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

Episode是一项研究计划，旨在围绕基于镜头的艺术作品及其在建立和质疑我们对西方当代文化的信仰经验方面所发挥的作用进行批判性反思。我们的项目在长期的跨机构合作中探索这些问题。为了启动我们在公共竞技场的研究，我们将于2006年4月至6月在利兹大都会美术馆举办一个由九位艺术家创作的基于镜头的新艺术作品群展和一个公共研讨会。“插曲”一词指的是一个移位的时刻--一个叙事片段--一个事件，从连贯的叙事序列中孤立出来，脱离语境，因此使我们意识到图像是一个建构。尽管如此，这些图像有能力让我们沉浸和着迷。我们探讨了体验这些自主碎片的力量是如何产生信念的。本研究考察了西方当代文化中基于镜头的图像是如何产生主张中立和客观立场但又主观和有趣的知识和意识形态价值观的。我们审视了确立事实的图像也是壮观的、修辞的、非中性的这一矛盾和问题。所选的艺术品讨论了这一点，因为它们显示了一种隐含的理解，即基于透镜的媒体是可复制的，多元化的，并且与娱乐密切相关，同时表明了一种意识，即摄影和视频媒体通常被视为“真理”并被接受。包括录像、摄影和透镜辅助绘画在内的艺术作品通过以下主题来解决这些问题：我们如何通过摄影重建记忆;城市生活图像中权力与平庸之间的关系;拉斯维加斯拟像中自然与文化的接近以及电视纪录片中英雄主义和现实主义语言的污染。展览设计是关键对经验情感和权力的研究。浮动的墙壁将引导和迷失方向的观众，舞蹈艺术品在空间和观众通过它。设计提供了一个高度感官知觉的乐趣，同时以一种权威的方式组织空间，夸大和扩展艺术品中提出的问题。通过展览制作和公众讨论的命题竞技场，这一研究对图像在当代文化中如何实现并被赋予事实地位产生了重要的探讨。是什么让我们对这些图像感兴趣？它是普遍作为一种建构的经验吗？作者的力量吗？或者，我们看到的图像是否让我们相信了一个似乎超越这一点的更大的真理？我们的项目讨论了图像如何让我们着迷，沉浸和感动，它们如何保持和产生信念，以及对事实的主张如何在当代怀疑主义文化中产生影响。这些活动将促进对我们主题的更广泛讨论，并为未来长期的国际研究以及与大学、画廊和公众在美术和文化理论领域的合作奠定基础。这些想法已经通过“奇观”（Debord）、“超现实”（Baudrillard）、虚拟（Virilio）和“中性”（Barthes）的概念进行了探索。以这些研究领域为基础，我们的项目发展了文学主义和反代表主义理论（Dewey，Rorty，and Fish）来探索建构与现实之间的内在关系。该项目将展出艺术品，以检验“情节”是否不仅仅是作为“小说”或“幻想”与我们的生活分开，而是它们如何纠缠在我们的日常经验中变得可信，而是没有生命的故事这个项目采用了虚构的叙事空间的矛盾性，并探讨了它与我们日常生活的内在关系。

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.