Everything that Shines Sees: Flash Light, Photography and the Acheiropoietic.
Exposition for Journal of Artistic Research #21, 2021.
This exposition takes a close look at the concepts of self-origination and mediation for a better understanding of the photographic image 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), it 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 acheiropoieton 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.
Come over me, proud light, wild light, burn deep.
- Laszlo Moholoy-Nagy, 1917
Lightning is an anarchist, it acknowledges no rules.
- Camille Flammarion, 1905
Everything That Shines Sees: Flash Light, Photography and the Acheiropoietic.
1. Introduction
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? Or is it the act of rebellion and dislocation that this caesura creates, overwhelming human perception, surrendering to a power that lies outside ourselves, that captivates us?
As a researcher affiliated with the Doctoral School of Arts in Ghent (Belgium), I am working on a practice-based PhD project entitled Everything That Shines Sees. Starting from a wider research into the extremes of the visible and visuality, I explore how the phenomenon of flash light and its radiation can be deployed, for a better understanding of the ways in which images manifest themselves and to what degree their formation and mediation can be approached from a phenomenological as well as an intellectual perspective. For it seems that flash light, as a sublime and immanent entity, never entirely reveals its true image. Might it even be a kind of otherworldly, artificial intelligence, which we can never understand completely? Can the experience and phenomenon of flash light be translated by any kind of aesthetic or visual 'print'?
My research project investigates, among other topics, whether the answer to these questions may lie in flash light's ability to materialize naturally and engender pictures that are not only made visible for, and by, the human. It involves a philosophical assessment of this phenomenon as an inherently photographic process, a form of direct writing by a burst of light, thus disconnecting flash photography from its commonly accepted conception as a human act of intentional looking, with the aid of an optical apparatus and an artificial source of illumination.
Using a number of my own works as starting points, this exposition addresses the creation and mediation of two specific forms of such self-generated or acheiropoietic imagery: the imprints made by lightning and other electric discharges, and the manifestation of cosmic rays. I discuss scientific tests I have performed in cooperation with a lightning simulation lab in Oxfordshire (UK) and with the nuclear research centre CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), as well as do-it-yourself experiments involving homemade spark generators. These are all specifically set up to investigate how the effects of flash light and its (radio)active properties relate to notions of materiality, visibility, representation, credibility and human agency, as well as to processes of mediation. Of what action and authority is the artificial flash image the effect? Can one argue that every work of art is in fact a fake acheiropoieton? That the act of making imagery to represent an idea or gesture short-circuits the very definition of acheiropoietic imagery? Is seeing truly believing? And what does seeing even mean with respect to the agency of the creative being interacting with an optical apparatus, when observation and visualisation are increasingly defined by a techno-logic? Shouldn't we adopt new perspectives with regard to the mediation and aesthetic involved in images by and of flash light, such as a perspective of transience, speculation, uncertainty, interactivity, and process?
These are some of the questions that are addressed in the context of the works discussed here. At the same time, I elaborate on the relation between the acheiropoietic and the photographic from a historical perspective to eventually touch upon its relevance to current discussions about automated images and the undeterred dominance of visuality as a powerful modality by which our lives and ways of thinking are increasingly organised.
2. The Acheiropoietic Image and Photography
The term 'acheiropoieton', a word of Byzantine etymology meaning 'made without hands', is traditionally used to describe miraculous appearances of a religious (Judeo-Christian) nature, such as the Veil of Veronica, the Abgar Mandylion or the Turin shroud [fig. 2, 3, 4]. All three fabrics are believed to have spontaneously received and preserved the imprint of Christ's likeness, through their direct physical contact with his body. Every religious acheiropoieton seems to have come about without any intermediary. Moreover, the assumption that no human was involved in its creation is a prerequisite for the icon's claim to offer truth. The more the human hand is present, the more the supernatural aura of the image is undermined. In this regard, Bruno Latour writes that the trick to uncovering the trick always involves unmasking the human origin of the work, the manipulator behind the scenes who is caught in the act (Latour, 2002). By proving something is man-made, the transcendence of the divinities is nullified, the claims of salvation from above are emptied, Latour concludes.
Several art historians as well as sindonologists have turned to photography and its vocabulary to explain the apparition of religious icons. The Holy Veil has been interpreted in terms of 'a photographic facsimile' of Christ's features (Walsham, Relics, 90), which proves to be even 'more authentic than a work of art, in that it does not rely on artistic imitation. It is authentic as a photograph' (Belting, Likeness, 221). The alleged imprint of Christ's body on the Turin shroud only became sufficiently visible and recognizable when it was photographed and revealed upon Secondo Pia's light-sensitive plate in 1898, thus authenticating the figure as a genuine trace of the divine, a mimetic witness. Theories have also been advanced which claim that the traces of Jesus's body on the Turin cloth came about as the result of a natural atomic flash, a 'photofulgural phenomenon of radiation'[1]that permanently fixed a shadow portrait of the divine figure. Both the natural and technical processes of photography have been put into the service of the spiritual, with the aim of authenticating, explaining or promoting the validity and truthfulness of the acheiropoieton, by an often contradictory rhetorical and scientific rationale. Through the connection of the visible manifestation with an imperceptible and deeper truth, the photograph turned into an imaginary site of revelation in which the spiritual realm of the unseen could be exposed in a strangely objective and magical way simultaneously. The acheiropoieton is legitimised by means of its photographic credibility. It became widely accepted that the science and technology behind the image, combined with a touch of light's wonder, can make the truth visible: hence, seeing is believing. This endows the image not only with the power of proof and persuasion but also with the allures of illusion, deceit, and falsehood.
In turn, photography itself has been strongly identified with acheiropoietic image-making ever since its inception. Early experimenters already took notice of the self-generating and automated principles involved. In contrast to religious images, which were supposedly created by a miracle, the autonomy of photography was considered a predominantly natural phenomenon, although associations with supernatural and lifelike properties were always nearby, largely fed by the illusion of its spontaneous origin. Already in 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot stated that it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself: 'A person unacquainted with the process, if told that nothing of all this was executed by the hand, must imagine that one has at one's call the genius of Aladdin's lamp. [...] It is a little bit of magic realized – of natural magic. You make the powers of nature work for you.'[2]
The first photo-flash technologies too were often compared to natural elements; either they were similar, or they were an improved artificial version of them. Bottled sunlight, borrowed daylight, night turned into day, the sun drawing its own picture – these were the common expressions used to describe and praise the near-magical novelties of this type of artificial illumination. By far the most suitable metaphor was found in natural lightning, a similarly shocking, dazzling, and unpredictable phenomenon that carves its way through the dark and reveals what is hiding in obscurity with a startling force. Aside from sharing obvious visual similarities, the photographic flash also took over lightning's metaphysical connections to the natural sublime: the camera's dazzling light became associated with a sense of awe and danger, of immediacy and unpredictability, of enchantment, beauty and cosmic energy, and of intense religious and intellectual revelation through which one could transcend oneself.
But the more the initial awe and novelty of flash light techniques wore off, the less they were equated with natural phenomena, even to such an extent that the two were seen as opposed to one another. The same thing happened to photography in general: while the medium's intrinsic acheiropoietic aspects – such as the (partial) autonomy of the recording apparatus, the technical agency involved in making a photograph, the chemical qualities of light-sensitive material, the fact that something of the unforeseen always remains present in the photograph – were still acknowledged in a positive way in the early days, over time, these aspects were increasingly discarded or discussed, as a rule, in a negative manner in the official historiography of photography. Acheiropoietic effects turned more and more into the proverbial 'flies in the ointment' because they fundamentally undermined the idea of photography as a human-centred activity, relying on authorship, control and intentionality, three principles that have defined the medium as an art form ever since its inception. In this regard, Peter Geimer remarks that speaking of the self-generated image mainly became a discourse focusing on what it is not, underlining the lack of an author, of intent and of a clear origin, thus marking first and foremost an absence or void (Geimer, 2011).
The key issues that are at stake here, and therefore underpin my artistic research, concern the definition and status of both the natural and artificial image, and their epistemological and ontological connections. The assumption, that there exists a direct and spontaneous line between the photograph and the invisible substance under study, can only hold true if all the intermediary steps and material processes, which make the production of the image possible in the first place, are either omitted or taken for granted as being merely technical matters. I, however, argue that everything happens in the middle, in that space where human and nonhuman agencies, nature and culture, meet and interact. The technical arrangement of flash light and the optical apparatus that goes with it are not merely a means of obtaining some independently given entity but an essential part of the construction of the artificial reality. Phenomena are thoroughly constituted by their workings, and their distinctly socio-cultural and aesthetic components. But the illusory objectivity of this technical visibility keeps presenting the theory of perception with the same age-old dilemmas regarding representation and indexicality. It is this paradox, which keeps complicating a media-philosophical approach of technical images and still colours cultural (mis)perceptions about authenticity, authorship, creativity and visuality, that informs the works under discussion here.
3. Images made by Keraunic or Fulguric Rays
3.1. Fulgurites
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to launch my investigation into spontaneous manifestations caused by lightning when I was granted permission to work in a lightning simulation lab in Abingdon, near Oxford (UK). The lab is designed to study the effects of direct and indirect lightning strikes on complex technical structures such as airplanes, military installations or wind-turbines. Equipped with high-voltage impulse generators that are capable of producing up to 2.4 million volts, and high-current generators specially outfitted to produce over 200,000 amperes of current, the test facility can accurately replicate the effect of a lightning strike as it occurs in nature [fig. 5, 6, 7].
I was allowed to use the high-voltage generators and experimental setup to produce artificial fulgurites or 'petrified lighting', three-dimensional vitreous structures that are formed when lightning strikes in sand and alters its composition to a crystalline mass. The silica-rich sand was strewn into a twenty-centimetre section of a PVC pipe, which was placed on top of a metal ground plate, just below a large rod made of steel. A thin copper wire, running through the centre of the sand-filled pipe, connected the plate with the rod. When artificial lightning was initiated, the current passed from the metal rod through the copper wire toward the metal ground plate where it impacted [fig. 8]. As the air and moisture in the sand rapidly heated by the explosion of the electrical discharge, lasting for one hundredth of a millisecond, both expanded and pushed the molten glass to the periphery of a small void, creating a hollow, tubular mass.The subsequent relatively rapid cooling of the molten glass caused it to solidify. I managed to produce several artificial fulgurites in the Abingdon lab [fig. 9, 10, 11]. One of those fulgurites was subsequently scanned in 3D, enlarged, made into a mould and cast in bronze. I then installed this 'Fulgurite Zero' as a lightning rod, so, in turn, it served as an intermediary to create a new fulgurite, which is undergoing the same process of scanning-enlarging-casting as I write [fig. 12, 14]. This closed circuit of image-making by lightning will be repeated until - in the long run - a network of connected fulgurites is formed, thus embracing the concept of an artwork as an ongoing, self-generating process, in which I consider myself the enabler or facilitator rather than the author. I extended my research into fulgurites to my studio by building a small-scale version of a high-voltage circuit made of different parts of household appliances. For these experiments, I used river sand mixed with a saline solution to enhance the electric conduction. I was able to gather a whole collection of fulgurites, ranging from small, solid forms to large tubular or branched ones [fig. 13, 15].
3.2. Lichtenberg Figures and Spark Images
With the same homemade circuit, I also produced so-called Lichtenberg figures, electric discharges characteristically shaped like fractals or tree-like branches, on wooden surfaces. Back in 1777, German physicist Georg Lichtenberg had discovered that these beautiful figures were likely to appear on electrically charged plates. He believed that they demonstrated the true nature of the electric field. Today, we know that Lichtenberg figures are branching patterns that may be created when high voltage electrical discharges pass either along the surface or through insulating materials. The works resulting from my Lichtenberg experiments were a continuation of earlier experiments with DIY high-voltage sources, such as a taser I constructed from an electric fly swatter or the flash unit of a disposable camera. With these sources I electrically charged metal objects in my darkened studio while photographing them through long exposure times, thus creating phantasmagorical images of 'floating' sparks. In Buddha I (2018), for example, the divine and photographic acheiropoieta thus merge into one [fig. 1].
The series Pocket Money I (2014) consists of six prints, each of which show the amount of copper coins I held in my pocket on the particular day the corresponding image was made. I placed the collected coins on photographic paper, electrically charged them with my DIY taser [fig. 19], thus leaving the contours of the coins and the characteristic shapes of the electric discharges imprinted on the paper, which was directly illuminated and exposed by the sparks. For Pocket Money II (2019) [fig. 20, 21] I threw my daily amount of change onto a wooden surface, prepared with a saline solution, and then 'zapped' each of the coins by means of the high-voltage circuit. The wooden plates were subsequently placed together to form a platform floor, protected by a plexiglass cover, with cut-out circles, into which the zapped copper coins were placed. The result resembles a recovered piece of a catastrophic event, displaying the material evidence of a violent and peculiar accident in an almost archaeological way.
While these projects certainly relate to contemporary art works by Hiroshi Sugimoto (Lightning Series), Carsten Nicolai (Funken), Walter de Maria (Lightning Field), Allan McCollum (The Event (Petrified Lightning)) and several light works by Nina Cannell and Olafur Eliasson, the fulgurite and electric spark images also refer to the much earlier days of photography. The initial idea for the pocket change series traces back to Etienne Trouvelot's images of electric sparks from the 1880s, for which he frequently made use of copper coins as conductive objects [fig. 16]. Together with his study of lightning, this French artist and astronomer researched the behaviour of electricity by means of photography. In his experiments Trouvelot employed photography in a radical manner, putting to use what most other photographers considered errors. His images were produced by discharging an electric spark between two photographic plates stacked back to back. As Trouvelot explained, the recorded electric phenomenon was the direct projection of its own image on a light-sensitive plate. By illuminating and recording itself, electricity was able to produce a self-generated image, an acheiropoieton in the true sense of the word.
Further inspirations for my research are ancient stories about spontaneously appearing images made by thunderstorm lightning and how photographic processes were involved in explaining such self-generated images. Around the end of the nineteenth century, following the recent discovery of X-rays and nuclear radiation, a better understanding of the behaviour of electricity and the ability of photography to register these phenomena invisible to the human eye led to the publication of several studies of the photographic effects of lightning.
A very popular interest involved the curious Lichtenberg figures that some (human or animal) victims developed across their skin when struck by lightning. As we know now, these striking patterns are likely caused by the rupture of capillaries beneath the skin from the electrical discharge, but at the time, this fact was not yet recognized as such. The peculiar 'lightning flowers' or 'skin featherings' (the current medical terms are arborescent erythema
or keraunographic markings) were often explained in terms of a photographic apparition.
In an article entitled A 'Lightning Figure' Photographed (1883), for example, the British meteorologist George Symons discusses a strange case in which six sheep were killed by a stroke of electricity in a wooded area near the city of Bath. When the skins were taken from the animals, a facsimile of a portion of the surrounding scenery was visible on their inner surface. These 'beautiful photographic images'[3]caused a great local sensation at the time and the skins were publicly exhibited in Bath.
In his book Les caprices de la foudre (Thunder and Lightning, 1905), the French astronomer Camille Flammarion also recounts a number of spectacular incidents involving inscriptions on the skin caused by lightning strikes. The first one tells the story of two French labourers who were struck by lightning when taking refuge from a violent thunderstorm in 1896. While one of the labourers only sustained minor injuries, his friend was in worse shape: the lightning cut open one of his boots and tore his trousers; but over and above all this, 'like a tattooist making use of photography', the lightning had 'reproduced admirably'[4]on his body a representation of a pine tree, of a poplar, and of the strap of his watch. In Photography through an opaque body (1896), the French author and editor Emmanuel Santini, too, describes numerous events in which images made by lightning spontaneously appeared: imprints of crosses, circular shapes, trees, flowers and plants, even cows are reproduced onto the lightning-stricken skin of human and animal victims. Like Symons and Flammarion, he approaches these phenomena as genuine photographic processes and uses similar analogies in their explanations: the lightning 'photographs', as it were; the images that it creates are 'reproductions', the skin of the victims serves as 'the sensitive photographic plate' of this spontaneous process. Mediated by lightning, this type of photography occurs in a natural manner, without human assistance, 'by itself.'
On the one hand, my photo-fulguric series can be considered as an updated manifestation of the same natural imprinting properties of flash light and of processes involving photosensitivity and radioactivity that are of all time. On the other hand, what sets them apart from these intriguing lightning stories is the fact that both the production and manifestation of the flash, and the petrified object, happen within the black box of a scientific apparatus. It seems that the technically induced visibility acts here as a kind of mirage that simultaneously obscures and reveals the relations embedded within the processes of production. Working in a scientifically controlled environment with high-tech observation methods amplifies the tension with which the photographic must contend: how visual aesthetics articulate what is not immediately visible but is still, of necessity, embedded within an image. While both fulgurites and spark figures may physically resemble their naturally occurring examples, they are fundamentally different because of the scientific procedures and the reflexive concepts they carry. Brought about by the workings of a partially autonomous closed circuit, together with elements of chance, anticipation and intention, these appearances are deceitful and truthful at the same time. They are what they are, in their phenomenological specificity, yet maintain a fundamental relationship with the hidden programs and rituals attached to them by design.
4. Images made by Cosmic Rays
In the context of the Art@CMS initiative, organized by the nuclear research centre CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), I was asked in 2017 to participate in a long-term project, that eventually led to the group exhibition Harbinger II: Subtle Collisions, held at Ghent University’s Botanical Garden in July 2019. I realized three works for the project, two of which are relevant to this exposition, namely Asymptotic Freedom and Hotspot.
4.1. Asymptotic Freedom
Asymptotic Freedom (2019) consists of a 3-metre-long glass tube filled with pure neon and a small amount of mercury. When switching on the direct high voltage current, the negatively charged mercury vapours are attracted by the positive electrode and start to drift in its direction at the other end of the tube. The migration results in a gradual yet unpredictable shift between the colours blue and red, seeing that the luminous glow of neon is red and that of mercury vapour is blue. The more the mercury fumes travel across the tube, the more the light shifts from red to blue. Once the vapours have migrated entirely towards the positively charged end of the tube, the polarity of the electrodes is reversed via an electronic circuit, causing the mercury to travel in the other direction, towards its initial starting point. The blue glow is slowly overtaken by red once again. This process is looped and repeated ad infinitum.
The title Asymptotic Freedom refers to a term used in particle physics when addressing the principles of interaction. Strong interaction concerns the mechanism responsible for the strong nuclear force, also called the colour force. It holds quarks and gluons together to form protons, neutrons, baryons and mesons. Since quarks make up the baryons, and the strong interaction takes place between baryons, you could say that the colour force acts as a source of the strong interaction, or that the strong interaction is like a residual colour force, which extends beyond the proton or neutron to bind them together in a nucleus. Inside a baryon, however, the colour force has some extraordinary properties not seen in the strong interaction between nucleons. One of those is the fact that the colour force appears to exert little influence at short distances so that the quarks are like free particles within the confining boundary of the colour force and only experience the strong force when they begin to get too far apart. The term asymptotic freedom is invoked to describe this interactive behaviour between quarks. The title of this work also hints at the uncertainty principle, articulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927. The principle states that any attempt to measure precisely the velocity of a subatomic particle, such as an electron, will knock it about in an unpredictable way, so that a simultaneous measurement of its position has no validity. This result has nothing to do with inadequacies in the measuring instruments, the technique, or the observer; it arises out of the intimate connection in nature between particles and waves in the realm of subatomic dimensions. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle first and foremost points at the limits to our knowledge of the behaviour of physical objects on a quantum level.
4.2. Hotspot
Through the sonification of cosmic rays, the work Hotspot (2019 [fig. 30, 33, 34]) aims to make exhibition visitors aware of the constant invisible background radiation surrounding us, of an unknown aspect of the universe that is not detectable by the unaided human sensorium. Interstellar space contains a permanent flux of high-energy elementary particles called cosmic rays, travelling at the speed of light and originating from distant supernovas. When colliding with the earth's atmosphere, cosmic rays create showers of secondary particles. Although they are partly absorbed by the atmosphere, these showers induce a large range of phenomena, the main one being a flux of muons. These heavy electrons, which are not present in usual matter because of their short lifespan, are produced at a high rate in cosmic showers. Because of their excellent penetration capacities, muons are able to reach the earth's surface. Human beings, however, are unaware of these cosmic particles crossing their body.
What follows is a short description of the technical setup used to create Hotspot. Two detector arrays were each composed of a photomultiplier tube combined with a slat of plastic scintillator – a luminescent material that, when struck by an incoming muon, absorbs its energy and re-emits this energy in the form of light. A particle passing through the scintillators triggered the emission of some of the photons it contains. These photons were then guided along the scintillators by an optic fibre cable until they reached the photomultiplier tube, which generated an electrical impulse [fig. 31, 32]. Parasitic noise from natural terrestrial radioactivity was eliminated because muons travel at a similar speed to that of light, and therefore cross almost simultaneously. When a muon hit both photosensitive detectors at the same time, a threshold that separates background noise from pulse was applied to clean up the received signal. Only when the input signal from both photodetectors surpassed the installed threshold was a block pulse generated as output. This negative pulse needed to be converted to a positive voltage of maximum 5V for the Arduino microcontroller to be able to read it. A fast data acquisition program then checked whether or not a signal hit the Arduino pin, saving the interval between two impacting muons. Each interval was assigned a specific tonal value, which the microcontroller sent as an analogue pulse to an audio driver that amplified the signal before transmitting it as a MIDI format to a loudspeaker. Every sent pulse had the same length of 300 milliseconds: the only variation was the interval between, and the frequency of, the notes.
The test network described here was installed for the period of the Harbinger exhibition in one of the greenhouses of Ghent University’s Botanical Garden. In real time, it translated the ambient cosmic ray activity into sound, broadcast through an outdoor garden loudspeaker [fig. 33, 34]. The title of the work, Hotspot, not only refers to a radiation hotspot in orbit, a place where the flux of cosmic rays is 10 to 100 times greater than the rest of the orbital path, but also to the hotspot's definition as 1. the place to be, a tourist attraction; 2. a place of significant activity, danger, or violence; 3. a public place where a wireless signal is made available. I decided to show the underlying, specialized technology necessary to create the soundscape, while the listeners can experience the physical phenomenon itself. This added to the surprising and at the same time humorous effect of the installation, as there is a large discrepancy between the high-tech part of the work and the deadpan sound it produces, resembling the popping of corn.
Several sound recordings were made in the course of the project [fig. 35] and later converted into sheet music scores [fig. 36]. I also ran a recording through a photosounder software program to create a visual output of the captured cosmic radiation, which was printed on a strip of photo paper 7.25 cm by 585 cm in size [fig. 37]. The different versions of Hotspot illustrate that each image-making framework prescribes how we (can) visualise the world, in the sense that it also constructs and interprets reality in a preconditioned way.
While my exploration of cosmic rays and the behaviour of elementary particles certainly expands on current artistic research into nuclear visuality such as that of Susanne Kriemann and Susan Schuppli, it was initially sparked when I read about untriggered flash sightings witnessed by astronauts in space. Since the first space missions, astronauts have reported seeing flashes while they were in orbit, even when their eyes were closed. Both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin witnessed strange flashes of multiple shapes and dimensions during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Apollo 15 commander David Scott described one flash observation as 'resembling a photographic flashbulb that has been flashed across a dark arena.'[5]International Space Station crewmember Jeff Hoffman recalled lying in his sleeping bag when, 'zap-zap-zap,'[6]one of the best light shows he had ever seen erupted in the retinas of his closed eyes. The experience of 'seeing things that aren’t there' when in space, is quite poetically described by ISS-astronaut Don Pettit:
'Flashes in my eyes, like luminous dancing fairies, give a subtle display of light that is easy to overlook when I’m consumed by normal tasks. But in the dark confines of my sleep station, with the droopy eyelids of pending sleep, I see the flashing fairies. As I drift off, I wonder how many can dance on the head of an orbital pin.'[7]
The repeated sightings of untriggered light flashes by astronauts who took part in Apollo 11, 12 and 13, led to subsequent missions including experiments specifically designed to explore this strange phenomenon. It was determined that what the astronauts were actually seeing were cosmic rays zapping through the retina and optic nerve of their eyes. The lion's share of cosmic radiation aiming for Earth is absorbed by our atmosphere, thus protecting us from being hit by an alarming amount of potentially deadly radiation. Yet, the situation in space is different. Free from the protection offered by the atmosphere, cosmic rays incessantly bombard everyone or everything crossing their path, as is the case on board the International Space Station for example. They cause 'such mischief as locking up our laptop computers and knocking pixels out of whack in our cameras. The computers recover with a reboot; the cameras suffer permanent damage. After about a year, the images they produce look like they are covered with electronic snow.'[8]They also have free rein to pass through a (closed) eye, — causing rods and cones to fire and resulting in the perception of a flash of light that is not really there.
Asymptotic Freedom and Hotspot raise similar questions about the ways the unseen image-making forces of light work on our media and on our perception. How can the existence and behaviour of the tiniest components of matter be made observable and visible? What kind of phenomenology are we talking about here? And in what way do artificial methods of making manifest come into play as a modus operandi in the specialised fields of science? While Asymptotic Freedom and Hotspot embody organic and cosmic events that have been around since the Big Bang, they are also inextricably linked to an elaborate man-made dispositif. This paradox lies at the heart of particle physics, which seeks to find answers to the ways in which our world is organised by studying what the elementary constituents of matter and radiation are, and which forces or interactions determine their behaviour.
The natural radioactive properties of the earth and the universe can only be made detectable and measurable by means of the high-technological apparatuses of nuclear science. It is important to note here that particle physics is in fact a high energy physics, because many researched elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in nature; they can only be created during energetic interactions or collisions with other particles – set in motion by the flash of a powerful beam of light. Such events are triggered in CERN's particle accelerators. Artificially provoking behaviour of matter operating far beyond human sensation, these experiments continuously re(de)fine the radius of what is 'observable' by means of increasingly sophisticated instruments and by putting speculative theories about the existence and behaviour of subatomic elements to the test.
What Asymptotic Freedom and Hotspot also aim to address is that both art and science develop certain models and mechanisms of representation that translate the invisible over the sensible into an intellectual understanding of the world, not unlike religious acheiropoietic imagery does. To build sophisticated optical apparatuses and program them implies a methodology for what and how to observe and show. In particle physics, these allegedly unbiased procedures are stretched to the limit: here, phenomena that are entirely invisible to the human eye are somehow rendered into graspable information, which is in essence an aesthetic procedure. Images of colliding particles or cosmic rays belong to a level of reality that goes beyond our perceptive capacities and are therefore fundamentally fictional. They only exist by the grace of the technical processes through which they are produced, and illustrate that visualizing with photography cannot simply be regarded as a straightforward form of mechanical observation. It is never merely a case of making visible what was previously invisible, for dozens of small decisions go into the process of visualisation and impinge on the final shape of the output.Furthermore, in Asymptotic Freedom and Hotspot, the visible is not a matter of real presence or likeness. One could even explicate that their visual existence is purely a matter of mediation processes, as the act of making manifest relies here on media-forms that are entirely detached from our agency and senses. Nature itself must be imagined and thought through. And photography – of and by the flash of light – acts as a form of science fiction.
5. The Concept of the Acheiropoieton Today
It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that, in today's media landscape, in which data flash through cyberspace at the speed of light and images become increasingly automated and processed by unmanned optical machines and computerised programs, the concept of the acheiropoieton makes a fresh re-entry in theoretical discussions about photographic images and their mediation. Indeed, the idea of a non-human life and intelligence operating as, or in the production of, an image has a contemporary relevance. Theories of emerging and future technologies, such as those related to the post-human and the cyborgian, point to the logical possibilities not just of intelligent, living and evolving images, but also of those which might (even partly) be automatic, autogenic and self-evolving. Whereas photographic images are nowadays encoded and structured by the inner workings and operative program of the camera, the flash of light, too, can now be artificially brought to life and entirely directed by a closed-circuit apparatus. This, near-total, dependence on technologically inflected vision — on the basis of which we increasingly experience, evaluate and organise our lives — has not necessarily managed to discourage traditional ideas about images, iconicity and idolatry. Our willingness to 'blindly' trust the visual data reproduced by sophisticated imaging technologies, supported by a powerful cult and economy of visibility, still depends on a system of belief in photography's unbiased powers of revelation. For media theorist Vilém Flusser, the fact that photographic images have become increasingly abstract and more difficult to decipher has created a new form of 'illiteracy'. In turn, this has led to the re-enchantment of the photographic image, invoking aspects of the acheiropoietic to explain the incomprehensible processes and phenomena related to it. In this regard, I follow Flusser's premise that the origin and purpose of technical pictures are fundamentally different from that of traditional ones. 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. I put to practice his idea that apparatuses 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.'[9]And that is exactly what a photographic image is too, not only to Flusser but also in my artistic research: one blindly realised possibility, something invisible that has become visible from the mutual exchange between human manufacture, automated operations and natural processes. Every agency involved in its manifestation is not merely a reproductive but a productive contributor.
I therefore believe that thinking about flash light, perception and the photographic condition requires other criteria than the traditional systems of opposition — true-false, natural-artificial, invisible-apparent, figurative-abstract, objective-subjective, man-made-acheiropoietic, creative-automated — which claim to provide an authentic image of fundamental value on the one hand, and an image deemed inferior and somehow less true on the other. In my practice, works originate precisely from the concordance of control and disconnection, purpose and serendipity, facilitation and agitation as dialectic modes that strengthen and motivate one another. Aspects of artificiality and naturalness, human-driven operations and the participation of the apparatus are indivisible partners of the same creative process. What I aim to foreground is that one cannot be favoured above the others or called an author in its own right for they are all involved when it comes to contemplating the flash image's ownership, meaning and aesthetic.
For Flusser, too, visual experiences opened up by mechanised processes and their computational logic do not necessarily mean anything in and of themselves; they only point in a certain direction. He puts forward several criteria, which he considers more suited to the character of automated images such as the level of uncertainty or surprise found in an image, qualities that also inform my practice. By provoking situations that turn the instrument against its own scientific-objective conditions, which can also be interpreted as a gesture of re-enchantment, I try to keep the contingencies of our complex dialogue with natural image-making forces and automated technologies open, in order to re-think the relation in more nuanced and unforeseen ways.
If we consider the flash image not based on opposites but in terms of a dynamic exchange with a directional value, it can attain a much more active existence as but one of the possible outcomes that guides and binds thing and representation. Such an image is embedded in the performative faculties of nature, human and apparatus, as it happens to reveal itself as a phenomenon. One example that illustrates what I mean by this, and also forms the starting point of my next research project, is the use of nuclear photo-emulsions to register subatomic interactions. Composed of bulky analogue film sheets, nuclear emulsions produce an abstract three-dimensional image, with a specific direction and temporality, similar to an animation clip or to photographing in burst mode, except bundled here in one single exposure. The resulting photograph shows the interactive event in its dynamic progression. The example not only affirms that each available image-making framework prescribes how we (can) visualize the world, but also that photography can be a dynamic process that strongly engages with the future. It also suggests that facilitating and rethinking image-making and perception in terms of a process-oriented exchange can provide a way forward for photography, away from its eroded concept as a passive carbon copy of the past in which creation is set against technique, and orient it toward the future, the self-creative and other kinds of image processes.
It therefore seems essential to me that understanding of the photographic condition and of the images it engenders be broadened beyond strictly human affiliations and attachments, and that the eventualities between human and nonhuman mediators involved in its production are kept open. This is particularly relevant today seeing that, in light of rapid geophysical changes, our notion of the human as a self-sustaining species is in need of a critical rethinking, not only in relation to the increasingly automated processes of computerised vision and representation, but also in regard to our interactions with nonhuman agencies on a universal scale. Such revision of our involvement in making (visual) sense of the world can engender a more attentive way of looking and acting, as well as a deepened perception of connectedness with other forms of life, by keeping in sight the vital roles both automated technologies and unpredictable manifestations can play in all this.
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[1]Arthur Loth, 1902. Quoted in Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy. The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005): 204.
[2]William Henry Fox Talbot, The New Art in: The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Science and Art 1150, 2 February 1839: 73.
[3]George Symons, A ‘Lightning Figure’ Photographed, in: Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, July 1883: 82.
[4]Camille Flammarion, Thunder and Lightning, London: Chatto & Windus, 1905: 299. (ebook)
[5]L.S. Pinsky et al., 'Light Flashes Observed by Astronauts in Apollo 11 through Apollo 17', in: Science, Vol. 183, Nr. 4128 (Washington D.C., 1974), pp. 957-959: 957.
[6]Astronaut Jeff Hoffman in: One Strange Rock, National Geographic Channel, Season 1, Episode 6 (Escape), 2018, 26:58.
[7]Astronaut Don Pettit, in: Flashes of Reality, entry dated April 19 on NASA blog Letters to Earth, 2012. https://blogs.nasa.gov/letters/2012/04/19/post_1334853361737/, consulted on July 30th, 2019.
[8]Astronaut Don Pettit, in: Flashes of Reality, entry dated April 19 on NASA blog Letters to Earth, 2012. https://blogs.nasa.gov/letters/2012/04/19/post_1334853361737/, consulted on July 30th, 2019.
[9]Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000): 15.