The refeatured landscape: Notes on the aesthetics of digital video

This thesis explores the relationship between the emergence of postimpressionist painting and the breakdown of the camera obscura as a model for the fixed stable capacity of human vision. This relationship is posited as a possible framework for understanding digital composite-images in a broader cultural context. The construction of my video-conceptualist work Hope BC Chainsaw Carving Capital of the World is situated as the primary research object. Writings by Paul Virilio on vision will be used to construct a relationship between vision, media and the virtualization of experience that is inherent to technologically mediated environments. The idea of the space-constructed image is extrapolated from the writings of Jonathan Gary, in particular, the relationship he constructs between cultural practices, technological innovation and the aesthetics of representation acts as a model in which the composite-image can be examined in terms of a larger field of cultural practices.