Worldmaking with the Aesthetic Apparatus:

Tracing Vision back to the Embodied Observer

The 2025 main project Heliographic Garden invites the audience to step into an enchanted Umwelt of photomedia.

The work draws from the material-discursive practice of analogue colour photography and studies its technical condition.

Tuula Närhinen

2025   Programme, schedule and events

THE HELIOGRAPHIC GARDEN

A Stroll into the medium-specific Umwelt of Analogue Photography

The project invites the audience to step into the enchanted world of analogue photographs, produced by the chemical agency of plants in interaction with light sensitive technologies. The work includes spatial and cinematic installations that propose the visitor to engage with the modus operandi of various photographic imaging technologies in their genuine, material-discursive milieu.

Generated by cameraless techniques, the artworks create medium-specific visual realities and temporalities that set out to challenge the spectator’s anthropoid vantage point. The chemigrams enable us to transcend the human sensorium and to envision alternative subjectivities and registers of materiality brought about by contact prints and analogue film.

Cameraless Space and Time – reflecting fixity and transience

Drawing from Jacob von Uexküll’s theories of the Umwelt, the project explores the “ecology” of analogue photographic technologies in terms of Naturtechnik. 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 has developed the technique to include still images on colour printout paper.

In today’s digital realm, the analogue photographic materials have become obsolete and can therefore often be found second hand by harvesting leftover stocks of expired films and papers. Based on the idea of inserting a flat light sensitive surface in the middle of vegetation, the images mediate optical illusions of a flowering “meadow”. The life-size renderings create surprisingly vivid impressions of vegetation, even though they are produced without lenses nor any camera equipment. The photograms feature quirky spatial illusions, marked by the contrast between extremely sharp details and shadowy outlines, which result from variations in pressure during contact printing.

The project asks how do different papers and films “perceive” colours of the natural world? The 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 taps into non-human perceptions of time and space to explores evanescent phenomena. 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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