Now, don't get wrong, I love my mac; I love the way it makes it so easy to develop really interesting visual effects and I have a lot to thank it for in terms of keeping me employed. But this entry is about the world of analogue.

My work such as it is, is pretty firmly entrenched in the digital world; I use computers to overlay layer upon layer of graphics and texture in order to create the look and feel that I want to achieve. And often the best results come from an experiment that has gone in a different direction to the one that I had expected. But does that process allow for the space between the digital points? In tech terms, a curve is digitally processed as a series of steps, but remains a curve in the analogue sphere.

I have no urge to ‘go analogue’; much of what I do would become hugely more difficult (and I haven't the time to overcome obstacles like that). But perhaps there is a paradigm that is easy to get lost in the wealth of opportunity that the digital world represents.

An example; at home I have a 16mm film projector which I am trying (somewhat slowly) to get working. It will play back at a certain speed (but probably waver), it may chew the film, it certainly hasn‘t got massively high quality optics - complete with dust and the like, it requires a physical act to change from one film reel to another - a process of threading and winding, and all of that is before we come to the film itself. The film I’m most interested in viewing is pretty old, has been in a garage, is a little mouldy, has been badly affected by light and is scratched.

Now, to someone who wants to watch a film, a digital projector running off a DVD, is great. But the old projector and the old film, mix together to form a story; not the one actually on the film but the one that is the film - the quality of it. It tells the story of how it has been kept; for how long. It has developed.

Time doesn‘t affect digital media; which is why we like it. But I wonder if we don’t lose something rather precious in all of the progress. I love my digital camera, but I lose the suspense of the prints coming back; it‘s instant but there’s something wonderful about developing your own prints (not that I have for a long time but you get the idea).

It would be interesting to have for example a quartz composer patch that worked based on the time and date and degraded the work based on when it was originally created. But is this cheating?! The more full on approach is to put the compositions onto film; but then you lose the ability to generate it real-time.

Don‘t know really. Just a thought. I would like to do some work with analogue signal processors post output, pre projection. That’d be pretty cool. Looks like a bunch more stuff to get my head around! Hey ho - such the life of an artist!

SteamSHIFT out