Seminar Vision Play - Interactivos?'08: introduction

[see programme]

The majority of the images we produce are made for the human eye. That would be a trivial observation, were it not for the importance we attribute to images upon structuring our material environment s well as our political and moral universe. There are drawbacks to supposing that the subject, the citizen, is also (and in a sense, fundamentally) a vision machine, with all its peculiarities and limitations. The first drawback is that it forces one to ask to what extent the production of images and the ways of combining them contribute to modifying our concept of who we are.

The theoretical seminar “Juegos de la visión” (Vision Games) does not aim to present a linear history but instead, open up for reflection several contemporary approaches that explore the meaning of images and perception thresholds in the contemporary world. It is possible however to give an overview of the ways that images have changed us.

The 17th century left us two legacies. The first is that of a subject who is aware that the ability to perceive is also an Achilles' heel. That subject was certainly a member of the elite, of the Court, permanently surrounded by images and besieged by the illusion of volume and time: volume in trompe l'oeils and anamorphosis; time in the suggested movement of foreshortening; and both in the ephemeral projections of the magic lantern. The second is separating the experience of the observer from that of the spectator. Instruments like microscopes and telescopes brought a fragmentation of scale and outlook with them. And with it came new notions of transit and sequence, mew strategies for recovering the whole though visual fragments. Since then, we have not ceased wondering whose visual experience we are recomposing, what potential observer is hidden behind it, and what does it contribute to us.

The explosion of optical gadgets and the development of automatic registry apparatuses (from photographic cameras to miograms) during the 19th century would not only change time. While artistic experiments explored the limits of the production of volume and figures through Impressionism, the advent of capturing snapshots generated new experiences(such as the illusion of an empty city created through overexposure) and unusual questions. For example, how many points of view –and filmed by how many cameras- can be used legitimately to record movement objectively and rigorously? How many types of lenses can be used? Cameras were developed as witnesses and converted into subjects.

All these questions arose as the nervous system was being explored and analyzed as a system that unified and gave meaning to the body. We then began to produce images, discourse, and tricks not as a matter of taste or pleasure but instead for the thresholds of the central nervous system. The explanatory strength of the brain, the fascinating interpretation of its images, the illusions emanating from our own neuro-physiological makeup turned us into spectators, captive and fascinated by our own limits. We were fascinated by exploring what we were able and unable to perceive, what stimuli we were unaware of, and how well we could recompose or register changes. These fascinating matters also led to the question of whether it was immoral to model and train not the eye but the brain itself without the filters of conscience. The terms discipline, education and suggestion came to mean practically the same thing, obscuring (or simply transforming) the very idea of citizenship.

In any case, the possibility of using visual means to make processes visible that due to their length, low intensity or medium were imperceptible to the human eye changed our form of dialoguing with the material environment and experimenting with it. Today information technologies place new points of view at our disposition. Some examples are: that of satellites or time lapse cameras that portray a year-long process in a few minutes; that of the a-historical, trans-historical or ultra-historical subject that arises from the possibility of recomposing fragments of a hypothetical unity, of mixing technologies, or of capturing snapshots in milieus that are hostile to human life (nuclear landscapes, acidic mediums, high pressure zones or the inside of the human body). In many ways, the always contingent capturing of an image can no longer be said to be a passive action: the process alters the object itself at the very moment one acts upon it, turning it into history. It is impossible to be a spectator: the mere act of looking turns one into an actor and transforms the world.