I am storing this connection here, as I don’t want to lose it and may incorporate this (as simply as possible) into some talks/workshops:
“In the art of the Middle Ages, there is no radical division between aesthetic subject and object, divine and mortal, but, rather, a continuous distribution of light into degrees of lighter- and darker- colored regions. There are no lacks or absences, only degrees of shadow and illumination.” Nail, 2019; 190 (My italics)
Then from Kathryn Hayles:
“The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image-an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water. Interacting with electronic images rather than with a materially resistant text, I absorb through my fingers as well as my mind a model of signification in which no simple one-to-one correspondence exists between signifier and signified. I know kinesthetically as well as conceptually that the text can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible if it existed “s a material object rather than a visual display. As I work with the text-as-flickering- image, I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, and more powerful than presence and absence.” Hayles, 1999; 26 (My italics)
“Without a kinetics of light, even the most dramatic images disappear into the night, in which all cows are black. Light is what gives aesthetic relation.” (Nail, Ibid)
Digital material is wave-like and responds to the conscious actor. Things/reality come into being on our screens when observed – when there is intra-action (a neologism coined by Karen Barad to imply more than interaction). When we swipe a page, or click on an icon, a digital wave having been drawn out onto the screen, momentarily appears as pixels/particles. But they recede when there is no intra-action. Donald D Hoffman tells us this is reality functions and the quantum field theory he relies upon is what Nail’s thesis also cannot do without.
From here, Nail makes light and vision imperative. However, I am interested in connecting that with a chapter from my old tutor, Daniel Rubenstein’s book, How Photography Changed Philosophy (2023); namely The Latent Image as well as an earlier chapter, Critiques of ocularcentrism – in which he warns about The trap of the visual – all chapter headings in his book.
“The reluctance of theory to talk about this primordial [invisible, pre-] state of the image can be considered symptomatic of the desire to focus on the visible and tangible image and ignore the invisible without questioning the basic premise of the distinction itself” (Ibidl 93). And, the following, “the emphasis placed on the visual content of images tends to obscure the processes of dissemination, production and dispersion that contain their own intelligent messages…” (Ibid)
However, here Nail emphasises how darkness and light work together (not as absence and presence but as continuously changing elements, intra-activity, out of which images emerge: “The second tension is between the lighted exterior of the church and the darkened center. It is only in such a high contrast between light and dark that the stained-glass images can appear at all” (Nail, 2019; 203). Nail also mentions ‘flickering’ linking back again to Hayles above although in churches of the Middle Ages rather than on our screen, where it might have been birds or trees outside a stained glass window that introduced the flicker. Nevertheless, the following description is indeed reminiscent of how pixels work: “…it is the contrast between color cells of light that generates the form of the image. Unity appears through fragmentation: a fragmented whole of relations” (Ibid). I am reminded of shifting outlines and boundaries and borders – and the fractal nature of reality.
I am only halfway through Nail’s book and look forward to seeing where he goes with the digital image towards the end of it.
Film shown on a 44-inch screen and included in Belongings alongside reconstituted paper, some of which includes text from Thomas Nail’s Borders, Migrants, and Writing (2020) which was co-created by Susan Aldworth, Sara David, Natalia Mesa Echavarria, Sarah-Jane Field, Silvina Maestro, Julia Shutkevych, Michaelle St Vincent and Judy Willcocks, with support from CSM’s Creativity in Action Fund, and with the CSM Museum and Study Collection
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Hoffman, D.D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Penguin
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Rubinstein, D. (2023) How photography changed philosophy. New York: Routledge.