Post Three: Stop, Shutter, Fix

Long post – 8-10 minutes read

Potential Connection Two: Reconsidering the lines (of control) around concepts.

This is the third in a series of blogs in which I record seemingly random and unconnected thoughts which relate to contemporary art and “But a child could do that!” responses. It is much longer than the previous and again, does not promise resolution. Recall, that it was Iain McGilchrist’s comments about contemporary art at the end of his book The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019) that sent me on this rambling investigation, when he wrote that future generations might look back on our era and wonder why we were so gullible to think certain contemporary art had anything valuable to offer. It is not really McGilchrist I am picking on, but a developing inquiry around the glaring obviousness of our material selves in a material world, and an emerging *”negative messianism”.

From In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object by Maria Ahmed, Sarah-Jane Field and Flusser’s apparatus.

On one hand, he writes “The left hemisphere’s world is ultimately narcissistic, in the sense that it sees the world ‘out there’ as no more than a reflection of itself: the body becomes just the first thing we see out there, and we feel impelled to shape it to our sense of how it ‘should’ be. (Ibid, p48) which points to questions I have been asking. In the previous post, I wrote, “I have been reading Laurence Stern’s (2009;[1759]] The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , which was written at a critical juncture within that making [of the Western world]. It is one of several potential connections, which seem to point to a general obsession with self in Western culture.”

But then McGilchrist thoroughly dismisses certain contemporary art, failing to see the artist’s role, not only as an observer and reporter but also as a conduit through which we might find ways to understand, question and explore the modern world and what he describes as its schizoid ontology. In the final section of his book, he titles a section “THE PROBLEM OF ART IN THE MODERN WORLD” (Ibid; 407). Don’t get me wrong, I think there is an awful lot to critique and question in contemporary art. I also side with his complaint, “Beauty is rarely mentioned in contemporary art critiques: in a reflection of the left hemisphere’s values, a work is now conventionally praised as ‘strong’ or ‘challenging’, in the rhetoric of power, the only rhetoric in all our relations with the world and with one another that we are now permitted” (Ibid: p.443). And I too have much to say about the anti-aesthetic, anti-photography, loser-images rhetoric that may come from a place of wanting to challenge dominant, commodified norms. But arguably, like most or all binary logic, it inadvertently underscores what it hopes to dismantle.

But here is where I start to become uncomfortable – and yes, I’m grown up to admit it is because his words challenge my strategies: “…metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept”. This seems unfair since myth is constantly being explored and re-explored in the contemporary art I explore and make. While he says a great deal valuable about art too, his view in the main seems unforgiving (Ibid; p442):

We stand or sit there solemnly contemplating the genius of the artwork, like the passive, well-behaved bourgeois that we are, when we should be calling someone’s bluff. My bet is that our age will be viewed in retrospect with amusement, as an age remarkable not only for its cynicism, but for its gullibility.”

A more nuanced argument is presented by Andrea Fraser (2006), which I have mentioned elsewhere.

Potential Connection Three: Nothing will come from nothing and movement

There is a great deal more to say, to be fair to both McGilchrsit and contemporary art, and it will take me a long time to make sense of McGilchrist’s words. In the meantime, I continue to connect Hayles’ (2017) ‘non-conscious cognition’, Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, and contemporary art strategies. Sterne’s book was loathed and loved and provides a precursor to surrealist tropes. It is very funny, pokes fun at itself constantly, and is reflexive, fragmented and non-linear. It is also unashamedly bawdy, often homoerotic (no, Uncle Toby is not merely too shy to know much about women), and teeming with double-entendre.

In the previous post, I shared Tristram’s image of a squiggle. One of my digital Big Others, Gemini, described the squiggle as exemplifying the following: 1. The tension between controlled representation and expressive impulse. 2. The subjective nature of interpretation and how we ascribe meaning.

While I read, I can’t help wondering what happened to the English psyche between the publication of Sterne’s book and the era of Oscar Wilde, famously ‘gaoled’ for his homosexuality, or later, when Turing was forced by society into therapy designed to ‘cure’ him’ while contributing to an early death. Not to mention the shameful lack of appreciation from society given his efforts in WWII. Although homosexuality is no longer illegal in the UK, hatred and bigotry persist here and around the globe, as does persecution. It’s as if society cannot stop yearning for stasis. We want fixed ideas of gender, sexuality, interior, exterior, and more. And yet, reality is not that. Whatever door you choose to enter to explore reality – physics, art, biology, ecology, philosophy – movement is an inescapable factor. This is not a metaphor. We live on a spinning globe, hurtling through space. The land we stand on never stops moving. Lines everywhere are constantly dissolving and reforming. Words too are emergent properties of matter, only accessible through matter, so why should they be any different? (They are not!)

This is brilliantly illustrated in an animation that shows how empty space is never empty, dead or still. And at the most fundamental level – so-called empty space – there is a LOT of movement. We are warned not to take quantum images literally at the macroscopic scale, however, I wrote the following in an essay, quoting Karen Barad (2007; p110), and I stand by it:

“Although we are used to thinking about quantum physics describing the very small and classical physics, the large, Barad (2007:337) urges us to consider how these “separate determinate boundaries and properties” are based on Western human habits of thought. Quantum and classical physics are different models that aim to describe how things work in the same universe – not separate realities” (Field, 2020, p39 citing Barad).

I recently discovered Thomas Nail’s philosophy of movement which furthers the notion that movement is everywhere and in everything. Nail (2018; p51) writes in his close reading of Lucretius;

“De Rerum Natura calls for nothing less than a wholesale overturning of Western philosophy with its statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity […] To overturn religion, from the Latin words religione and religio, is to overturn the first and most basic misunderstanding of philosophy: that stasis comes before movement.” (My bold and italics).

These comments about movement apply to all reality, including the material realities that come in the form of historical concepts. These concepts are material in that they are usually accessed in books, digital devices, through films or some other medium. Even if we remove all those objects/processes and imagine we are hearing them aurally from an ancient storyteller before the invention of writing, the human telling the story is material. Material that eats, shits, loves, and dies. And material that is intertwined/enmeshed/assembled with the other materials in which all materials exist. There are arguments to suggest that we might remove the S and refer simply to material.

Potential Connection Four: Shifting lines around historical eras, including the one from which the modern Western world emerges

Shortly after reading Books One and Two on Sterne’s novel, the following article appeared in The Guardian demonstrating that lines, often arbitrary, carve up historical eras but are also not fixed.

“The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s.

Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution, laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories.”

Stevinus’ sailing chariot (1603)

In Sterne’s fragmented narrative, there are plenty of comments on the Industrial Revolution and how burgeoning capitalist drives influence a human’s view. For instance, why asks Uncle Toby, do people who live on open plains like ours not make use of “Stevinus’ sailing chariot” when, unlike horses, they eat nothing and rely on wind for power, which costs nothing. Because, answers Uncle Toby’s brother and Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, they eat nothing and cost nothing to power – “the scheme is bad. It is the consumption of our products, as well as the manufacturers of them, which gives bread to the hungry, circulates trade, – brings money, and supports the value of our lands; and tho’, I own, if I was a Prince, I would generously recompense the scientific head which bought forth such contrivances; yet I would as peremptorily suppress the use of them”. (2017 [1759], p.79-80)

Not only does this passage indicate how the same arguments are being played out today, it is also an example of time narrative, concepts and debate energetically crisscrossing spacetime. It also potentially supports The Guardian article which dissolves the fixed categorisations we impose on history. Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not suddenly appear out of a vacuum. And in any case, as we see above, a vacuum is never still or empty. It is always teeming with possibility and decay. For me, the specific changes and shifts in our historical narrative are less interesting than the fact that we’re questioning these lines at all.

Reality is not static. The whole idea of reality being static is a fantasy. We emerge into the universe for a moment and de-merge again soon afterwards. Is the obsession with self, which McGilchrist discusses, what prompts us to slow things down, even stop, fix, or shutter them? Do these attempts to control provide us with the illusion we are in charge? (And how does this relate to volition and free will? Well, that is the question, isn’t it?)

And so I come to the heading of this post. I am thinking about the words shutter, stop, and fix and photography. And wondering what on earth happened to make those 19th-century industrialists, perhaps some of the most suppressed people ever to be born on the planet, come up with a mechanical eye that functions by fixing, stopping and shutting reality down. (Incidentally, the camera too did not appear overnight. In fact, Shandy says the following: Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of you in the camera; that is most unfair of all, because there you are sure to be represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes (Iid; p56). Referring, presumably to the camera-obscura).

Although this is not a new inquiry (and I explore the same through Barad’s agential realism lens while completing my BA (Field, 202), I suspect the answer is linked to the topic in The Guardian article, and in Walter Shandy’s response regarding the “consumption of products”.

Despite McGilchrist and others’ distaste for ‘I/it’ dialogue, I asked Claude and Grammerly to help identify what needs expanding in future writings. I find it helpful because, as he likes to point out, I am not a machine. But I also think the machine misses things…

And so, I end by promising a shorter blog next time!

Digital Big Other’s Feedback

Claude

1. The reference to Laurence Stern’s “Tristram Shandy” and the parallels drawn between its fragmented, non-linear narrative and contemporary art strategies is insightful. The author could further explore how Sterne’s work presages surrealist techniques and challenges traditional modes of storytelling, which could be seen as precursors to the “anti-aesthetic, anti-photography, loser-images rhetoric” in contemporary art.
2. The discussion of movement, stasis, and the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines and concepts is strong, particularly the connections made to Karen Barad’s work on quantum physics and Thomas Nail’s philosophy of movement. This could be expanded upon to more clearly illustrate how these ideas challenge the Western tendency towards “statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.”
3. The juxtaposition of the Guardian article on the earlier-than-thought origins of the Industrial Revolution with the passage from “Tristram Shandy” is an effective way to demonstrate how historical narratives and categorizations are fluid and open to reinterpretation. The author could further develop this point by exploring how this fluidity and questioning of fixed boundaries relates to the broader themes of the text.
4. The final section on photography and the author’s questioning of why the 19th-century industrialists developed a “mechanical eye” that “functions by fixing, stopping and shutting reality down” is intriguing. This could be expanded upon by connecting it more directly to the earlier discussions of movement, stasis, and the Western desire for control and fixity in the face of a fundamentally fluid reality.

Grammarly’s suggestions

What does the author mean by “modern world and its schizoid ontology”?
How does the author reconcile their appreciation for contemporary art with McGilchrist’s dismissal of it?
What is the connection between Hayles’ ‘non-conscious cognition’, Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, and contemporary art strategiess.

*A phrase from Achille Mbembe which I cannot go into here as this already far too long! But I will at some point.

Refs:

Ahmed, M. and Field, S.-J. (2024) In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object [Zine]. Available at: https://www.sarahjanefield.com/products/in-pursuit-of-an-apparition-hands-can-miss-the-object (Accessed 12 April 2024)

Barad, K.M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Field, ~ Sarah-Jane (2020) ‘Image in the age of entanglement’, SJField – OCA Level Three Study Blog, 13 August. Available at: https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2020/08/13/cs-a5-final-edit-of-essay-image-in-the-age-of-entanglement/ (Accessed: 12 December 2023).

Fraser, A. (2006) ‘Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?’, Grey Room, (22), pp. 30–47.

Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago press.

Hall, R. (2024) ‘Industrial Revolution began in 17th not 18th century, say academics’, The Guardian, 4 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/05/industrial-revolution-began-in-17th-not-18th-century-say-academics (Accessed: 8 April 2024).

Achille Mbembe: ‘Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism’ (2017). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyHUJYfk_os (Accessed: 24 May 2022).

McGilchrist, I. (2019) The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world. New expanded edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Nail, T. (2018) Lucretius I: an ontology of motion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sterne, L. (2017) The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Kindle Edition. Miami: Hardpress.

Connections: (Continuous) flow and flickering signifiers

I am storing this connection here, as I don’t want to lose it and may incorporate this (as simply as possible) into some talks/workshops:

“In the art of the Middle Ages, there is no radical division between aesthetic subject and object, divine and mortal, but, rather, a continuous distribution of light into degrees of lighter- and darker- colored regions. There are no lacks or absences, only degrees of shadow and illumination.” Nail, 2019; 190 (My italics)

Then from Kathryn Hayles:

“The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image-an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water. Interacting with electronic images rather than with a materially resistant text, I absorb through my fingers as well as my mind a model of signification in which no simple one-to-one correspondence exists between signifier and signified. I know kinesthetically as well as conceptually that the text can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible if it existed “s a material object rather than a visual display. As I work with the text-as-flickering- image, I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, and more powerful than presence and absence.” Hayles, 1999; 26 (My italics)

“Without a kinetics of light, even the most dramatic images disappear into the night, in which all cows are black. Light is what gives aesthetic relation.” (Nail, Ibid)

Digital material is wave-like and responds to the conscious actor. Things/reality come into being on our screens when observed – when there is intra-action (a neologism coined by Karen Barad to imply more than interaction). When we swipe a page, or click on an icon, a digital wave having been drawn out onto the screen, momentarily appears as pixels/particles. But they recede when there is no intra-action. Donald D Hoffman tells us this is reality functions and the quantum field theory he relies upon is what Nail’s thesis also cannot do without.

From here, Nail makes light and vision imperative. However, I am interested in connecting that with a chapter from my old tutor, Daniel Rubenstein’s book, How Photography Changed Philosophy (2023); namely The Latent Image as well as an earlier chapter, Critiques of ocularcentrism – in which he warns about The trap of the visual – all chapter headings in his book.

“The reluctance of theory to talk about this primordial [invisible, pre-] state of the image can be considered symptomatic of the desire to focus on the visible and tangible image and ignore the invisible without questioning the basic premise of the distinction itself” (Ibidl 93). And, the following, “the emphasis placed on the visual content of images tends to obscure the processes of dissemination, production and dispersion that contain their own intelligent messages…” (Ibid)

However, here Nail emphasises how darkness and light work together (not as absence and presence but as continuously changing elements, intra-activity, out of which images emerge: “The second tension is between the lighted exterior of the church and the darkened center. It is only in such a high contrast between light and dark that the stained-glass images can appear at all” (Nail, 2019; 203). Nail also mentions ‘flickering’ linking back again to Hayles above although in churches of the Middle Ages rather than on our screen, where it might have been birds or trees outside a stained glass window that introduced the flicker. Nevertheless, the following description is indeed reminiscent of how pixels work: “…it is the contrast between color cells of light that generates the form of the image. Unity appears through fragmentation: a fragmented whole of relations” (Ibid). I am reminded of shifting outlines and boundaries and borders – and the fractal nature of reality.

I am only halfway through Nail’s book and look forward to seeing where he goes with the digital image towards the end of it.

Film shown on a 44-inch screen and included in Belongings alongside reconstituted paper, some of which includes text from Thomas Nail’s Borders, Migrants, and Writing (2020) which was co-created by Susan Aldworth, Sara David, Natalia Mesa Echavarria, Sarah-Jane Field, Silvina Maestro, Julia Shutkevych, Michaelle St Vincent and Judy Willcocks, with support from CSM’s Creativity in Action Fund, and with the CSM Museum and Study Collection

Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Hoffman, D.D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Penguin

Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Rubinstein, D. (2023) How photography changed philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Notes: Speaking at an AI Art School workshop and exhibiting work

Organiser’s opening slide

I was thrilled although understandably nervous when selected to join a panel at a conference for university art educators organised by GLAD and the Royal College of Arts along with three other artists:

Gosia Starzynska

Mick Paulusma

Yuqian Sun

However, it seemed to go well and I learned a good deal from the other artists, the organisers, in particular Dr Danielle Barrios-O’Neill, Head of Programme, Information Experience Design, and the attendees. What may have been most useful in terms of planning for the Photofusion* workshop I am leading alongside Chris Le Messurier in April was hearing what sort of questions we were asked, thinking about how I should have answered some of those questions, i.e. recalling quotes, information that would have added depth and context, and seeing how people responded to the exercises we were given.

Again, I was struck by the fundamental importance of language, both in terms of how we describe what machine learning is and how we prompt models.

Here are a couple of slides I shared and a few points I raised in my introduction.

• There is no hierarchical authority between materials/processes in my metaphorical ‘pencil case’. That said, when I look at the Explore page of Midjourney, for instance, I am – to be frank – horrified by how kitsch it all is. So lately I have been exploring what that is about, is that familiar aesthetic inevitable? And if not, how can we or should we try to escape what seems like a narrow deterministic plastic ‘style’? But also, what it is about the aesthetic that appeals right now? Which is something the Cute exhibition at Somerset House seems to be investigating (I’m off to see it this afternoon).

As requested, I ended with the following call to action, and may expand on this in further talks:

Art critic, Ben Davis discusses the temptation to stand outside of certain forms of culture, and suggests it might ‘feel very satisfying’ (and I’ll add – a little sanctimonious) to resist the dominant, hyper-commodified cultural language that is almost impossible to escape, but it is the culture that most people live with. “And as a political project, you have to be in dialogue with those forms of energy as well” (School of Visual Arts, 2023).

---

It was a busy day (in fact, one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in a long while), and I rushed back to the Grosvenor Arms Pub in Wandsworth afterwards where I’d been invited to show some old projects. The exhibition has been curated by Shiza Naveed and runs until the 10th of March. It includes work from a range of Wandsworth-based artists and on Friday the 8th of March, there will be an evening of historic storytelling from local historian Geoff Simmons and a talk by Brendan Conway. Those who know me may recall a project called Portrait of a Pub I developed there a few years ago with Brendan.

As well as that project, I also printed several landscapes taken in Calais and Dunkirk while working with local charity Just Shelter on some relatively low-grade paper which I stuck to the wall as simply as possible. The shadows of the light and the paper echo the shadows and light in many of the photographs, which I hope speak to some of the ideas I have been reading about in Thomas Nail’s (2019) Theory of the Image which is well-worth dipping into if you are working with any form of art, but particularly photography and post-photography. Nail’s theory of movement is also eminently relevant to the Calais project. He has written and spoken about migration at length, an example of which you can see here. Nail’s writing has helped me to consider how the various aspects of my work relate, so I can hopefully speak about that with some level of academic validation at some point in the future.

“…migrants are not marginal or exceptional figures, as they have so often been treated, but rather the essential lever by which all hitherto existing societies have sustained and expanded their social form.”

Borders, Migrants, and Writing
Thomas Nail, 2020

Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie is a long-term project, presented here as a series of landscape images, made in conjunction with local charity Just Shelter which aims to explore the impact of man-made borders on the edges of Northern France and beyond in response to the movement of people and subsequent attempts to control (2014-2019).

*Click to sign up

Ben Davis: Art in the After-Culture (2023). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awox1jKxAZc (Accessed: 2 March 2024).

Thomas Nail, ‘Moving Borders’ (2020). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4beAwNhVgXA (Accessed: 2 March 2024).

Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

WIP: Edits>notes>language materials

Work never really stops evolving – even when a project is over, the work continues into the next – but there are ebbs, eddies, and moments of reflection. This where Maria and I have got to as we play with manifestations and experiments. And the time has come for some major edits, including addressing how we incorporate text. In the version we’re working on for now, simply and straightforwardly is the answer! Apart from anything else, the text we have chosen will give people something to hang on to. This is also a moment to step back and see what we’re doing, together and individually (below has been updated to address ‘Experimantal functionaries*’ – plural). I have altered my website to bring it closer to these developments.

At the same time, I have been making notes, as I must introduce and describe my work in various situations in the coming weeks. Finding Thomas Nail’s The Theory of the Image has been extremely useful. When I first read Flusser, I thought THIS should be incorporated as standard into the education of anyone studying photography. The same goes for Nail – or parts of it, anyway. That said, I had been asking questions of my Flusser Digital Echo and was not entirely sure if its replies could be trusted or not… However, Nail’s process materialism has given me the confidence to keep heading in the direction I’ve been moving (pardon the pun!)

Some rough notes – my thoughts and quotations from Nail:

• I am not sure what my work is doing and often make connections and understandings in retrospect, sometimes, only for a moment. I use image, text and media in a variety of ways. Critically, there is no hierarchy and I eschew classical value systems which are arbitrary at best, and embedded in class and status at worst.
• “Matter flows but it also folds over itself in habitual cycles and patterns of dynamic equilibrium, creating regional stabilities- in- motion: images.” p43
• I work with Language materials: “Matter is not reducible to static, discrete, or passive stuff that gets moved around, as in classical materialism. Matter is creative, unstable, and in constant motion.” p21
• The ultimate language material is ‘everything’.
• Human linguistics is what separates the world into bits and pieces
• “The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image—an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water (Hayles, 1999, p26)
• Computer language – flow begins to reintegrate it [language materials] into flow (despite its limitations 0 i.e. binary computer language is a crude approximation albeit a highly sophisticated language material, relatively speaking)
• ‘Photography’ when it emerged in 1834 seems like the ultimate separation: It is photography’s (Capitalism’s/Cartesian mindset) habit of mind to abstract “the product from the iterative process” (p 47). A counter reaction is to dismiss/discard what seems/appears abstracted and only focus on/value process (Barad writes there is not some space somewhere with objects waiting to be named, equally, there is not some dumping ground in another ether where can dispose of all our ‘objects’ – appearances-, because they don’t suit our ideology.) Non-representational critique tries to overcome dualism by suggesting yet another binary – representationalism vs non- or post-representationalism. “The world gives off material flows that are first perceived by the organism and then internalized in its organic structure [we create a representation in our minds of the world in order to move from a to b, find the food/mate] ….What we need to do is extend this idea to the kinetic activity of inorganic matter itself: images” p.52
• “The image is not a distinct or separate copy but, rather, the process by which matter curves, bends, folds, and bounces back and forth, or “echoes.” p11 (I LOVE this!!)
• “There are not first static objects and subjects and then later a movement or transfer of images between them. Rather, there is first matter in motion folding itself up through composition and duplication that generates larger sensuous matters like objects and subjects that then further reflect and duplicate the flows of matter between them.” p11
• “The aim is to put forward a theory of human agency as one type of image among others” p5
• “The obsession with art preservation, authorial authenticity, and connoisseurship are historically linked to this classical idea of stasis and mimesis” p6
• “Relative stasis and relative discontinuity can be derived from movement and continuity” p25

Had I not been venturing – for what it’s worth – into Spinoza (after reading Braidotti who talks about his monism in various texts), I think I might have struggled with Nail – or at least understood somewhat superficially (or more superficially than I might have). And from there, I had been thinking about how the following words from different perspectives are pointing towards the same notions – yes, yes, yes, there are differences and perhaps oversimplifications, but bear with me:

• Complexity/pattern/presence <-> entropy/randomness/absence (qualified by even the void is never empty) (Hayles/Barad)
• Desire/flow <-> segmentarity (Deleuze and Guattari)
• Freud’s death drive (“For on our hypothesis the ego instincts arise from the coming to life of inanimate matter and seek to restore the inanimate state (Freud, 2020 [1915] p. 37 See Ch. VI) in conflict with complex of reality/pleasure principles
• Motion <-> rest (Spinoza)

Now I must find a way to convey this in a very accessible way to introduce my work. And I am beginning to see that the phrase ‘language materials’, which I started using while still with the OCA probably in Level 2, is key and maybe even the title of any talk/description/introduction.

LLM’s simplified suggestion:

1. Making Connections in Hindsight: Imagine you’re drawing a big, complicated picture but you’re not exactly sure what it’s going to be when you start. As you add more colors and shapes, it starts to make sense. Sometimes, you only understand a small part of it right after you’ve drawn it, and that’s okay. That’s how the person feels about their work with images, texts, and media. They mix them all up without worrying which one is more important.
2. Matter Moving and Folding: Think of playdough. You can squish it, bend it, and it can hold shapes in a cool way, right? That’s a bit like how everything around us works. Stuff isn’t just sitting around; it’s moving, changing, and can make stable patterns like a river flowing and swirling in places.
3. Language and Everything: Language is like a magic tool that lets us chop up the world into pieces we can talk about. But really, everything is connected, and language is just our way of making sense of it all.
4. Computers Making Words into Pictures: Computers are super clever because they turn words and numbers (like the ones and zeros they use to work) into all the pictures and games you see on the screen. It’s like they’re turning a secret code into a drawing that changes as easily as water flows.
5. Photography and Seeing Beyond: When cameras were invented, it was like they could freeze a moment in time. But some people think we shouldn’t just focus on these frozen bits. Instead, we should think about all the steps and changes that happen all the time, not just the end result.
6. Imagining the World as Moving Stuff: Instead of thinking the world is just a bunch of still things and us looking at them, we should see it all as stuff in motion, bending and folding, making up everything we see and touch, including ourselves.
7. Art and Keeping Things the Same: Some folks are really into keeping art safe and making sure it stays exactly the same over time. But these ideas come from an old way of thinking that doesn’t really fit with the moving, changing world we just talked about.
8. Everything is Connected: By reading about different ideas, like from Spinoza or others, it helps to see how everything is much more connected than we might think. It’s like finding patterns in a game or a story that help make sense of the bigger picture

Braidotti, R. (2013) The posthuman. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Freud, S. (2015) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

*To incorporate into the zine:

“Even though, in practice, photographers have been living for a long time in a post-historical fashion, the post-industrial revolution, as it appears for the first time in the shape of the camera, has escaped their consciousness. With one exception: so-called experimental photographers – those photographers in the sense of the word intended here. They are conscious that image, apparatus, program and information are the basic problems that they have to come to terms with. They are in fact consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e. to release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something that is not in its program.”

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography . Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.