Worldmaking with the Aesthetic Apparatus:

Tracing Vision back to the Embodied Observer

Tuula Närhinen

The 2025 main project Heliographic Garden invites the audience to step into the enchanted Umwelt of photomedia. The project addresses cultural techniques, conceptions and pictorial operations underlying the spell of analogue photography. 

2025   Programme, schedule and events

THE HELIOGRAPHIC GARDEN

Generated by means of various cameraless techniques, the project creates endemic visual realities and medium-specific temporalities that challenge the spectator’santhropoid vantage point. In so doing, it enables us not only to transcend the human sensorium but also to reflect on alternative subjectivities and registers of materiality brought about by photographic mediations.

Cameraless Space and Time – reflecting fixity and transience

Drawing from Jacob von Uexküll’s theories of the Umwelt, the project targets the “ecology” of analogue photography. Uexküll’s concepts of “perception time” and “effect space” are applied to study the silver-based materials as living fabrics of spatial and temporal becoming.

All the artworks are produced by placing objects of the natural world (plants, dead insects or soil) in direct contact with light sensitive surfaces, such as photographic papers, films or cyanotypes. The cameraless method implicated is informed by the artist-researcher Karel Doing’s Phytograms, a cinematographic technique and community film practice that makes use of organic chemistry and analogue film stock to create moving images of plants. Embracing Doing’s experimental method Tuula Närhinen set out to further develop the technique to include still images on colour printout paper.

In today’s realm of digital photography, these analogue materials have become obsolete and can therefore often be found second hand by crowdsourcing photographers’ leftover stocks of expired films and papers. The photograms feature quirky spatial illusions, marked by the contrast between the contact print’s sharp details and the shadowy outlines in the background. The 1:1 renderings mediate surprisingly vivid impressions of depth, even though they are produced without lenses nor any camera equipment simply by implementing a light sensitive surface which flattens the world onto a picture plane.

The project asks how do different papers and films “see” colours of the natural world? Närhinen’s photograms are contingent on several unpredictable factors such as the differences between emulsions, moisture, the length and strength of exposure as well as hazardous chemical reactions. Some of the negatives are left unprocessed after the exposure while others are treated with potassium hexacyanoferrate and/or ammonium thiosulfate (= fixing agent) to enhance the colours and to prevent the negatives from darkening. The results are listed according to the commercial brand and type of the paper stock utilised in their making. For example, a photogram entitled the Meadow July 2024, Kodak Supra Endura (2010), is executed on a 51x105cm piece of Supra Endura roll paper whose emulsion expired in 2010.

Following Uexküll’s account, the work explores evanescent phenomena related to the non-human perception of time. Digital animations based on insect imprints registered on film will be displayed at various frame rates. The clips are viewed from discarded cell phones’ tiny lcd-screens, converted into nimble media players by uploading a program that loops the moving images. The temporal dimension is also addressed through still photograms that highlight seasonal changes and plant growth.

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