Episode: Experiencing the Pleasures and Persuasions of Lens Based Media.

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Episode is a research initiative set up to generate critical reflection around lens-based artworks and the role they play in establishing and interrogating our experiences of belief in western contemporary culture at large. Our project explores these issues in a long-term cross-institutional collaboration. To initiate our research in the public arena, we will produce a group exhibition of new lens-based artwork by nine artists and a public symposium at Leeds Metropolitan Gallery, Apr-Jun 2006.The term 'Episode' refers to a displaced moment - a slice of narrative - an event, isolated and de-contextualized from a coherent narrative sequence and as such makes us aware that the image is a construct. Despite this, these images have the power to keep us immersed and enthralled. We explore how the power of experiencing these autonomous fragments produces belief.This research examines how lens-based images in western contemporary culture produce intellectual and ideological values that claim neutral and objective positions and yet are subjective and interested. We scrutinize the contradiction and problem that images that establish facts are also spectacular, rhetorical and non-neutral. The selected artworks discuss this as they show an implicit understanding that lens based media is reproducible, pluralistic and has a close proximity to entertainment, whilst at the same time demonstrating an awareness that photographic and video media are often taken for and accepted as 'truth'. The artworks that include video, photography and lens assisted painting address these issues by working through the following subject matter: how we re-construct our memories through photography; the relationship between power and banality in images of urban life; the proximity between nature and culture in Las Vegas simulacra and the contamination of the languages of heroism and realism in TV documentaries.The exhibition design is key to this investigation of experiential affect and power. Floating walls will direct and disorientate the viewer, choreographing the artworks in the space and the audience through it. The design offers the pleasures of a heightened sense-perception whilst at the same time organizes the space in an authoritarian manner, exaggerating and extending the issues proposed in the artworks.Through the propositional arena of exhibition making and public discussion, this research generates a vital inquiry into how images achieve and are given the status of fact in contemporary culture. What is it that moves us about these images? Is it the experience of the universal as a construct; the force of authorship? Or, do the images that we see convince us of a larger truth that seems to go beyond this? Our project debates how images can keep us enthralled, immersed and moved, how they hold and produce belief, and how claims to fact have affect in a contemporary culture of skepticism. These activities will promote wider discussion of our theme and act as a foundation for long-term future international research and collaboration with universities, galleries and the public across the fields of fine art and cultural theory.These ideas have been explored through notions of the 'spectacle' (Debord), the 'hyperreal' (Baudrillard), the virtual (Virilio) and the 'neutral' (Barthes). Taking these areas of research as a foundation, our project develops literalist and antirepresentationalist theories (Dewey, Rorty, and Fish) to explore the implicit relationship between the constructed and the lived.The project will exhibit artworks that test whether 'episodes' aren't simply set apart from our lives as 'fiction' or 'fantasy', but rather how they entangle themselves in our everyday experiences becoming believable, but unlived narratives. This project takes up the paradoxical nature of invented narrative space and examines its implicit relationship to our everyday lives.