Artist’s Statement

Hyperaesthesia and PostHyperaesthesia: Hyper-3D Paintings in QuickTime VR

by Philip Sanders

The Hyperaesthesia and PostHyperaesthesia interactive panorama series explore culture and consciousness, especially the relationship between perception, preconception, and meaning. These are photographic/painted constructions composed of interrelated virtual worlds, whose individual panoramas may be characterized as the extension of painting into four dimensions and interactivity. These two series present a dialogue between the internal psychology of an individual viewer and external physical or social realities, juxtaposing actual seeming places and things with conceptual, archaeological, and painterly images. Although the Hyperaesthesia panoramas seem to present a photographic realism, everything has been constructed or revised with digital techniques; the PostHyperaesthesia series makes this revisionary process an explicit aspect of the imagery. Meanings are developed through viewers’ expectations and responses; the idea is to create an environmental metaphor that is an explicit construct, a resonant framework in which the artist mediates between the external world and the artwork, and the artwork mediates between the artist and the viewer.

Traditional paintings are built up layer by layer, each successive layer superseding and covering what came before. There is a regret for what is lost, a nagging interest in the dynamic permutations of the process, the archaeology of a painting.  New technologies tend towards work utilizing collage, montage, and vision in motion. With digital image creation, an artist can save each stage of the work, and display it as an animation or a series of stills. Extending this temporal process along a spatial axis lets the artist give a viewer the ability to explore and recreate this entire process of creation via a temporal/spatial record of the work in 3 dimensions plus interactivity, using technology such as QuickTime VR.

The ability to view any digital image all the way down to individual pixels lets artists create images on a microscopic level, as well as the photographic hyperrealism available at the conventional, “zoomed out” view. QuickTime VR allows zooming into alternate, microscopic realities by a viewer, enabling works which can simultaneously contain abstraction, realism, and surrealism. These paintings are presented on the WWW as QuickTime VR panoramas within Macromedia Director movies incorporating interactivity and sound.