On Monday the 14th April 1986 an exhibition opened in London's Notting Hill district, it ran for 3 weeks and displayed a collection of around 50 peices of artwork created using digital electronics and visual processing.
Thirty six years later, some of the images have survived, the original large format photographs suffered flood damage and are lost - however a few of the transparencies have been rescued and digitally restored.
Lets put this in context: These images were produced at a time when IBM had just launched their first 386 desktop computer - sporting a 32 bit processor, a 40mb hard drive and 1mb of ram. Microsoft would release the .bmp file protocol for saving still images this year, the .Jpeg would not appear until 1992. SCSI was also released as a standard in 1986 there would be no USB for another 14 years. There were no smartphones, no digital cameras and the World Wide Web would not make an appearance until 1990.
Using hardware to create images had some fundamental problems, there were no metadata or storage systems capable of either saving the system states or processing the final images - once the equipment was turned off the images vanished forever and there was no way to reproduce them again - this makes every piece of artwork absolutely unique.
Original postcard flyers
Inphase facilities ran as a production company and post house, we involved ourselves with music companies, advertising as well as animation for the likes of MTV. Whilst designing a book cover - working on a mixture of collage, video camera sources and a new digital frame-store I began to create some fascinating artwork.
Digital Art and Production Studio 1985
In 1985 the biggest problem we faced was image capture. There was no way to digitise the "live" Video result and no suitable high resolution storage format available, so I resorted to tests with a 35mm stills camera and Kodak Ektachrome E6 film.
One of the Sony " Trinitron" Broadcast Monitors in the edit room had a new, flatter tube face which reduced edge distortion, but being glass was highly reflective, coupled with scan rates of the lines, fields and frames on the screen, it took a lot of testing to find the optimum exposure f-stop and more importantly, the shutter speed. Each test roll was overnight processed at Metro Labs in London for analysis -
The Up4grabs Exhibition came together after some large format prints created amazing results, the combination of screen size, lens settings and film type gave the images an interesting texture, clearer in some works than others.
Paul J. Bates in the "Rack Room" 1985
All the large framed prints in my possession were destroyed in a flood at my home in Ibiza, but a few of the origial transparencies survived....these have been scanned and painstakingly digitally restored.
The Artwork files created after restoration measure 100cm x 70 cm ( 36 x24 inches ) at 300dpi for high quality printing and are available to buy as 1/1 edition collectable rare and unique pieces of Art. They come with unlockable content which includes a copy of the original Post Card - Flyer, access to download a high definition .tiff file and the buyer will recieve a physical 60cm X 40cm HD metal foil print of their chosen Artwork
Paul J. Bates 2022
