Categories
Month: August 2020
Categories
Where are we going ?
Categories
Constructing another reality?
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Does a machine see?
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Controlled by algorithms
Categories
Søren Lilholt
Søren Lilholt
STATEMENT
Echoes of contingency
Echoes are (un)anticipated responses from a future self.
A contingent preposition is neither true nor false – and yet a contingency is a potential future reality – often of grim consequences.
Images are creations reaching for the future.
They offer themselves to vision.
And once seen they dissolve into echoes of a self-reflection that lends itself to a historical consciousness. 1
The echo image is a reflection blurring the boundaries between subject and world.
A vision that at one and the same time originates from the world and from somewhere else.
A vision that answers our questions in a voice belonging to ourselves and someone not exactly ourselves.
It is a cyclical unfolding that reaches beyond the search for verification and instead puts us in contact with the unknown.
It is a generative behaviour that however abstract or concrete depict our world – the subjective as well as the collective – the conscious as well as the unconscious. 2
Echoes of contingency investigates the possibility for images to resonate as such impermanent echoes of the world.
The project began as an intuitive visual exploration. Trying to conduct a visual philosophy inspired by the thoughts of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I started to investigate whether a compulsive production of imagery might reveal to my own questions or conscious/unconscious feelings about a world that of a world that increasingly has been feeling out of balance to me.
Covered by special made filters, which only allow the viewer to see the images when standing directly in front of them, the works fluctuate between the visible / invisible. Each image is isolated in its own private sphere denying the spectator the opportunity to see the works in their collective entirety. Instead, the images compel the viewers to engage with the echoes of their own memory and imagination.
- 1 Scotece, Enrico: “The Past and the Pending: Photography, Phenomenology and Intent as Perceptual Experience”. In: Global Media Journal, Australian Edition, Vol. 10. Issue 1. 2016.
- 2 ibid.
BIO
Søren Lilholt is a Danish artist living and working in Copenhagen. He has studied at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography and holds a MA in Visual Culture from the University of Copenhagen. Attracted to the seemingly incomprehensible and the subtle ability of photography to alter perception, his practice is deeply rooted in a phenomenological approach to photography and visuality – a process that aims at delving deep into a perceptual openness towards the world. His work has been published in Der Greif, exhibited at The Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and in 2019 he was chosen as one of the emerging Danish photographers to exhibit at the annual exhibition Young Danish Photography at Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen.
CONVERSATIONS
“To break out
from the constellations
and to form new
meanings and
connections.”
Yuliya: During our research for the project, we have talked about the concept of the Atlas and your inspiration from Aby Warburg and George Didi-Huberman. In terms of this gaze towards the future that is central to our project: How do you think the Atlas of images can predict the future?
Søren: I think an important part of the way we think about the concept of the Atlas relating to Aby Warburg is its inherent ability to always transform or always reach forward. A very important part of the Atlas is to look through history in a vertical way and see how different themes, symptoms or symbols re-emerge in a very non-linear and anachronistic way.
I think that the concept of the Atlas offers a different way of thinking about images and photography: images are actually just at the beginning of their lives at the moment they are created. They reach forward – and not only tell us about the past. I think images in this way inherently contain the possibility to reveal larger structures of social memory and imaginary. So I wouldn’t say that they can predict the future, but they definitely reach for the future.
But the big difference between the archive and the Atlas is that at least historically you would look at the archive as a structuring of knowledge or as a construction of knowledge that is unified or fixated and often very historically linear, whereas the Atlas is a way to try and present visual links that are very far apart or distant from each other historically – so the linear structure evaporates and then you look at visual thought structures in a way that transverses throughout history. It is about how images evolve or small traces of visuality take on new meanings or engage in new contexts. So the Atlas deals more with the perpetual possibility for recombination and reinterpretation of images.
I think the Atlas brings us closer to touching this ungraspable area of imagination and creativity – the imaginary magma of the real, as I think philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis called it.
Yuliya: It’s interesting that you use the word echo in your title because it’s something that at the same time is in the now and in the future or in the distance.
Søren: When you look for the possibilities in images instead of what they verify, then sometimes they will reveal traces to you that you didn’t know where there. And these new traces of meaning can evolve over time from your own consciousness.
In the description of my project I say: “images become echoes of self-reflection that lends itself to historical consciousness”. What I mean is that if you think about an echo, it is something like an anticipated response. If you are in a place you know produces echoes and you shout out something, you will already anticipate an answer coming back to you. So in the moment you shout out, you are already prepared for the answer that lies in the future, and you know that the voice answering you will be your own. But the voice and answer still feels detached from you – it sort of feels like it comes from someone else. And some of the words in the echo might get muffled out, so something has changed just a little bit. And I think of images in the same way. When I create images, I feel that they come back to me in a way that I can’t fully control.
Yuliya: You made me think about the connection with Margherita’s work and her work with the palimpsest. These different layers of information and knowledge and its connection to this physical layer as well. Like images are a way to conduct this knowledge or imagination about the world.
Søren: Yes. And the way that Margerita’s works are enclosed in wax and become sort of alive because of this very organic material – I see this as a very direct way of also pointing to the lives of images that I’m talking about.
Margherita: I think the word echo that you use is a perfect word for it, because it is really about something that you cannot fully control and it plays on something jumping back to you.
Yuliya: I’m also wondering about this contingency or anxiety that are a part of your project. Do you somehow associate the future with this feeling of anxiety?
Søren: I thought of this contingency because of the images I had made. The images for the project were made in a very intuitive or compulsive way. And when I looked through the images – thinking of them as these echoes – I felt that they all had this almost uncanny, claustrophobic feel to them. They felt almost ill-boding and so I thought about this word: “contingency”. A contingent preposition is something that is not definitely true nor definitely false, and I liked that in relation to the images, because I felt they vibrated between the real and the unreal. Also, contingency is a preparation for something that might happen in the future, which is almost always something bad. So I liked this double meaning and uncertainty connected with the word.
Yuliya: What’s your opinion on the role of the viewer as an actor of an artistic work ?
As you use privacy filters in your installation, it is a very different way than just to expose your images as the Atlas on the wall. This installation makes the viewer engage physically with the work and also questions what is visible and invisible. And, by the way, why use these filters?
Søren: I think the simplest way to explain it is that I wanted the movement or engagement of the viewer to be the thing that made the images unfold or come to life. I think that it always takes the eyes of the viewer and their whole imaginary to unfold any image – but I wanted to really emphasize this and I felt that could be done with these filters, as they give the images the possibility to shut down and unfold or be born into visuality again and again. They only come to life in relation to the movement of the one who perceives them. Another thing I thought about working with the filters was in relation to the way that they enclose each image in its own private sphere in a way. So you can’t see the whole collection of images at once, which generally is the way you exhibit images in connection with these theories about the Atlas or archives and so on.
Warburg’s own plates, for example, consisted of a lot of small images presented together. But when looking at these constellations of images as a viewer you tend to see the collection of images as a whole or almost as one big image, which will generate meaning – but while the different constellations of imagery and the way they are linked certainly are at the heart of understanding how images work in this Atlas-minded way of dealing with visuality, I wanted to emphasize that there lies an important aspect in the potential of a single image and that it isn’t only contained within a bigger constellation, but also always has the possibility to break out from the constellations and form new meanings and connections.
As each image shuts down or encloses on itself as the viewer passes by, the viewer will have to bring their own memory and imagination in play to stitch all of the images together. I also thought about this in relation to contemporary visual culture. The way we engage with images most of the time today through smartphones and computers and stuff like that means we have this vast archive of images of all sorts at our disposal all the time and we can make them all pop up on the same screen or within the same frame in a way. This, I think, both grants images a great generative power – not very unlike the Atlas way of thinking about images – but it also has a danger of blurring out the acknowledgment that images also have discursive boundaries. So there is this tension between the possibility for generating knowledge and the loss of awareness of the contextualization of images.
Categories
Carola Lampe
Carola Lampe
STATEMENT
Tell me what to see
Tell me what to see examines the impact of new technologies on human behavior and experience. Searching for the future, the project focuses on data, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
As vast amounts of data are being created, captured and analyzed, our lives are becoming increasingly controlled by algorithms.
They can save lives, simplify life, structure chaos. However, there is great concern that they may give too much control to corporations and governments, reinforcing bias, creating filter bubbles, reducing choices and leading to greater social imbalances.
Artificial intelligence is trained on data coming from the past:
“…Historic prejudices are deeply encoded in our data sets, which are the frameworks on which we build contemporary knowledge and decision making. We will not solve the problems of the present with the tools of the past” (James Bridle, New Dark Age, 2018)
Because it relies on historical information, the rise of artificial intelligence is amplifying these concerns. Those systems or machines are never neutral and, therefore, prone to error and malfunction.
Moreover, new technologies are developing so rapidly that we increasingly find ourselves in simulated environments. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and simulation.
What is reality? Are we creating another reality?
How and what does a machine see? How is it different from our view?
Does data mean knowledge or is it just information?
Tell me what to see revolves around these questions. It explores the juxtaposition of reality and artificiality and the tension between the human and the mechanical.
The images were created with three different approaches: they were shot in the physical space by observing everyday life, artificially constructed in the studio, and generated by AI.
Tell me what to see is an installation which merges photography, AI generated text and sound. It plays with the construction of a “new” reality in an attempt to make the invisible visible.
BIO
Carola Lampe is a Berlin-based artist working with photography, installation and performance.
She graduated from Osnabrück University with a master’s in Fine Arts, has studied Dance and Choreography at Laban Centre London and Photography at Ostkreuzschule Berlin.
Carola’s work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions in Germany, Greece, Italy and Hungary. Her performances have been shown in Germany, the UK and Japan. She has been chosen for the third cycle (2019-2020) of Parallel Photo Platform programme and was shortlisted for the Athens Photo Festival in 2015 and 2017. Some of her recent photography projects have been featured in Der Greif online exhibition and dienacht magazine. She is currently interested in the implications of technology on the human being. Observing everyday life and investigating boundaries of what is real and what isn’t, her art shifts between documentary and fiction.
CONVERSATION
How are
we building
the future with
Artificial Intelligence
and technologies?
Yuliya: How could technology and Artificial Intelligence define, create or predict the future?
Carola: Some people say this is the age of algorithms now. They are used everywhere, and all the technology is used now already in a lot of ways, it shapes and defines our lives. When talking about technology, I am speaking mainly about Artificial Intelligence, which is aimed to optimize every aspect of our lives. It is used in a lot of places, good and bad: health, warfare, self-driving cars, consumerism. The concern is that it puts too much control in the hands of governments and businesses. A handful of corporations own a lot of data about us. Another concern is that it re-enforces the bias which is put into these systems, it creates filter bubbles, it cuts choices, which means that in fact you are limited to your profile. We are living in a cloud, cloud being a metaphor for the internet. The cloud knows everything about you, about every person who uses the internet, emails, business documents, your memories, your preferences. The negative part of this is that it feels like a surveillance state, that we are under control and that we increasingly often find ourselves in simulated environments.
There are a lot of things which can be automated, but the question is: what about emotion and creativity?
Yuliya: Was that state of awareness of those negative points of AI the starting point of your project?
Carola: Yes, this is the starting point. I work in the technology field and am aware of those developments. I got interested in AI and thought it might have positive effects, but actually after I dealt with the topic more intensively, I saw what drastic consequences the use of AI can have. And I wondered if we really want that. It is prone to be used in a lot of negative ways. That was my starting point, but I have been interested for a long time in exploring the impact new technologies have on the human being and the society. In the end, I am very much interested in the human being and humanity and the impact it has. Can we sustain humanity? In which forms is human life possible? How is the human being or the psyche changing because of the technology?
Yuliya: There is one quote in your statement: “We can’t solve problems with the tools from the past”. What kind of tools should we use to solve our problems?
How can we use all the knowledge about the past, present, future for that purpose ?
Carola: The quote you are referring to speaks of Artificial Intelligence. So, normally AI systems are trained based on data – they learn, they develop their “intelligence” by being fed with data. It is like in an archive which stores data from the past and present, but not from the future, and because it is based on the past, it might be biased. You should also ask: who provides the data, where does the data come from, what information and what kind of data is used? There are many examples of AI systems where some kind of data has been used, and the systems re-enforced the stereotypes, the bias which had already been embedded in that data. Those systems couldn’t be fixed, they needed to be stopped. Those machines are never neutral, you have to be careful what kind of data is being used. And it will also never solve social problems.
Yuliya: What about information and knowledge? Is data just information or also knowledge, and how can we create knowledge out of information?
Carola: In software development there is that saying: “garbage in, garbage out”, which basically says that whatever you put in, you get out.
There is so much data around now that people who work with it don’t know anymore what to do with all of that, because the amounts of data are too vast and also because they can’t distinguish between garbage and valid data – that is a big problem right now.
The data is just information, and you have to make connections in order to create knowledge or meaning.
George: I keep hearing that phrase that data is the new oil, and that data is almost becoming a currency. And that there is that massive obsession in companies trying to figure out what kind of data they have and how to monetize that data.
Carola: Yes, that is right. If you have a lot of data, you are rich. So, all the companies who are among the world’s top five right now collect and own a lot of data. Their business model is based on data.
Søren: But also the idea about information being the oil is a very old truth, in a way. After all, knowledge has always meant power. Also in relation to your work, George – your work also deals with getting knowledge which can be used for power, right? There is definitely a connection there. And I also think it is an important thing, as you said, Carola, to differentiate between fearing the power of the system and how the system is used. What I mean is that technology and all the data collected are not in themselves guilty, these are just systems. It is the power we give the users of these systems that can be scary and uncanny. In that realization also lies the possibility to break with it, but it means that we have to become aware of it.
And in connection with Margherita’s work and mine as well, there is this almost magical aspect of it. The work in a way becomes unfamiliar, and when things become unfamiliar we begin to wonder about them, analyse them and look at them in a different way. As soon as we are very familiar with things, we just accept them and let them go their own way. I think there is a lot of this weird sense of familiarization with technology today. We just accept it as it is and we don’t push it in a manner that would make it suddenly behave in ways we don’t know, that we can’t understand. Because then we really start to wonder. But this is just generally speaking, just to say that people simply accept things.
Your work, Carola, is also about this revealing, unfolding of the technology, very visually.
Yuliya: Is it also about unfolding the future? The more we know about technology which we think is meant to be our future and the more you reveal the technology, the more you somehow unfold the future. So, can you somehow predict what is going to happen, what it will be like?
Carola: I tried to look at the NOW, the present, and imagine the future. All information or all ideas are always rooted in the present or past. When I am imagining the future, I base my ideas on this data, I draw my own conclusions from it and I am also embedded in a certain culture and thinking model. So, I am not sure if one can predict the future, it is very subjective. Only some elements might be predicted. So, with my work I wanted to create some ideas or show some aspects of what the future might look like.
Søren: I also thought about software… I am not an expert in software, but I thought about it in relation to an archive. An archive is always evolving and producing stuff for the future in a way, from the knowledge from the past. Isn’t this the same in software development, isn’t it the case that only very few programs are written from scratch, isn’t it all a conglomerate of code from very different times that you stitch together? For instance computers – aren’t they filled with codes which come from different people, from different parts of the world, from different times, stitched together to make that system function? I think that sometimes it is difficult to say “this is the place where this specific function originated from”, as it has many traces to other parts, too? Isn’t it like this?
Carola: Yes, in a way it is like that. The software program has been coded by a person or a team, and then it evolves, develops over time. Ever new versions are created, and those developments are based on the existing code. So, yes, you are right – the codebase of a software program has normally been through a lot of phases, where code is from different times and different people. Sometimes, when software exists for a long time, you have a really old legacy code in there, which then might need to be updated as well.
Yuliya: It also embraces this idea of collaboration, because, as we said earlier, archive is not something individual, it is a collective process with different roles. It cannot exist with just one individual, right? It actually re-enforces this idea of an archive as an involving and collaborative practice.
George: Isn’t one of the concerns related to the use of algorithms and AI that somebody has to tell the algorithm what the norm is? There has to be some kind of a basis from which the algorithm decides or makes a decision of any kind. For instance censoring content online, like when Facebook will use algorithms to flag up things that are questionable, that maybe shouldn’t be there, but the algorithm cannot decide on its own, you have to have a human to decide what is allowed or what is not allowed. The algorithm has to be told what is normal and what is not. What is allowed and what isn’t produces these huge ethical questions about our online life. If we start to decide what is allowed and what isn’t, who makes the decision about this? And whose perspective is it? There are huge questions, it seems we need to answer them as a society, as a race, as a species, and talk about what kind of norms of online life there will be. Is that right?
Carola: Yes, that is exactly right. Just to give some context: AI works by combining large amounts of data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms, allowing the software to learn automatically from patterns or features in the data. So data is the basis of those systems, and of course somebody needs to decide which data is going to be used. That is the problem. It is very much related to the values, morals and culture this human being comes from. This is a huge problem, as it makes everything much more complicated. Do we want to have censorship or not? When does censorship start? What are we allowed to see and what do we get to see? Who decides about this and what might be the agenda?
Yuliya: How do you perceive that idea of a future-oriented archive regarding your work? How does it speak to you? How has this influenced your work ?
Carola: I see data as an archive, and databases are archives in a way, digital ones. I am interested in the future and how systems from the present have an influence on the future and future developments. But I also see the limitations of data, as we are using the data from the present and past. In my work, I searched for images and created images which I felt could give us some idea about the future, maybe I was searching for those patterns. I have produced a lot of images, an archive in search of the future. But the “data” I have found, recorded or produced was from the present, and it is now from the past, and it is also biased, by my selection. So, I struggle a bit with the future terminology.
Yuliya: I would like to develop a little bit on this idea about forensic research on the future through your works. How do you investigate the future? Or how could we investigate the future?
Carola: In a way, I tried to investigate several aspects of our life, I did not concentrate on just one aspect. Sometimes it felt like investigating, searching, but I also made some things up. My work comprised researching the same in different areas of life: environment, human being, computer generated imagery etc., looking into different aspects and then bringing them together and looking for the same kind of ideas in those different aspects, searching for a pattern. But in the end, I am interested in just one question: what is human and humanity, and how might these change
Categories
George Selley
George Selley
STATEMENT
Human Exploitation
In 1996, the US Department of Defence released declassified excerpts of a manual entitled, The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. The manual had been a standard textbook for students at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA); an American military training academy set up in Panama in 1946, which trained Latin American soldiers using techniques that were compatible with United States military customs and traditions. The manual is specifically concerned with interrogation techniques, and advocates the use of fear, beatings, false imprisonment and executions. More than 60,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained at the School of the Americas, and in all, 11 dictators have attended its courses – among them, some of the region’s most notorious human rights abusers: dictators, death-squad leaders and even drug traffickers. Despite a truly shocking list of human rights abusing alumni, US army officials identify these men as “a few bad apples”, and the school still exists today.
This military training manual is an institutional record: part of an archive, one generated by the actions and processes of the implementation of power – the bureaucracy of warfare. Archives are time and space bound, perpetually connected to events in the past, yet they can also be carried forward into new circumstances where they are re-presented and used – evoking Hal Foster’s description of the archive as a place of creation: “a move to turn excavation sites into construction sites.” Here, the manual is deconstructed and re-presented with fresh meaning. Pasted over its pages are photographs from the University of Milwaukee Photography Archive – taken by two early to mid-20th century American geographers: Isaiah Bowman, and Eugene Vernon Harris. Bowman and Harris were using photography to chart, map and document Latin America on behalf of the American Geographical Society, and the US Foreign Service respectively, shortly before the formation of the school.
Except Bowman and Harris’ images are also presented in edited form and paired with extracts of text from the manual. The language of imperialism is deconstructed, an air of suspicion and mystery is created; people are physically removed, and attention is drawn to banal objects that become menacing: attempting to convey the mindset taught to these young soldiers. As we move through the images, a dark, almost poem-like narrative forms, things are covered up, and layers overlap. All the while the implements and materials of bureaucracy are present – post-it notes, highlighters and office paper provide a sterile juxtaposition to the disturbing passages of the manual.
This editing process can be associated with the “performance” that archivists enact on the archive. Hal Foster describes the nature of archives as at once “found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.” There is no fixed meaning of any archival document: we may know the action that created the trace, but its present and future meanings can never be fixed.
Ultimately, the work seeks to challenge and comprehend the way in which we understand not only the archive, but also the historical past in the present, whilst demonstrating that contemporary geo-political issues are often incredibly complex and historical. It seeks to do this not through indictment or emotional blackmail, but rather by attempting to create an emotive and informative encounter with the viewer.
BIO
George Selley is a London based photographer, filmmaker and researcher. George currently teaches photography at the Fine Arts College, in Camden. He is a recent graduate of MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication. His work has been published in Dazed, Huck, The British Journal of Photography, Artpress and Fisheye Magazine, among others. In 2017, George was one of the first photographers to receive the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Student Award. More recently he was a finalist in the Prix HSBC Pour la Photographie 2019 and the Felix Schoeller Best Emerging Photographer Award 2017. He has been exhibited all over Europe and the United States. His 2015 documentary Study Drugs was selected and screened at the 2015 American Public Health Association Film Festival, in Chicago. George is a co-founder of the Carte Blanche Collective and a member of Inpro.
CONVERSATION
The power of images –
deconstruction,
sabotage, engagement
and re-contextualisation
Yuliya: I’m wondering: how can we learn from the past – in particular for example from this story that you reveal – in order to build a better future? We think we learn from the past, but doesn’t history just repeat itself? What’s your opinion on that in relation to this work?
George: For me, the history of the school and the manual is associated with a kind of damaged and twisted memory that is very much broken. I think the whole idea behind the work is to take those remains and rearrange and re-interpret them somehow – not necessarily by adding something new, but by working with what is already there and trying to see it in a different way, to challenge the contemporary historical narrative, to understand the nuances and complexities of the school and the wider repercussions that are linked to it.
In his essay On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin talks about the historical materialist, whose role, he says, is to move away from the contemporary historical narrative as much as possible. He says that the historical materialist must “brush history against the grain.” I think this is a perfect phrase for explaining what I mean by somehow re-arranging and re-interpreting the remains of a damaged and twisted memory.
Yuliya: So how do you relate particularly to a future-oriented archive?
George: I think of Kabakov’s garbage dump, which constantly devours and preserves, but also continually generates something new – this is what I understand as a fertile archive … Archive as a place of creation – it preserves things but it also continually generates something new. It is like turning excavation sites into construction sites. I think that’s very much relevant to my work, but also to our collective project.
Yuliya: George, for you, what is the connection between political and personal?
George: What a question! Actually, when we discussed it, we came up with other questions from that question rather than answers. I mean, what do we mean by political? Almost anything can be political, and it reminded me of something that Brecht said: a belief that art should not be political is in itself a political statement. But if I was to try and answer the question in relation specifically to my work and this project, I think I would probably speak about methodology and process, and also about starting points. I think it’s very relevant to talk about how it came into being. In the case of this particular body of work, the starting point was an invitation to take part in this wider collaborative project by people who had been or who have family members who had been personally affected by the story and by the repercussions of the school.
I felt this kind of responsibility and a kind of privilege that these people thought I had something to add and offer – despite the fact that I’m not Latin American and I don’t have any overly obvious personal connection to the story or the school. And that really made the work and the process very intense and very personal for me. It became very personal, because I was so touched. And I think maybe in a sense they provided the personal aspect, while I – through my previous work around the US manipulation of Latin America – provided some kind of a political aspect, but through the process of working together those boundaries of who provided what became all mixed and merged in a very constructive way.
In terms of process and methodology, the starting point for a piece of work for me is always something quite tangible, and when I say “tangible”, I mean something that exists or existed – a document, a photograph, a historical event; a story or injustice of some kind.
Yuliya: We discussed before the idea that everything is political, and we have this saying that even if you are not interested in politics, politics will be interested in you somehow.
George: Yes, choosing not to be aware of it is in itself a political stance.
Yuliya: From the viewers’ perspective, what does it mean to find this kind of material not in an archive and state institutional context, but in the artistic context? I mean, what are you aiming to produce as an effect on the viewer by putting it into this artistic context?
George: I think that even though we live in a time when information is more accessible than ever before, people still don’t really engage with this kind of stuff. You know, you can download all these materials and you can look at Freedom of Information requests, you can also make your own freedom of information requests. There are lots of things that we can access, but they are all very text heavy, and it’s a very specific kind of a person that actually downloads this kind of stuff – usually white, middle-aged men. And so, I think there’s something about taking them out of those contexts and putting them into a different context. And there are many settings in which this can be done that make it more accessible somehow.
We were talking before about Tim Hetherington’s Trojan horse theory – almost enticing the audience into re-framing and re-contextualising the material in a way that makes it more likely that someone may engage with it. And it’s not just in artistic settings that this can be done – we, as a collaborative project, have done this in many ways, like taking the work to places where atrocities happened in Latin America that were conducted and controlled by graduates of the School of the Americas, going back to those villages and those places and creating some kind of exhibition or collaboration or just a discussion with people there about what happened, sharing material with them and then sometimes receiving new material from them that maybe we didn’t see before. It’s a kind of intervention, a way of bringing these things into a collaborative discussion. But they shouldn’t just be done in artistic settings, because the art world is in itself a very inaccessible world, so we are trying to bring things into the public discourse and make it accessible.
Yuliya: How about the artistic methods you use by creating collages ?
George: The images are pasted over the text. It is a kind of attempt to deconstruct and sabotage the language of imperialism – break it up literally, physically, challenge it. I think it’s a good way to present the work because people can engage one at a time – it’s somehow more impactful than, for instance, having the images on the wall. I’m interested in how other people think it can be interpreted.
Yuliya: But it’s also related to this question about the gestures of an archive such as revealing, which is one of the important concepts of your work from the intellectual and conceptual point of view, but also folding and unfolding – the physicality of the work. How do you relate to these gestures?
George: There was a nice sentence in the article that we shared with each other where Hal Foster describes archives as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private, and that there’s no real fixed meaning of any archival documents – we might know the action that created the trace, but its present and future meanings can never really be fixed. In other words, something new is constantly being revealed and things are always being re-interpreted and re-arranged. There’s a very obvious link with collage and these words that we’re using: revealing, folding and unfolding. In terms of collage, this is a kind of physical reconceptualization.
Yuliya: Another concept from this article that all of us found so interesting was the gaps in an archive – that it’s very difficult to direct towards the future, when certain information somehow disappears.
Søren: I just thought it was interesting to think about the importance of what’s not in the archive. Just because the material isn’t there doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It’s always important for an archive to acknowledge the missing information. George talked about how almost everything is available, but then it’s maybe not so important that things are available, but it’s the structures which decide how they become available and how they become apparent to you that are the really important part. What digital ways do we find to explore information and knowledge that opens up and reveals these structures, and how do these digital structures hide information in their own way ?
Yuliya: Hiding is also a gesture related to an archive.
Søren: Definitely.
George: I think that’s very related to what Walter Benjamin said: who chooses where the gaps should be, which bits are important and which bits are not important in our construction of history? And I think that the project very much tries to show that geopolitical issues are often incredibly complex and they’re very historical and that perhaps things are not always as they seem. And that we have a very simplified idea of history and that maybe we lose some of these nuances that can be found in these gaps.
SOUND
The sound above is an amalgamation of songs known to be currently or historically used by the US Military for interrogation purposes. The Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual (a US military manual used to teach interrogation techniques to students at the School of Americas) talks extensively about the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners and interrogatees. The manual advocates the use of sensory control – whether a deprivation of the senses, or an overload of unwanted sensory stimulus: such as very loud music played continuously. The idea behind such techniques is to prevent any form of routine developing in the prisoner, with the aim of ultimately inducing “psychological regression”: a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioural level.
I have taken a selection of these songs, randomly corrupted the files in an editing software and then channelled them through an analogue synthesiser before recomposing the sound into its current form. The sound becomes swamped, the violence hidden within the status of the songs selected – an attempt to create a sinister representation of the sound of state violence and torture.
Categories
Margherita Muriti
Margherita Muriti
STATEMENT
The blood liquefied at 10 am – it will be a good year!
Some drops of myrtle
A vine leaf
2 Oz of moonstone
Add a pinch of scratched image powder
Leave it to stand in the sun for a while
Make a wish
Once it becomes soft put it on your skin
Every year, on the 19th of September, thousands of people assemble and wait for the miracle: the liquefaction of Saint Januarius’ blood, according to legend he was saved by a woman just after his death. The archbishop tilts the ampoule with the solid blood through a very precise ritual of hand gestures. If the blood turns into liquid, it will be a good year.
Touching is always a mutual action: what is touched, touches back. This work is about the empty space where two surfaces seem to mingle, the proximity between my hands and images. In Ancient Greece, it was believed that the act of seeing happened through a very thin film through which the scene reached the eye. It was this pellicula, a wafer-thin skin, that made things visible.
What’s the relationship between the act of seeing and touching? Do we touch when we cannot see? Do we touch in order to see better, to see further? Do we touch to stop seeing?
Candles were the first lights; they were used to heat as well as to keep hopes and desires alive. Used in different kinds of rituals, they have always bonded our visible, concrete and material world to invisible ones.
A ritual is a repetitive sequence of gestures which is the external manifestation of an internal belief.
The blood liquefied at 10 am – it will be a good year! is a photography and installation work which consists of wax tablets laid out on a surface with floating heating light bulbs suspended a few centimetres above them. Every day, slowly heated, the opaque surfaces become transparent, allowing the images to appear.
Touching images, hiding and revealing them, sometimes scratching, creasing or crushing them. They are brittle images, never fully graspable.
In Byzantine culture, the defacement and disappearance of the images was not an act of defilement but a sign of devotion, a recirculation of the painted body in the body of the beholder.
The work has evolved through a study of gestures, the photographic gesture itself and the imprint process. The imprint process is similar to photography, but, unlike the latter, which creates a specular resemblance, the imprint needs contact and proximity. The image becomes a matter of surface, its materiality acts as a protection, gradually hiding and revealing it.
Wax is a prodigious and almost living material. Like organic forms, it’s malleable, it assumes the temperature and the form of my body. Once heated, this ductile material is neither solid nor liquid. Images become viscous and sticky. Unstable and fragile, just a little heat can transform them, create an oscillation between form and formlessness. One part flows, changing its shape and the other one evaporates, mixing with oxygen. The evolution, change and disappearance over a certain period of time proves its instability and relates these images to living organisms.
BIO
Margherita Muriti lives and works between France and Italy. After literary studies,
she graduated from Gobelins, l’École de l’Image, in 2017. Ranging from photography to film and installation, her work focuses on the fragility and persistence of images, questioning the photographic medium and its process of transformation. Margerita’s practice also draws from the dialogue between senses, how different
languages stimulate us, act on our body and its perception.
Her work was part of collective exhibitions such as Voies Off Festival, Rencontres d’Arles 2017, Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie de Niort 2018 and Futuruins at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice 2018/19. One of her last projects, Le Blanc Nuit, was exhibited in Venice, at the VAP gallery during the summer of 2019. On that occasion, she invited artists to perform with her installation pieces.
CONVERSATION
How constantly
transforming
images become
a space
of encounter?
Yuliya : Your project is very much about the physicality of images and the relationship between their
essence and their elusive form. The concept of a gesture seems very important to me regarding your work, both through the process of creation and afterwards, when the images constantly transform in the wax. What is the importance of gestures in your work for you? In particular, I mean the archival gestures, such as revealing, folding and unfolding…
Margherita : I think that somehow this project is about gestures. One of my starting points was the interest in our gestures when facing images, how we physically approach them.
I’m now thinking about a performance I assisted during the last Venice Biennale. It was about idols and how we relate to sculptures in the public space. A Spanish actress played the role of some statues from the Catalan public space, such as the ones of famous football players or royal personas. People were asked to make some gestures towards them: gestures of devotion, violence, protest or any kind of gestures. I started from a reflection on images in a very large sense and on how we relate to them. In general, I’m very attentive to gestures, trying to understand what they suggest, mean, translate and reveal of our way of being.
Yuliya : How does this relationship to gestures influence your work for our common project on a future-oriented archive?
Margherita : Photography is a gesture in itself, and an archive is an ensemble of gestures, isn’t it?
In this project, I started thinking progressively about our relation to images, the way we look at them as if they were alive, the reason and the way we do it.
I think of the novel by Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva – which is very well known thanks to Freud’s work on it. It is the story of an archaeologist who falls in love with a woman depicted in a bas-relief in Rome. When he gets back to his country, he commands a plaster reproduction of it and starts to imagine her moving. He has visions of her walking and then he comes back to Italy to search for her. What touched me in this story was the power of a very small detail of the bas-relief and seeing how it leads him to make her alive: her left foot can be just glimpsed under her raised garment-dress and it is barely lifted, as if she was walking. It is thanks to her foot gesture that she becomes alive in his dreams.
George : Your project makes me think about this phrase: “see it to believe”. Touching and seeing something makes it real and tangible for us. It also makes me think about Charcot’s obsession of opening up the body and trying to find diseases or madness, as if it could be grasped somehow and found, located somewhere to prove that it is something real. But you cannot find it, it is not physically there. So does it actually exist?
Joachim : Instead of talking about these hidden facts, hidden matter within the work, I think the work is much more the opposite: it is revealing something.
I think that my project is about revealing something, using language to reveal, Margherita’s project makes a statement: as the wax slowly melts and shows the final pieces, it reveals something. Margherita, I guess that by styling your work you hide something within it, but then, during the process, it is revealed again.
Margherita : Yes, absolutely. If you think about the process of heating the wax, the time of revealing is much longer than the time it takes to become veiled again. It can take two hours to reveal and then five minutes to be hidden.
Joachim : It is really interesting also because it is really connected to a political statement concerning the archive: it is easy to hide something compared to revealing it.
George : There is a connection in both of your works, Margherita and Joachim, between this kind of performance of an archivist and how things are revealed by the archivist: there is an archive, and then an archivist’s role is to dig in the archive and reveal things. It is almost a performance which seems to relate to your work, Margherita, in the sense that during the process you are doing a kind of performance. And also the light, the bulb melting the wax – it is about revealing some kind of information or an insight.
Margherita : The whole process is very performative. The way I print images, I melt wax and put it in the mould… it is a ritual of gestures that follows exactly this path.
Joachim : I also think that revealing and hiding is very much present in Soren’s work, which is about hiding images side to side, the performance of walking, as the archivist going into something and revealing are very present.
Margherita : It is very much linked to the physical place of the viewer as well.
Søren : Yes, I agree. I also think about the use of wax in your work, Margherita. Of course there is the question of preservation in it because wax encapsulates things and it is a sort of preservation. But wax is a fluid material, almost alive, and it is a sort of skin you put on the image and it becomes a way to give images their own life. It’s like moving between the visible and the invisible. The invisible is a part of the visible, it is always present and you have to engage to make it reveal. It is not something which is away from the world, it’s there but you have to activate it, engage yourself in a performative act to make it visible.
I would like to hear more of your thoughts about this material, wax, and its living aspect, its transformation. I recently read an article about religious wax sculpture, and there was a restorer talking about how these sculptures still sweat, hundreds years later. As if they are alive. It is giving these images their own life, and it would also connect to the archive as a constant accumulation of meaning, which is not settled, but fluid.
Margherita : It is precisely about wax as a living material and its transformation. In this sense, it is linked to the idea of preservation, or maybe non-preservation. What I point out is its changing character, how its state is constantly changing, as life is.
Yuliya : How is the concept of temporality linked to your work, and especially to the future in our project?
Margherita : The installation focuses on transformation, so, somehow, it is just about the present, as if the work asked you to be there, in that precise moment, and look at its transformation.
My work is not about recording or registering, but rather about the importance of the transformation, even if I think about the material, wax, and the relation my project has with the concepts of palimpsest, recording marks, fingerprints.
Carola : I’m not quite sure that time does not play a role in your work, because even if you see something in the present, you might match it with something in the past or the future, because it is changing, slowly…
Margherita : Yes, of course. It is changing. Maybe we should state more precisely what the duration of the present we are talking about is. When I say that it is not linked to temporality, I mean that it does not make a difference between past and future, as it focuses on the present, on the “now”, and you do not really have any marks of the past or the future on it.
So I think it is about an image in a very large sense and about being in the present to look at its transformation. It is also a way to be patient, to stand there and wait to see what the image reveals. The image is not there yet. It asks you to take time and see what it slowly reveals… It is a way to add a different temporality, as if it asked you to stop, wait and look.
Yuliya : In your statement, you wrote about the empty space, where two surfaces seem to mingle. In terms of gestures, an archive is also an empty space between what is really conserved, what happens and what remains as knowledge.
Margherita : I would relate it more to the idea of the role of the viewer, a visitor to an archive. Actually, the space I talk about is far from being empty. It is the space of connection, encounter. In a metaphorical way it is empty, but finally it is far from being empty, it is the place where interesting things happen.
