Zoom in Zoom out (Jullien Instructions 3)

Aesthetic reduction, as Jullien calls it, is the act of stepping back from a work of art, of viewing its lifelines (95-6). I'd like to post a kind of quoted paraphrase of these two pages because I think they're important to the instructions.

The farther away you are from a painting the more easily you are able to take its contours. "Contemplating a landscape from afar, one grasps its lifelines (shi); considering it close up, one seizes its substance." From close up one enjoys the details, but they are unable to explore the vital tension of the landscape or the painted lines. Only from a distance could dynamism be expressed, rendering it more accessible to contemplation because it removes all the unessential things so that we can just focus on the essential lines of the piece. By exploiting the magical shortcut that painting provides us -- by allowing us to see vast distances on a short distance of paper -- the spiritual dimension is opened and we are able to transcend all the unreality of things.

Reading these two pages brings to mind artists like Georgia O'Keefe, whose highly zoomed in flower paintings incited a lot of different criticisms. In the age of photography and computers, this kind of O'Keefian style is highly achievable, especially now because our digital photographic technology is so clear. One wonders, however, or at least I wonder, when I look at O'Keefe's paintings, what dwells beyond them.

These instructions are two-fold.

Instruction Part 1: Take a picture of anything - a landscape, a flower, a cityscape - so that you can see a lot of it at once, the way that one's eye takes in what it's viewing. On the computer, zoom that picture to its maximum zoom potential and scroll through the enlarged image until something clicks in what you're seeing. This could be the colors, the shapes, the textures, a mixture of those three or something new. Take a screencap (and the crop the unessential window borders). You now have two images: the original and the highly zoomed in selection. 

Instruction Part 2: Open both images in some kind of paint program (obviously separately) and take a black paintbrush (or some kind of contrasting color) and trace what you perceive are the lifelines of your images. Make sure that you are drawing a continuous line: Do not let your paint brush leave the surface of your image until you are finished drawing that lifeline. Do the same for the other image. Post your images side-by-side. Compare the lifelines. Are there any similarities? Did your Zoomed out lifeline intersect the portion of the image that you had zoomed in on?