many years and knew about my interest in video, introduced me to the new technology. Once I saw what is possible in HD, I knew it was very much appropriate for my work. All my work, in all media, is carefully detailed and very precise.

What do you feel is the state of public art in America today in general?

Wilson: I've worked so much abroad, in Europe and elsewhere, that I am not sure how to answer that question. But one of the reasons I have not been able to work more in the U.S.A. is that we lack the wealth of publicly funded arts institutions that you can find in Europe. There's less economic pressure and more openness towards experimentation there. As a result, audiences tend to have wider experiences and a better understanding of art. It has also become more difficult to experience other cultures in the U.S. Over the past years, the mood has become more isolationist. For example, every year, it is more difficult to get visas for artists I invite to the Watermill Center, a center for the arts and humanities I founded in 1992 on Long Island near New York City. That's a great mistake. We need more international public art so we do not lose contact with the wider world.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.