Everything that Shines Sees, UGhent/KASK Ghent, 2021.

Doctoral dissertation, 240 pages.

For my doctoral research project Everything That Shines Sees, I take a closer look at the concepts of self-origination and mediation for a better understanding of the photographic inscription engendered by a flash of light and its natural radiation. Starting from my own artistic experiments with fulguric and cosmic rays, performed in cooperation with a lightning simulation lab in Oxfordshire (UK) and with the nuclear research centre CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), my research puts forward a speculative approach that looks beyond static and traditional assumptions about what it entails to ‘be photographic’. Through the exploration of the creative role fulfilled by a sudden burst of light across different time periods and different manifestations (fulgurites, imprints, photograms, sound), focus is laid on the part the acheiropoietic and the automatic can play in this revitalized apprehension of the photograph as a technical image and of the agencies involved in its mediation. The research projects discussed thus aim to foreground the involvement of nonhuman contributors in the formation of contemporary images and their epistemology as a possible way to re-think perception in a time increasingly shaped by a reliance on artificially induced visibility.

In my dissertation I discuss historic and contemporary case studies that link the flash and its technology to three major concepts: light, time and mind. I hereby focus on the engagement proper to the technical process of mediation by flashlight, and how that is tied to the performative qualities of its distinct aesthetic and the often contradictory symbolism attached to it. In doing so, I reveal that flashlight is not merely a means of obtaining some independently given entity; it is an intrinsic part of the construction and the signification of the substance since phenomena are thoroughly constituted by its workings.

The published output consists of two volumes. Volume I presents a theoretical investigation into flashlight as a creative concept within contemporary artistic practice. Volume II features a selection of my audiovisual works created in the framework of this doctoral research. 

Introductory chapter

Despite the confusion and danger that it holds in store for the viewer, the human fascination with the flash image is a persistent one. Is it a sort of entrancement, an evocation of a pure or even higher energy that attracts us, disclosing what operates beyond the threshold of human perception? Or are we drawn by the act of rebellion and dislocation that this caesura of artificial light creates, overwhelming the naked eye and disrupting our sense of reasoning?

As part of my doctoral research project entitled Everything That Shines Sees, I explore in this dissertation how the event, the technology and the phenomenon of flashlight in photography have contributed to the formation of a modern understanding of vision and to the articulation of perception as a cultural concept and not just a physiological one. 

Rather than trace an exhaustive history of flash lighting, I analyse in this dissertation a number of specific themes from a media-philosophical approach, and with reference to examples from the domains of philosophy, science, literature, art and popular culture.

These leitmotifs prove essential not only to a critical assessment of artificial lighting technologies and the production and reception of flash images, but also to my own artistic praxis. I turn to case studies and contemporary written sources in which researchers, artists and visual theorists have attempted to rethink perception, following questions raised by flash photography. This also includes the more subjective aspects of vision and the difficulties of finding a language that can describe and discuss the visual and mental shocks that came with this technology marked by suddenness and surprise. How to speak of the ungraspable, the unforeseeable and the extremely abrupt? What literary metaphors were projected onto the phenomenon and technological apparatus of flashlight, in an attempt to make sense of the medium and its unique relationship to truth, and to certain aspects of the virtual and the imaginary? 

Particular focus is laid on flashlight as a specific form of mediation characterised by a mutual dependence on human and nonhuman agencies. I investigate what this process might tell us about the ontology and capacity of physical as well as mediated vision. What does seeing mean with respect to the agency of the creative being when interacting with an optical apparatus? What does the fact that vision increasingly becomes a technical matter imply for the longstanding assumption that there is a seamless continuation of the physical experience into the photographical experience of perception, and of traditional visual media into technical ones? Shouldn't we adopt new perspectives with regard to the mediation involved in flash images, such as a perspective of transience, self-origination, interactivity and process? My aim is to start from these flash-related issues as a reference point against which I can explore which roles the logic of technical mediation itself plays in the creation of the very appearances that it mediates. I examine the engagement proper to the technical process of mediation by flash, and how that is tied to the performative qualities of flash's aesthetic. 

In addressing the different agencies involved in mediation by flashlight, I draw upon three important premises relating to technical vision and imagery. 
First, there is the concept of phénoménotechnique, developed in the 1930s by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in the context of his interest in the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Aiming to determine the specific involvement of technicity in science, Bachelard claimed that the results of controlled observational practices, photographic images included, are per definition constructed and therefore have little to do with reality as such. They only exist by the grace of the technical processes through which they are produced. The mere fact that technology is an integral component of modern science means that the information engendered by it does not simply describe the world but actually produces new phenomena in the course of its emergence. This also implies that such phenomena are not simply pre-existent, ready to be discovered, but that they are invented and constructed, Bachelard argued. The theories that observational science operates with are inseparable from the material tools through which phenomena are induced and normalised as research output. Appearance and apparatus interact and instruct one another. The technical instrument already represents the embodiment of a certain stock of knowledge while the instrumentally mediated observation or image is also a source of action in the acquiring of knowledge. The dynamics involved in scientific observation inspired Bachelard to develop an epistemology of process and innovation, intended to cover the plasticity and contingency of scientific thinking itself. Within this configuration, the instrument does not passively extend the observer's perceptive capacities: it has its own agenda as the outcome of a specific implementation of expertise. Bachelard described the subjective dimension of this engagement with phénoménotechniqueas the 'psychoanalysis' of scientific knowledge.

When applied to the flash photograph as a technically produced vehicle of perception, the idea of phénoménotechnique then suggests that both image and depicted phenomenon are not hidden preconditions of the world awaiting to be discovered and exposed but rather the work of a determinate recording apparatus and optical instrument — camera, lens, shutter, flashlight, photo-sensitive emulsion, post-production procedures — manufactured and put into practice at a certain point in time. They are therefore more closely connected to the technical dispositif than to reality as we experience it. Furthermore, image and depicted phenomenon are in continuous construction and progress, for they depend on the functionalities and competences of a time-bound apparatus. The visible has to do with the technologically attainable at a given moment in history. Following Bachelard then, to think about the practice of flash photography requires taking into consideration the concrete technological praxis and history of its specific form of mediation. 

In his book Laboratory Life (1979), the French philosopher Bruno Latour expanded Bachelard'sphénoménotechnique. He claimed that one important feature of the use of what he calls 'inscription devices' is that once the end product, an inscription or image, is available, all the intermediary steps which made its production possible are forgotten. The engendered information becomes the focus of discussion and the material processes which gave rise to it are either omitted or taken for granted as being merely technical matters. A first consequence of the dismissal of material processes to the realm of the purely technical is that inscriptions/images are seen as direct indicators of the substance under study. The central importance of the material arrangement, however, is that none of the engendered phenomena could exist without it. Without an artificial lighting device, for example, flash photographs and the representations they engender cannot be said to exist. Flashlight is not merely a means of obtaining some independently given entity; it is part of the construction of the substance since phenomena are thoroughly constituted by its workings. The artificial reality, which is nevertheless often described in terms of an objective given, has in fact been constructed by the use of a technical apparatus with a distinctly socio-cultural component. It prompts Latour to conclude that we have never been truly modern, for while everything happens in that space where human and nonhuman meet, it is hardly ever acknowledged as such.

It is this paradox, which is an essential feature of science for Latour, that also complicates a media-philosophical approach of technical images, including photographs made by flash. He elaborated on this issue by defining an 'actor-network theory', in which he states that humans never act alone, but are always caught up in networks that include both environmental features and technologies, which he refers to as nonhuman actants.

Central to the notion of phénoménotechnique and the actor-network theory is the question: what constitutes an apparatus within a specific observational practice? For example, if a wireless sensor activates a slave flash unit, hooked up to a main flash unit, which in turn is connected to a digital camera and a computer interface, where then can we set the boundaries of the apparatus? How about the photographer who operates the camera and processes the data via imaging software? The paper the image is printed on? The person who views the resultant image and subjectively interprets its qualities and significance? The art critic who evaluates the image when exhibited on the gallery wall and who writes about it in the specialised press? 

Theoretical physicist Karen Barad argues that the constellation of an apparatus remains an open (but non-arbitrary) temporal process [i]. It is in and of itself a phenomenon, made up of interactions with other apparatuses and actors, both human and nonhuman. Optical devices and the reality they represent, Barad says, are therefore not fixed givens but an ongoing dynamic of interactivity. Furthermore, phenomena are not limited to human or social constructions; we don't simply make the world in our image. Other species as well as artificial intelligence have different apparatuses that discern reality in a different way. As it stands today, with observation and recording techniques increasingly decoupling from our agency and vision, human practices are not the only operations that come to matter, but neither is the world independent of them. For Barad, then, the main task is to determine what role human actors exactly play within a specific observational apparatus. 

Second, there is Vilém Flusser's keen analysis of how technically produced images, starting with photographs, have drastically changed the ways in which we relate to our surroundings. He already raised this point more than thirty years ago in his publication Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), before electronic technologies made the dominant mark on society that they have today. Within his media theory, the Czech philosopher offers a unique approach as to how we can position ourselves in this new environment, where automated optical devices progressively distance themselves from human agency, and humans increasingly experience, evaluate, and act in function of the images these devices produce. For Flusser, the origin and purpose of technical pictures are fundamentally different from that of traditional ones, and we need to acknowledge that distinction before we can even begin to decode, interact with and comprehend the meaning of the visual experiences opened up by mechanised processes and their computational logic. He does not suggest by this that technical procedures operate outside the human but rather that our complex entanglement in them cannot be explained by our too narrow principles of human intentionality, free will and authorship. Apparatuses, Flusser said, are entirely different from human thought functions precisely because they have been developed to visualise the invisible and conceptualise the inconceivable in an automated fashion. They want 'neither to grasp nor to represent nor to understand things;' to an apparatus, what we find difficult to see is just 'a field of possible ways in which to function' [ii]. And that is exactly what a technical image is to Flusser: a blindly realised possibility, something invisible that has become visible from the inside of the apparatus. But the illusory objectivity of this technical visibility does present the theory of perception with certain dilemmas. Since the depicted subject can only emerge in that state through the use of specialised instruments, the question whether these instruments themselves affect the phenomenon they are intent on making observable becomes a problem. It is therefore key to recognise the importance and specificity of underlying technologies when discussing technical images and the cultural (mis)perceptions they give rise to.

According to Flusser, one such misconception is the so-called 'crisis of authority', brought about by the reproducibility and automation of technical imagery. For it is based on the false dichotomy of personal freedom and technological determinism, an obsolete structure that does not even apply to mechanical pictures. The delusional concepts of the author and the original obscure the fact that the production of information is a dialogue, he claimed. Flusser illustrated this by describing the photograph as the result of an exchange between the photographer and the photographic apparatus, therefore it makes no sense to call each one of these partners an author in its own right. He did however provide an important task for those who challenge the control of the automatic apparatus by provoking unpredictable situations/images that turn the instrument against its own condition of being automatic. In doing so, the contingencies of our complex dialogue with technology are kept open and the relation can be investigated in more nuanced and unforeseen ways. 

Criticism of technical images, Flusser concluded, requires an analysis on the basis of their program and on the acknowledgment that they are not reproductive but productive agencies. Such a criticism requires other criteria that the traditional true-false, real-artificial, or real-apparent ones. Trying to classify technical images according to their meaning is bound to fail from the start. For technical images do not signify anything in and of themselves; they only indicate a direction, Flusser claimed. He put forward several criteria, which he considered more suited to the character of automated images: the extent to which they are informative, surprising or predictable, for example. After all, Flusser believed, one can only propose a relevant way of looking at a technical image, for not what is depicted in it but rather the image itself shows the true message. 

Third, there is the current interest in what has been termed 'nonhuman photography.' Broader cultural theories concerned with the influence of nonhuman factors on today's ecological state of the Earth have also found their way into the philosophy of photography. Described as 'the nonhuman turn', these theories engage with a decentring of the human as the main point of reference for a critical thinking about the radical geological changes brought on by our modern way of life. They also take into consideration forces that operate independently from human will or control. As the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man, has engendered a crisis of biological and social life as such, not in the least by the dominance of new media technologies, attention has now been drawn to shifts in our engagement with these nonhuman entities and issues: 'animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies,' as they are broadly described by media philosopher Richard Grusin [iii]. Unfortunately, these changed engagements usually come to our attention in their negative capacities, ranging from climate change, endangered species and environmental pollution over pandemics, terrorism and war to problems with intellectual property, surveillance, and privacy. Yet this revision of our place in the world as a species has also engendered a more attentive way of behaving and looking, a deepened sense of connectedness with other forms of life, and an awareness of the vital role (visual) technologies can play in all this.

There are many different facets to the conceptualisation of the nonhuman turn in critical thinking but my interest here closely follows the interpretation in which the traditional idea of active subjects versus passive objects is replaced by a dynamic mediation between both human and nonhuman agencies [iv].For this rethinking of vitality in terms of a process-oriented exchange can provide a way forward for photography, away from eroded concepts in which creation is set against technique, and the indexical and the intentional are privileged over the non-figurative and the unforeseen. 

One such critical reassessment of photography in terms of a life-shaping form of mediation, which only every so often involves humans, can be found in Joanna Zylinska's aptly entitled publication Nonhuman photography(2017). Her basic assumption is that the technical medium itself needs to be understood as a mutual exchange within which or through which humans and nonhumans relate [v].One of the conventional principles of image-making she challenges is the self-focused photographer who is in control of his own vision and (world)view. She outlines an ecological model of perception which favors a process-driven type of photography as well as discusses various aspects of visualization from a longer-term and much wider perspective; these include photographic practices from which the human is entirely absent (microphotography, space photography, drone-mounted cameras) and photographic manifestations with close links to biology, geology, chemistry, electrophysics, and the universal laws of light and energy (fossils, imprints, photograms, light-sensitive emulsions, numerical systems). The aim Zylinska sets in Nonhuman photography is to analyse new ontological approaches to nonhuman photography and to offer possible ways of negotiating them,adapted to the sensibilities of our time and to the altered functions and capacities of photography today. 

In Volume I, the photographic flash of light is discussed theoretically in relation to three major concepts, namely light, time and mind. In Chapter One, Flash and Light, the photographic flash is discussed as a source of illumination that intervenes in space and time and startles the gaze. Attention is paid to the particular ways in which artificial light is able to expose a hidden world and how its unique visual qualities affect all that is depicted by its sudden eruption. Focusing on the excessive flash in terms of a manipulative light that carries both creative and destructive properties, moments of crisis are discussed that involve a traumatic loss of coordinates caused by the flare's confrontational dazzle. The main interest lies here in the way certain literal and figurative gestures of destruction relate to the practice of flash photography and how conflicts are also marked by a form of transition and renewal, much as a burst of light is. Acheiropoietic auto-impressions by a sudden strike of luminance are looked into in order to investigate how they relate to certain commonly favoured concepts in photography such as indexicality, intentionality, authorship and originality as well as to consider the current relevance of acheiropoietic processes in view of today's increased automatisation and dehumanisation of visual media.

Chapter Two, Flash and Time, explores flashlight with regard to time, temporality and speed. It takes a closer look at the sudden eruption of brilliance as a constitutive element in the visualisation and conceptualisation of duration, movement and the moment in time. The ways in which artificial lighting techniques and their resultant imagery have altered the understanding and experience of time, not only from a physiological but also from an aesthetic perspective are foregrounded. Time-related challenges revealed by flash are discussed in view of human experiences of temporality and to the body in motion.

Chapter Three, Flash and Mind, examines the flash of light in terms of an unexpected transition connected to insights and cathartic experiences that arrive in a moment of surprise. In the case studies explored in this section, the burst of light acts as a conduit for communication between the psychical and the material world with a distinct link to the immanent truth of things. The metaphor between external light and internal enlightenment is discussed, as is the visual language for using flashlight to represent psychological and spiritual states. Theories that try to describe and fully grasp the elusive nature of flashlight as a revelatory force are addressed. Can the identity of such luminance ever be disclosed? Or is flashlight, as French philosopher François Laruelle suggests, a kind of otherworldly, artificial intelligence, which we can never approach to the core? 

Volume II features a selection of my own pictorial works, which are part of the artistic outcome of this doctoral research. They present visual possibilities and scenarios that might formulate an adequate answer to the research questions that instigated this doctoral project and often recur in my artistic praxis in more general terms:

How can flashlight be mobilised within a conceptual model to get to the essence of perception? How can I evoke artistically the complex experience of the light pulse? And — within this — what role does the machine play? Do I play? Where do flash's affiliation with aspects of enchantment and technicality meet? How can I approach the core of the flash from an artistic or a phenomenological point of view if I cannot look straight into its source without being blinded, without it being replaced by a blind spot or an after-image? Do I approach it from its periphery? From a point of denial and avoidance? Or from its absence, meaning from the dark and therefore its invisibility? Can flash indeed create a convulsive beauty, an aesthetic that can be translated by a visual 'print' of it? Is this then an essentially picnoleptic image, constructed of ruptures, absences and dislocations, which evolve out of the whiteout (or is it blackout?) caused by the explosion of luminosity?

With these objectives as a starting point, what I am most set on pursuing in my works is to present openings that promise alternatives and new configurations of interaction between human and technical ways of seeing: thought-provoking interventions that either clash or crash, whereby the boundaries of human control and technical self-generation are called into question. In so doing, I hope to broaden the understanding of the photographic and its mediation, to stretch it far beyond an intentional act by an individual author operating a camera and an artificial light source. I am hereby particularly inspired by premises that make a plea for a diversified approach to theories of perception, while at the same time linking the practice of image-making to a form of philosophy, or, vice-versa, critical thinking to a form of image-making. A number of these premises is therefore covered in more detail throughout the ensuing chapters.

[i] See:Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham / London: Duke University Press, 2007.

[ii] Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011: 15.

[iii] Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis  / London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015: vii.

[iv] See for example: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

[v] Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman photography. Cambridge (Massachusetts) / London (England): The MIT Press, 2017: xiv.