Reflections on Image as Site by Rune Søchting
There is an alien quality about the works that are developed through the project Image as site. I have followed the project during its development and while the following reflection takes my experience of the exhibition KOMPASS at Trafo Kunsthall in Oslo in 2022 as its starting point, I believe the points could be applied within the larger scope of the research project.
The exhibition KOMPASS was developed as an artistic collaboration between Ellen Røed and Signe Lidén. In the exhibition, recorded video and audio from different locations were presented in a large room along with several structural elements, including a big tripod-structure that had been used during the field recordings. Video images from inside a forest, recorded simultaneously with two cameras, were shown on screens one above the other. Sound recorded from the same location was made audible via circular cloth membranes that worked as speakers suspended throughout the room. The installed elements afforded a sensorial experience of a forest site that was curiously disorienting at the same time. The exhibition invited an exploration of different perspectives while one moved through room without ever offering a privileged center or vantage point.
While exploring the space one became aware of the relation between the projections, between perspectives. Dependent on viewpoint, momentarily, a rhythm emerged from two projections. At times the visual and the auditory material seemed to be in sync and at other times they appeared to float apart. Thus, in several ways the project was about creating a milieu, understood literally as a place between.
Another prominent theme of the exhibition was the process and technology of recording itself. The installed rig-stucture and membranes that had been used for the forest recording were included in the display. As a total installation the exhibition resembled historical photos and science fiction depictions of lunar landings where technical devices and vehicles were deployed to explore and record the alien landscape. The technology was also a significant aspect of the presented recorded material. The recording cameras’ movements, as they scanned the site, appeared to have a curious life of its own, without revealing a clear intention. At times the auto-focus on the cameras were activated and started hunting for focus. The sound of the camera mechanisms was part of the sonic environment mixed with other ambient sounds.
The idea of the image that emerged while visiting the exhibition had several entry points: Firstly the technical process of recording at a particular site and secondly the process of perception of an image through a number of distributed viewpoints in the exhibition-space. The exhibition managed to establish a tension between these aspects of the image without resolving it. Instead the work invited a reflection of the image as a processual phenomenon and as something that is not defined by specific medial or sensorial features.
Further, the context of the presented recordings implied a unique process of development: the material presented at the exhibition were recorded over a long period with a specially designed rig that allowed for two cameras to be mounted and kept in a delicate balance. As a technical object the rig has its own development-process where it has been tuned, altered, expanded etc. In a similar fashion the techniques of audio-recording were developed specifically according to the circumstances. The repeated recording-trips establishes a small history entailing a development of the actions necessary for making it happen, skill-building and a development and refinement of equipment.
The notion of the image offered in the project is thus an expanded one, and through its iterations the project have explored the image as dependent and entangled within a given environment and the process-history that allows for its becoming.
Image as process
A theoretical reference point for this attempt to explore the image as a dynamic phenomenon is the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. In posthumously published lectures on the image he likens the structural relation between the image-phenomenon’s visible features to the underlying process to that of a mushroom (Simondon 2023). With this metaphor Simondon suggests an understanding of the image as something that is more than a visible phenomenon, like a screen or a window. Just like the mushroom seen from above ground is a growth that hides a vast and complex mycelium underground, the image is something that is dependent on a vast, underlying, invisible and complex network. Further, the metaphor invokes the idea of the image as something dynamic, temporally specific and prompts us to think of it by way of its process of becoming and as something that unfolds within a particular context that allows for its appearance.
In an elucidating reflection the philosopher Emmanuel Alloa describes how Simondon’s account of the image can be seen as a counterpoint to a prominent understanding in Western philosophy that holds the image as an autonomous entity and at the same time a thing that has a dubious status as a copy or a reflection, as something derivative, illusory, as “a lesser being”. In Simondon’s text, Alloa finds a different perspective of the image that is defined by way of its relational entanglements (Alloa 2021).
With Simondon’s metaphor we might conceive of the image dynamically as something functionally related to a given environment. The image exists in and through the process whereby it emerges. This does not eliminate the image’s sensorial features. However, these apparent features must be understood in relation to the process of its becoming.
Through its practical and artistic interventions and the work presented at Trafo kunsthall, the project Image as Site invokes a similar understanding of the image. In the work there is an explicit focus on the image-producing process, the image-enabling technology and the circumstances. The question of course, is what is the nature of the processes that underly the emergent image and what is the nature of the dynamics inherent in the process.
The image, the body and technology
A salient feature of Image as site is the role of the image-producing technology. This opens for a different perspective on the question of the image than one finds, for example, in the approach of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Here the image is contemplated with regards to how human perception unfolds as an embodied activity within a given environment. (Merleau-Ponty 1964). Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes the painted image as something more than a depicted view observed from a distance. Rather, the painting is to be understood by way of the process of how it is produced. The image on the canvas is a visible trace of an underlying intimate relationship and a processual continuity between the perceiving and moving body and her environment. When perceiving the painting we immediately recognize this, yet our reflective awareness tends to give prominence to an idea of the image as an autonomous, static and visible spectacle.
With its emphasis on the technical or machinic component in the image-producing process, the works in Image as site opens a different frame for contemplating the image than as something determined by human perception. Instead of a human body whose actions and movements results in a recognizable image, we find technical devices: the tripod’s skeletal structure with a moving metal arm carrying cameras, large metal frames with suspended cloth that serve as membranes for pickup of mechanical vibrations. As such, the project’s investigation of the image entails a deliberate decentering of the human as controlling agent and moving body in the image-making process.
Arguably the theme of the image as an emergent phenomenon is recurrent throughout history of art and Image as site invokes a number of historical references. In its focus on technology there is a resonance with the exploration of the artistic possibilities of new image producing technologies introduced in the post-war era, significantly in early experimental works with film and video by American artists such as Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman in late 60s and early 70s. Here it was particularly the real-time transmission from camera to monitor-screen that became subject of investigation.
As Rosalind Krauss suggests, the space emerging with real-time transmission between camera and monitor is characterized by reflection and feedback. According to Krauss, video-art thus explores a particular economy of visuality and the gaze is thematically characterized as an “aesthetic of narcissism” (Krauss 1976).
However, the new image-making technology also opened for artistic investigations into more complex relations of recording and audiovisual feedback and invited a way of thinking about the process of image-making in terms transmission of information, and pointed towards a more general conceptualization of communication as something that unfolds within a circuit, as was prominent in the theorical innovation in cybernetics and information-theory.
Topological spaces
An example of this is Nancy Holt’s film-work “Swamp” (1971). The film documents Holt carrying a 16mm camera while moving through a swamp-environment in New Jersey along with her partner Robert Smithson. Holt’s visual access to the environment is restricted to the optics of the camera’s viewfinder. While Holt’s vision is restricted, she is guided by verbal instructions given by Robert Smithson. Considered cybernetically, the work stages a situation defined by the interplay between a set of stations and viewpoints with different access to information. The communication between the stations enables a particular way of navigating the environment. The image recorded by the camera represents Holt’s perspective and must be understood as an integral functional element while moving through the swamp. In a curious way the output is both an image of a place and establishing a site through this practice.
Another American artist who worked extensively with the notion of information related to a given situation is Dan Graham whose works explore how our way of relating to our immediate environment, space, other individuals and self-reflection is affected by devices that extend and/ or restrict our pickup of information. Graham’s installations recurrently make use of mirrors, one-way glass, but in a number of works in the 1970s explore situations involving feedback video-image (i.e. “Time Delay Room” and “Present continuous past” both from 1974) . By introducing a delay in the transmission of the video signal, the experienced visual feedback necessary for how one understands a situation is confused. Reflecting on the fact that image-screens increasingly are part of human environment in various forms, painting on walls, mirrors, windows, photographs, TV video screens, GPS etc. these works stand as powerful test-sites that examines how human behavior and experience are part of larger networks of relations and complex systems of communication that channel information.
These works seem to challenge an idea that human perception can be accounted for in terms of registration and processing of information from a neutral, privileged vantage point. Rather, the way we perceive our surroundings should be understood as a process that unfolds within the context of an affectional economy: the state of the one perceiving is constantly affected by the act of perception whereby the conditions for perceiving itself is affected. According to art historian Eric de Bruyn this calls for a topological concept of space: a space is produced by the relations unfolding in it (de Bruyn 2006). Or as Birgit Pelzer suggests in her reading of Graham, we should consider the situations created in his works as dynamic systems involving the ones perceiving as active components. In his work “space is demonstrated to be less a function of sight than of movement, it is constituted through the body or, more precisely, the actions of a subject. We thus return to an elementary topological percept: the deformability of perception, based on notions of contiguity and separation, of envelopment and continuity which exist independently of any fixed scale of measurement.” Space is thus not to be conceived as an empty container, but rather as temporally unfolded, as a “force field”, thereby challenging an intuition of space based on Euclidian geometry, that serves as a stable foundation for perception (Pelzer 1979).
The camera as instrument
The topologically informed idea of space as a force field resonates well with the notion of a site as something that emerges rather than pre-exists. However, the nature of the dynamics that constitute the field in the work presented at Trafo Kunsthall is different from what one finds in the works of Nancy Holt, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas. The works by Graham or Holt rely on a dynamic system of relations with an emphasis on an emergent interplay of gazes. The project Image as site explores an interplay of non-human things, of objects affected by gravitational pull, the blowing of wind, by automatized technical processes affected by events, changes in light etc. Significantly, the recorded sites are predominately without people. If humans are present, they play the role as observable elements with the same status as other visible elements at the site. In the same way the camera’s movements and its auto-focus pull appears to unfold without a bias towards presence of human bodies or controlled by a human gaze. Instead, the cameras’ behavior appears to have a “life” of its own, apparently independently of human agency. What came across in the recordings in the installation were not just the visual and auditory information captured by optics and microphones but also the recording of the strange life and behavior of the technical recording system itself, the movements of the rig, the sound of the auto-focus as it was affected.
Perhaps it is the apparent absence of recognizable intentionality in the recordings that infused the experience of the installation in Trafo Kunsthall with an alien quality, it was a site where humans were welcome as guests but not at home.
Physical process
The staging of physical process in the work brings another set of references to mind: In the text from 1968 “Music as a gradual process” the minimalist composer Steve Reich proposes the idea of a music developed around a structural principle of an observable process. Among the examples that he gives is that of pulling back a swing and let it swing until it comes to rest (Reich 2004). This idea is staged by Reich in his feedback work “Pendulum music”, famously performed at the Whitney museum in 1969. The idea of a music organized around a physical principle, can also be found in the works of Alvin Lucier, perhaps most explicitly in “I am sitting in a room” (1968) where a series of successive recordings gradually lets the voice present on the original recording vanish in acoustic-resonance that is increasingly amplified by the repeated playbacks and recordings, like a feedback system evolving in slow-motion.
It is tempting to conceive of the work displayed at Trafo Kunsthall along the lines of the processual work. However, it is clear that the nature of the process differs significantly from ones suggested by Reich. Compared to Reich and Lucier’s works where the process manifest itself as a temporally unfolded irreversible processual figure, the works of Image as site revolves around a particular tension between balance and off-balance, between a static state of suspension and unpredictable movements. Rather than reveal a processual figure, the work allows a kind of tension to unfold. The carefully designed rig is tuned to expose a particular yet unpredictable kind of behavior. The rig is designed to display emergent and essentially unpredictable behavior in moments when the system is out of balance between states of equilibrium.
What produces changes in movement might be explained in retrospect yet as events the changes remain indeterminate and unpredictable. A poetic reflection on the moment can be found in the French philosopher Michel Serres’ reading of Roman philosopher Lucretius as an unpredictable deviation of the movement of the atom, termed a “Clinamen” (Serres 2001). This tiny deviation of the movement of one atom is the beginning of a chain-reaction of movements through the mass of atoms and thus the original cause of change leading to the emergence of a form. The point is that the accidental deviation.
In this way what is recorded are moments of meta-stability – between states of equilibrium. The project finds its focus on the moment after the clinamen-accident has destabilized the system and before a new state of equilibrium is found.
The idea of the clinamen is also interesting in that it finds its explanation in a physical model of a system based on a play of forces. Following this, what we phenomenologically consider a static state could be understood, not as an absence of energy, but as a temporary state of equilibrium where a force in one direction is countered by an equivalent opposing force. Or to suggest another example from Serres’ reading: the spinning top that stands still as long as the top maintains its rotational movement. The underlying rational is that the initial natural state of things is not one of being at rest until they are moved or affected. Rather, everything moves and is filled with energy. All kinds of states, both in motion and static, are results of in an interplay of forces.
We are alien
It is far beyond the scope of this short reflection to justify if or to what extent a vast philosophical model like this could be read into the project Image as site. However, I would claim that the work opens towards a characteristic sensibility, a possible way of thinking about things. In the works it comes across as an experiential tension. For an immediate experience there is something unnerving in the experience of what appears to be fixed, stable and at rest could be so only momentarily in a fragile state of equilibrium. It is also somehow telling that the perspective, the audiovisual sensorium the project introduces in its attempt to record a dynamic interplay of forces, results in an experience of a familiar environment as something alien and without a clear center.
The project thus invites a mode of attention towards the fluctuating nature of things. It also inevitably opens a question with regards to the role of the artist in relation to the work. The artist is one who sets initial conditions, helps to develop circumstances, but does not directly interfere with the process once it is running.
A further point could be raised concerning the status of the image as a processual phenomenon. As mentioned earlier, the attention to the process rather than object is nothing new within an art-historical context, but in the project Image as Site this attention involves an apparent tension with regards to the status of the recorded material, that is produced throughout the project. Should we consider the recorded audio-visual material as a documentation of a process or as the result/output of a process or a work in itself? Which part of the recordings are the “right” ones, what is draft and what is “finished”?
Rather than present an answer to these questions, the project explores the tension by establishing situations where the processual nature of experience is forefronted. There is not a single privileged, “right” place for observation – no center, but rather an intermediary position temporarily suspended in a moment of balance between elements in motion and under constant influx of forces.
Perhaps the project’s exploration of the image can be characterized by its own inherent tension, between a framework for contemplating the image as autonomous entity, with a significance found in what the image is an “image of” and its immediate appearance, and on the other a framework that understands a site as a field of forces and where the appearance is but a part of an interplay of elements. Clearly human perception is capable of both perspectives. Yet it seems it is not a tension that has a single resolution.
References
Alloa, E. (2021). “A Lesser Being – From Louis Marin to Simondon and back”, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, No. 61–62
de Bruyn, E. C. H. (2006). ”Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism”. Grey Room, 25(Fall 2006)
Holt, N. (1971). Swamp. [FILM]. Holt/Smithson Foundation
Krauss, R. (1976). “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”, October, Vol. 1 (Spring), pp. 50-64
Lucier, A. (1968). I am sitting in a room. [Music] [Compact Disc LCD 1013]. New York: Lovely Music.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James E. Edie. trans. Carleton Dallery. Northwestern University Press.
Pelzer, B. (1979). “Vision in Process” in: October, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1979)
Reich, S. (2004). “Music as a gradual process”, in: Audio Culture. Eds C. Cox & D. Warner. Continuum.
Reich, S. (2000) ‘Steve Reich on Pendulum Music ’ . Perfect Sound Forever. <www.furious.com/perfect/ohm/reich. html>.
Reich, S. (1968). Pendulum Music. [Music]
Serres, M. (2001). The Birth of Physics. trans. Jack Hawkes. Clinamen Press Ltd.
Simondon, G. (2023). Imagination and Invention. trans. Christophe Wall-Romana and Joe Hughes. Univocal Publishing.
Rune Søchting is an artist and researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He wrote a ph.d. on sound as a relational phenomenon where he explored the “conditions for the audible” and its social and critical implications. His artistic practice unfolds across various formats such as composition of sound, installations and performance. His works are often the result of a site- or context-specific research involving dialogues or collaborations that informs the chosen format or technology. He is currently associate professor at the Royal Danish Art Academy Schools of visual arts.