🚀 go-pugleaf

I have done many video works, about 30 in all since I began my studies at 
the university of minnesota and have continued to do video work after my 
formal undergraduate education was complete.  I see myself primarily as a 
painter because I feel painting can best fulfill the quality of vision, 
which is vision and interaction with human, and processing of vision 
through human.  The twentieth century has greatly expanded the painter's 
expressive vocabulary.  I say this to qulaify my forthcoming statements 
about how we see when we look through the lense.

Vision is a binocular, whole space process.  When we open our eyes we can 
take in our entire surroundings if we only face in one direction, turn 
180 degrees and look in the other direction, then arch our neck and look 
up and lower it and look down.  This process will ensure that the entire 
sphere of our environment is scene.  If we are interested in focusing on 
a particular object, we must through an effort of the will, concentrate 
on that object.  The cloud, the sun, the individual star, the leaf on the 
tree, the person walking across the street, the words on the billboard.  
All the time we are aware that the only thing which is holding us to the 
focus of that particular thing which is our will.  In most visual fields 
there are hundreds of things to choose from in any one specific 
direction.  Literally hundreds, even thousands or hundreds of thousands 
of things in just one visual field.  Isn't that interesting?  How are we 
to choose what thing to concentrate on, to focus our attention on?

A lense makes this choice much easier.  It provides a box around which to 
focus our visual process.  It reduces the visual field to a specific 
area, which depending on the adjustments of our instrument could be very 
small or very large, but it is never as large as pure vision and it is 
always in a box, which allows for analysis.  Often times the device we 
look through is also recording on some material, such as tape or film 
which provides another interesting option.  This allows us another step 
of removal from pure vision.  Now the things which we look at are no 
longer temporally bound.  If we record a birth, an explosion, the sun 
rising, the wind moving the leaves in the trees, people walking across 
the street at a crowded intersection . . .these can be played and played 
again.  In real vision a process happens and then it is over and then 
another process happens and then it is over, in continuous state of flux, 
of chaos and order chaos and order chaos and order. The camera allows us 
to fool ourselves into a sense of permanence about physical phenomena, 
although the thing which is recorded on to is subject to the same laws of 
disintegration and reorder as what is being recorded.

So I see two interesting things happening in these processes by which we 
experience the visual field in a camera, video recorder or film camera.  
One is the reduction of vision to a specific context which is always less 
than the actual visual field, a process which lends itself to analysis 
and exploration of the object.  And the other interesting thing is the 
recording of a linear event which then temporarily has the status of a 
non-linear event.  Again allowing for an interesting exploration of the 
object with the benefit of linear sequencing, or time as an additional 
quality.  


Chris Lugo
Visual Artist, Video Artist, Performance Artist, Lawn Mower
WWW Page at http://www.umn.edu/nlhome/g264/lugo0001/