Abstract The project invites the audience to step into the queer and enchanted world of analogue photographs, produced by the chemical agency of plants in interaction with light sensitive technologies. The work includes spatial photographic and cinematic installations that propose the visitor to engage with the modus operandi of various analogue 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 resulting chemigrams enable us to transcend the human sensorium and to envision alternative subjectivities and registers of materiality brought about by the contact prints and the analogue films.
Drawing from Jacob von Uexküll’s theories of the Umwelt, the work taps into non-human perceptions of time and space. The project explores evanescent phenomena and the “ecology” of analogue photographic technologies in terms of Uexküll’s Naturtechnik. The concepts of “perception time” and “effect space” will be applied to study the silver-based light-sensitive materials as living fabrics of spatial and temporal becoming.
The work is part of a three-year research project entitled "Worldmaking with the Aesthetic Apparatus: Tracing Vision back to the Embodied Observer". The research develops an artist-led, empiric approach to study the sweeping repercussions that visual technologies may have in orienting the human sensorium and in underpinning our worldview.