Field Notes

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

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

Some rough notes – my thoughts and quotations from Nail:

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

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

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

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

LLM’s simplified suggestion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*To incorporate into the zine:

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

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