Many of the installation artists seem to be working with the awareness of how the tangible ‘real’ world can seem dilapidated in comparison with the infinite phantasmagoria of images and data available on-line or on-screen. The potential decrepitude of our physical surroundings and all the cosmetic, genetic imperfections (not to mention the mortality) of our own bodies are a permanent humiliation in the face of dematerialized digital phenomena.1
It was like I was in the universe, and at the same time, inside myself.2
The first two exhibitions of my project had given me several important insights regarding my semi sculptural photo objects. In the concluding remarks of my essay Playing against the camera (chapter 3), I pose the question of whether my works had reached a point where they formed a new form of photography, a new understanding of our perception of these types of images, or whether the works had simply left the category of photography altogether.
Instead of trying to solve this puzzle, I found it more interesting to remain in this liminal condition of photography. I wanted my project to keep ruminating and hovering around the horizon of the medium, and explore what would happen if I continued expanding on my approach of manipulating the context for the encounter with photographic material.
As mentioned earlier, Joanna Zylinska discusses the possibility for photography being a much broader category than what we normally associate with it. Instead of necessarily being the product of a certain technology producing visible images, she proposes we look at photography as part of the deep time of geology, as an aspect of how the world works - the leaving of marks, traces and imprints is a fundamental part of nature from its very beginning.
I also wanted to look at photography in the so-called ‘deep time’ framework, by thinking about photography’s relationship to geology, fossils and other kinds of deep-time imprints on surfaces. Then, going back to this idea that we are all photographers today, I wanted to consider that maybe all humans are to some extent nonhuman, running on algorithms as much as exercising their own ‘individualism’. If not, then how come most people’s Instagram feeds or wedding photographs look almost the same?3
Zylinska places the technology of photography into an existing structure of natural processes of making imprints. Instead of us using photography, photography is a kind of natural force, a structure in the world, that in a sense is “using” us, having us conform to what Wilem Flusser would call the photographic program, steering humans towards performing specific actions and choices (like conforming to a set of expectations for a wedding photo or a selfie for example).
I find her example to resonate with the material used in my project, the 3-4 year old rocks originating from lava deep within the earth crust, that for a brief moment stepped out of geological time, able to move and take shape in human time, only to be fixated, like photographs freeze events in time. Like the millions of photographs that circulate human media every hour, these rocks will remain in geological time as snapshots of an event in earth´s history, solidified in a process of natural creativity. From now and millions and millions of years into the future they will compress and form strata in the bedrock, and like an archive of snapshots, represent our period in the history of the earth.
But maybe more relevant to how my project developed from my visit to the lava field, is the principle that Zylinska lays out for her argument: that there are basic structures underlying- and manifesting in photography, that can be isolated from the practice and technology we call “photography” today. In her example, that structure is the making of an imprint. Such basic structures can then be applied to something else, and by doing so, enable us to see such structures and their workings in the world with a new gaze in the context of artistic research. It can also allow us to work “photographically” with other techniques or materials than the specific technology associated with the word. In Teleportation, a relevant such structure to be explored is how photographs manifest a dilemma between virtuality and actuality in human consciousness: our constant negotiation between on the one hand virtual phenomena such as memory, imagination, anticipation and illusion, and on the other, the relentless actuality of physical reality.
As artistic expressions, photography and installation have much in common in terms of being expressions where this basic dilemma between the “real”4 and the “imagined” is part of the interpretation of the work itself. Therefore I found that working with installation could be a way to create a setting where I could abstract- and project some ways that I perceive the photograph to trigger a play between the physical and the virtual.
Point of view
Hito Steyrl describes the construction of a stable horizon and the idea of linear perspective as developments related to ideals of a scientific, objective view from a detached observer. Linear perspective, which is so intensively enhanced by the cyclopic vision of the photographic lens, creates a quasi-natural, window-like view to the world. Linear perspective (and the still image) creates a space that is calulable and predictable, and can be used to manage future risk. For all these assumptions to fall into place however, we need an immovable observer standing on stable ground looking out onto a vanishing point on an (artificially) flat horizon. This apparent position of control ends up diminishing the observer´s individuality and freedom, by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of observation.5 This would resonate with how Flusser and Zylinska describe humans as conforming to a photographic program, where instead of discovering unique situations, we try to recreate those that are delivered to us through photographs.
In recent times however, the paradigm of linear perspective seems to be fading in favour of multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted flight lines, and divergent vanishing points.6 The notion of control promised by central perspective has been radicalized, in particular by the proliferation of aerial views, of a view from above (think for example of Google Maps or drone footage). Steyrl points to how these processes have enabled structures of power and processes of colonization. This shift from a stable ground enabled by linear perspective toward multiple perspectives and a God's eye view could be liberating to the observer, but has also resulted in a contemporary condition of groundlessness and free fall. We don´t notice this free falling because the disappearance of ground makes falling feel like weightlessness, or free floating.
Just as linear perspective established an imaginary stable observer and horizon, so does the perspective from above establish an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground.7
It can be interesting to read my artistic development from photography to installation, and the development through the three exhibitions in Teleportation with regard to what sort of point of view the camera, space and viewer collaborate on realizing in each show. What have been the implications of a shift of focus in my artistic practice from photography to installation?
In the first exhibition, I was concerned with mapping, with constructing a view from above by mapping out the lava field from within, by sampling fragments of it, measuring how they were placed on the field itself, and then placing them accordingly in the exhibition space. Not unlike the way maps were created before aerial photography and satellite imagery.
The focus stacking method used exaggerates the lens´ fixing of a single point of view and construction of linear perspective (by means of how the strata in the photo objects converge toward an apex closest to the camera). Shooting the rocks from above at zenith also involved the construction of a God's eye view at a micro level. The photo-objects were laid out on the floor in a manner re-creating their position on the lava field, literalizing the idea of a view from above for the viewer, but also enabling them to move around and between the objects.
We seem to be in a state of transition toward one or several other visual paradigms. Linear perspective has been supplemented by other types of vision to the point where we may have to conclude that its status as the dominant visual paradigm is changing.8
Toward liminality
In the second exhibition, I started to realize that the interesting form of “teleportation” happening in the project was not from the exhibition space toward the landscape in Iceland itself, but toward a liminal space somewhere between that landscape, the exhibition, my memory of the lava field and the imagination of the viewer. Therefore, for Teleportation #2 I decided to build a room within a room in the exhibition, enabling me to stage for the viewer a transition into such a liminal space, a sort of nonspace from which to experience the photo objects. I took inspiration for this from among other things from The Matrix and THX1138 science fiction movies, but also from the idea of radicalising the neutrality assumed by the white cube gallery.9
…and then just ping! inside, as if you are thrown out into weightlessness, is what I can compare it with. Maybe it's where the science fiction part comes in on my part, that it was some sort of void or a white void [...] something absolutely empty, that does not have anything, a kind of vacuum maybe.10
Along with a liberation of the observer from linear perspective, a shift from photography to installation involves a larger degree of choice on the part of the observer. S/he has to figure out the space and his/her placement within it, and the loss of distance to the work means that there is a greater risk of losing control and being subsumed by it.
Inspired by how Robert Smithson´s nonsites insisted on a connection to site, but simultaneously displaying its distance and detaching from it by means of abstraction, I started constructing a new gallery-specific situation and a fantasy landscape on the floor. Here, one of the rocks photographed was used to produce six identical photo-objects, which were then laid out next to- and on top of each other, in a sort of collage. Working with the physicality of installation, and the sheer possibility of having near total control over the volume and surface properties of the surroundings for the photo objects, meant that I could engage the more immediate senses of movement and touch. I decided to create a strong contrast between the outside of the space and the inside, by covering the outside in a paint meant to emulate concrete, and thus extend the play between illusion and reality into the physical properties of the installation. Inside the space, I worked with a shimmering ceiling reflecting into a glossy epoxy floor, that felt slippery to walk on without shoes, and that caused the light to scatter in such a way as to make the room almost dissolve into itself.
This attention to the physical context of the photo objects was a consequence of observing how the physicality of the photo objects, and their strange, illusory visuality, somewhere between two-dimensional image and three dimensional object, caused viewers to want to touch the works. This caused me to think about the strata in the objects as a form of photographic “braille”, a way of aiding vision in the viewing of the objects, and even making it possible to experience photographs without vision. When photographing on the lava field I was often faced with a problem: strong backlight from the sky would make my pupils contract, and cause the rocks towering up around me to appear as black silhouettes, erasing the details in their surface, making it difficult to make necessary observations needed to do the work. Could I replicate this form of blindness in the viewing situation? And by doing so, re-create one aspect of my experience of travelling to- and being on the lava field? What sort of reactions would such an encounter with the limits of perception in an installation setting cause in the audience?
On the opening night of the exhibition Teleportation #2, I had a moment to myself in the dark space outside the structure we had built. Suddenly the space that I now had become intimately acquainted with seemed very alien. It could be due to the fact that I saw it finished, and with a spectator's view, or that the room was darkened. This uncanny feeling made me slightly uneasy, I got the sense that I had set in motion something beyond my control, almost as if I had conjured something that was not “art”, but real (and not the bracketed “real” of installation art). I lost the critical or aesthetic distance to the situation. Could I somehow build on this in order to see if others would have a similar reaction - a similar confounding of aesthetic and non-aesthetic experience?
I have health anxiety. This is a condition often made fun of because it leads one to make far fetched conclusions about being affected by serious disease from minor and normal events in the body. For the sufferer of health anxiety it is however deadly serious, literally. For me at my worst, the discovery of a “symptom” means the arrival of death. Subjectively, this experience is not on the level of theory or make believe, there and then it is reality. It concerns my entire existence. But in actuality, it is a constructed situation in my mind from mis-interpreting symptoms that turn out to be nothing, and not a threat to my life in any way.
I have speculated whether the structure of this experience in the dark outside of the space relates to that of health anxiety. I recognised how such an imagined/constructed situation can spill over and appear real. What it showed me was that installation - by engaging the viewer in a physical, but constructed aesthetic situation, by creating a liminal space between illusion and lived reality - can be more effective at exploring existential questions by sidestepping the viewer´s critical and conceptual distance. The installation artist Mona Hatoum has described it thus:
There was also at that point [when I started making installations] a shift from a situation of representation to a desire to create an actual and real situation that the audience could experience directly for themselves. I wanted to explore the phenomenology of the space and materials to create a direct physical interaction - a kind of gut reaction to the situation before the process of questioning and association begins…11
One of the visitors to Teleportation #3 said this about walking into the darkness:
[...] the experience of being in total darkness and actually having to feel my way [...] to me was a bodily experience so powerful that it triggered everything I can think of primal needs for control, some of those biological things that made me feel… I was simply afraid. And the moment when I was standing there in the dark and realizing that if part of the exhibition is that for example there is a person here touching my shoulder, or I bump into something now, I simply wasn't sure that I, at the age of 65 would survive that. So to me this acute fear in that moment was so strong that it perhaps overshadowed the rest of the experience [...] and at this point in time, now fear had let go, and now I felt that I could take in the larger experience, beyond my own pulse and my own anxiety.
[...]
Me: You say that in there you experienced a real fear, something more than the kind of fear you would experience from watching say a scary movie…?
Oh yes, yes, far beyond that, absolutely, because this is not something that I can write off as something happening on a screen in front of me, I am … it is happening, I am in the movie. I am actually there and the psyche doesn't distinguish between, when I´m in a situation like that then the psyche … those things that were activated there aren't rational, they´re completely irrational inclinations, but in such a situation the irrational reactions in me become so strong that I didn't have any distance, intellectual distance to anything, there was nothing to hold onto there, I could might as well have been a caveman in the forest with tigers all around. The emotion is precisely the same.12
Bruce Naumann´s work Live-Taped Video Corridor can tell us something about the relationship between a distanced, critical view from without and an immersed view from within as it relates to the body, spatiality and lens based-representation. In this work, two TV-monitors are installed at the end of a narrow corridor. Above the entrance to the corridor is mounted a CCTV camera that transmits a live recording of the viewer from behind to the lower monitor as s/he enters the corridor. The upper monitor shows a recording of an empty corridor at all times. The art historian Anne Ring Petersen describes how in this way, the installation visitor is very directly engaged in the work, giving them the opportunity to enter into a double role as both a reflective observer and a bodily involved viewer performer.
The metonymic proximity between the “living image” and the “dead image” of the empty corridor displayed on the installation´s second monitor seems to draw the experience into an existential register; here one not only sees oneself as walking, but as walking away; one is an ever-present body observing itself on its way out of “the living picture”, towards death and absence.13
For such a work to make sense, the viewer must consider both the physical situation of the work as well as their own action and bodily and emotional involvement in it. This work shows in a very literal sense how strategies associated with lens based media can be used in a spatial/interactive setting, and in this case how it can initiate a liminal state between an immersed and detached view. Petersen analyses this situation further in light of Katherine Hayles´ distinction between body and embodiment, in which the former is synonymous with cultural constructions of what a body is (and a detached, observing gaze, as described by Steyrl), whilst the latter refers to the subjective experience of the lived body from “within”. The clash between the two in Naumann´s installation, initiates a situation where one is quite literally becoming part of a staging of one's own disappearance. When approaching the monitors, one will see oneself walking away toward a light in the end of the corridor, not unlike near-death experiences.
Immersion
Naumann´s work, and Ring-Petersen´s description of it, is an example of the efficacy of installation when attempting to make artworks that places the viewer in the center of the work, as a participant or even performer. By manipulating the physical environment of the viewer, one can emulate lived experience more literally, and tap into a sensuality where the work is perceived as more acutely “real”. This is what I perceive to be what is called immersion.
Anne Ring Petersen describes how the sense of touch generally has been given a low ranking as a minor, superficial and almost animalistic sense, dating back to Aristotle.14 This stands in contrast to how vision, enabled by its augmentation with linear perspective in art, a process further accelerated by photography being embedded into systems of observation, exploration and surveillance, has come to represent detachment, control and rationality.
Installation has contributed to a radical redefinition of the viewing subject in art, replacing a Cartesian, ocular-centric model with a phenomenological model that focuses on the eyes´embeddedness in the body.15Working with photographic material that invites touch can be seen as exaggerating this traditional contrast between the haptic and visual sense. In Teleportation #3 this was radicalized by shrouding the visual material in darkness, intensifying the importance of touch and the viewer´s immersion into the situation. The sense of fear or loss of control experienced by some visitors due to the lack of vision inside the installation, and from being denied information about what was going to happen there, seemed to enhance the experience of immersion.
I once participated in a one-on-one performance by the danish theatre company Teater Bæst called Lyst #2. The setting for the performance was a brothel. I had understood that it would be fairly transgressive, and that I would be engaged as a participant in the situation, but I did not know how or to what degree. This contributed to a mix of apprehension and anticipation in the days leading up to the performance, and this actually gave me the feeling that the performance had already started. On the day, I was to show up at an address, not part of a known cultural venue, that had a flashing “open” sign in the window. Inside I was asked by a receptionist to choose between “hardcore” or “dildo show”. I chose the first, and was sent up the stairs and into a room furnished as a typical brothel room. Here I was greeted by the performer of the piece, who was a woman dressed in a provocative outfit. She sat me down in a big leather recliner, and started to ask me about my sexual fantasies and preferences. This led into a situation where she undressed completely, and engaged me in an interaction that at some point reached a point of intimacy where I felt I had to interrupt the situation, and tell I was about to cross some personal boundaries. From here on, she proceeded to present me, who was now in a sexually aroused state, with a lecture about the history of prostitution and how women has been taught sexual shame throughout history. After about half an hour I was back on the street and was utterly confused about what I had been part of. Was this really a theatre piece? Had I just engaged in a sexual interaction and paid for it? Was this prostitution if it had not been part of an aestetic framework? Was there a difference?
This experience had a profound effect on me, and in the days that followed thoughts of doubt and shame mixed with enthusiasm and amazement kept occupying my mind. What I found perhaps most fascinating was how the element of not knowing beforehand what would happen, and then being overwhelmed in the actual event contributed to an intensity of experience that could not have been simulated if I had known what to expect. By catching me off guard in this way by not allowing me to prepare, the performance pulled me deeper into the situation by activating some instinctive responses. The way that the situation forced me to choose between instinctive responses and my own morality -by crossing over the boundary of pretending and actually triggering a response of arousal in me- created a strange conflict between rationality and instinct, illusion and reality.
It has been suggested that immersion represents a negation of true art experience. This attitude goes back to Michael Fried´s infamous essay “art and objecthood” in which he attacks minimalism for not providing a proper art experience, but rather invoking the viewer´s relation to the artwork in a shared situation, what he calls “theatricality”, the delusion that an aesthetic experience is taking place. The viewer is unable to appreciate the work from a disinterested distance, but is subsumed by the work. Nicholas Brown likens the traits Fried dislikes about theatricality - a pandering appeal to the spectator and infinite iterability - to that of commodities, and commodities cannot have intention that preempts their commercial function.16 Art is reduced to mere spectacle. Such a view is radically different from the one held by conceptual artists following from the minimalists, who believed that by making art into an experience rather than objects, no one could “own” the work.17
This illustrates that how to position works of art that use immersive approaches can be understood in several ways, in this example, with regard to how artworks and experiences function in a cultural economy. I have been more concerned with how synergies between photography and installation can elucidate on the phenomenological experience of virtuality and actuality (disregarding the origins of that experience), and if such an elucidation can be employed to facilitate existential contemplation usually associated with religion.18
Religious spaces and ceremonies are largely based on different forms of immersion. Think only of the way the sound of an organ or the singing of the imam fills the space of worship, or how meditation causes a form of immersion in oneself. Or how trompe l´oeil effects have been used in fresco painting in order to create spaces that seem out of this world, and appear as literal portals to higher dimensions. Even in paleolithic times humans transformed their spaces with illusions in the form of paintings of what may be totemic or magical creatures. I find it strange that by immersing ourselves, by falling deeper into a situation, we can somehow have the experience of transcending that very situation.
Teleportation #3 hovers in the balance between spectacle and my attempts at using immersion to reset viewer's attention, pull them out of their ordinary short attention span and experience a slow, subtle situation. It is clear that many did associate the experience with for example ghost tunnels and other situations where you anticipate a certain dramaturgy to unfold. I felt it important to retain some of this expectation. But at the same time, I wanted to take this opportunity to see if I could transform such an experience of spectacle into an opportunity for existential introspection. To go from the banal to the deeply serious in a simultaneous act of perception.19
Many visitors described precisely such a meditative state. In Teleportation #2, some viewers described a kind of resetting of themselves. This happened for many in the experience of entering into a space that that reminded of both sacral architecture and closed itself off from the rest of the building around it (a busy art academy), and where the space itself, by means of angles and materials, tended to expand and appear “boundless”.
In Teleportation #3 I tried to enhance the feeling of boundlessness described by viewers in Teleportation #2 by using darkness. What I personally found interesting was how I found myself in a state of liminality between outer sense stimuli and an awareness of my senses themselves. For me, as the maker of the work, all of these elements came together in a powerful encounter with myself and my own existence on a very basic level.
Could I enhance such an experience of becoming “reset” by making the situation more unpredictable, in the same way that Teater Bæst and other immersive theatre companies do? Could such a strategy of withholding information and a staging of an unpredictable situation trigger responses that allow the viewer to bypass their critical distance to the work? If such a response was initiated in a situation dominated by elements usually associated with religious spaces, and where the sheer experience of total darkness encouraged introspection and a searching attitude, could I somehow facilitate a form of reflection on the part of the viewer that could take on existential or numinous qualities? By pulling them deeper into the situation, could I enable them to teleport?
William S Haney II [...] defines the sacred [...] as a ‘voiding of thought’ (going beyond pairs of opposites) and a condition of liminality [...]. To take the receiver out of the ordinary is the task here; not just in the sense of presenting something slightly unusual, but much more ‘radically’ or fundamentally opening up the capacity for seeing anew, for beginning to get in on the way things put themselves together. To do that, you have to go ‘back’ to ‘before’ preconceptions, to a ‘place’ prior to language, what Peter Malekin calls ‘emptiness…devoid of boundaries’. Shock may be one aspect of the process, since it may well be a shock to find oneself ‘outside’ what one thought of as oneself and the configuration of the known world; it may also be a case of loss or abjection, a sudden revelation of the emptiness of role and identity. However, it may also be a gasp of amazement.20
Such a view of the sacred describes a state of going back to a preconceptual place where a certain ‘voiding of thought’ can take place. This would be something we find both in many religious traditions, where the devotee tries to transcend the earthly consciousness by reaching a boundless state beyond identity. In Teleportation #3 the journey through darkness seemed to have a similar function of resetting the viewers and their attention, they could have the experience of “seeing anew”.
This is not to say that everyone had spiritual experiences inside my exhibitions. I can only explain what I dreamed of achieving when starting out, and my own experience. Indeed, many were fascinated by the craft involved in creating illusory spaces, by the meticulous work behind the photo objects. To me a variety of reactions and experience is a sign that I have produced something that is not mere spectacle, but that contains a level of complexity and avenues of interpretation that makes it interesting on a subjective level. Such an open endedness on the part of the work means that each viewer is allowed to fill the work with their own baggage and experience.
References
de Oliveira, Nicolas. 2003. Installation art in the new millennium: the empire of the senses. London: Thames & Hudson.
Dewdney, Andrew. 2014. «Nonhuman Photography: An Interview with Joanna Zylinska.» Unthinking photography. https://unthinking.photography/articles/interview-with-joanna-zylinska
Steyerl, Hito. 2011. «In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.» Journal April(24). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/
Petersen, Anne Ring. 2015. Installation art: Between image and stage. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press.
Horning, Rob. 2021. «Buying time.» ARTnews January/February: 34-39. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/immersive-experiences-commodify-time-1234581629/
Yarrow, Ralph. 2007. Sacred theatre. England: Intellect books.