[-empyre-] Camera Obscura

Wed Jul 27 19:32:32 AEST 2016

Hi Beatriz and all,

Camera Obscura turned up early in this month.  Murat Nemet-Nejat and Lee Mackinnon exchanged:  http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009166.html

Lee Mackinnon wrote:  “….For me, a feminist data visualisation is one that begins to first unearth and re-navigate assumed meanings- an exploration of technics that always begins and ends with the bodies whose presence has been overwritten, or written out of these hierarchies of knowledge, or forms of production.As regards Murat's question concerning the camera obscura and the digital  image- can you narrow the question somewhat- is it the function of the
camera obscura, or the image that results from capturing it, either by drawing it or capturing it on a light sensitive surface? In other words, is it the technical system of representation or the representation of the image itself that interests you?

and Murat responded,

"If I remember correctly, in your post you were emphasizing the granular materiality of the digital image (therefore, somehow transcending the representational quality of the camera obscura image). Yes, I was referring
to the creation of the image in the camera obscura photography where the created image depends on the efficiency (in the 19th century often the inefficiency) of the receiving medium to record the light coming from the
object. Is that movement of light which often creates uncontrollable distortions in the representing image any less material than a coded (mediated) sensory image created digitally?"

It’s fascinating you all bring this up— the Camera Obscura— and I’m wondering about how Beatriz imagines her installation-- could  it somehow dematerialize (is that right?) a manifest image? I’ve often thought about that especially in connection with my installation video project, “Shed Cubed,” which had as a working title, “Transborder Immigrant Light,” stealing from the nameTransborder Immigrant Tool by bang.lab and Electronic Disturbance Theatre.  My wondering was about how light could be drawing moving across borders,  http://www.christinamcphee.net/shed-cubed-premiere-installation-2012/  https://vimeo.com/152125614  — installed at Krowswork, Oakland in 2012.

In a way I was using my drawing shed as, in a crude way, a camera, but more in the sense of a black Maria than as a camera obscura, yet there are some resonances perhaps.  One observer, Louis-Georges Schwartz, went so far as to identify the camera-making light tracing processes in Shed Cubed as a feminist-marxist marking of refusal and space-time at once.  I was skeptical of this at the time— yet in the context of this discussion, suddenly I can almost see how Schwartz’s analysis could relate to your potential Camera Obscura project, Beatriz, with its goal of coming closer to ’nomadic collective identities’— the latter being of course not defined as human as such but somehow much more— granular? temporal? Schwartz comments on how and why he believes  “the shed becomes a camera within which McPhee is an element. Her mastery of line expends itself tracing shifting lines produced by natural illumination. Her skill refuses any already recognized mode of expression. Re-marking the lines made by sunbeams on the shed’s walls means working on a line that only exists in particular place at a particular time that McPhee’s line indexes. It also means working on the fissure of the figurative and the abstract. The great skill required to trace the line of light and shade leaves a mark that can appear to be a casual abstract doodle. McPhee elaborates an idiom situated in relation to the longer history of drawing as a skilled practice. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh accounts for Raymond Pettibon’s drawing practice as an assertion of skill in order “to rescue as a practice of counter-memory the mnemonic spaces of language and visual representation under the conditions of their systematic extinction by techno-scientific rationality and spectacle culture … [taking place] at precisely those social sites where the resistance against technoscientific rule and the results of its most advanced devastation are the most evident. ” Extrapolating Buchloh’s argument, one might radicalize its form and turn it a bit against itself and towards a critique of deskilling: an expression of skilled mark-making resists the conditions of contemporary cultural production to the extent that matrix attempts to subsume skilled mark making and render it impossible. Pettibon asserts his skills using comic book forms associated with men and the forms of subsumption his work resists seem to be those shared by working commercial artists and the world of “high art.” McPhee asserts her skill over and against its subsumption in the sphere of social reproduction, which remains coded as feminine. She had to build and convert a shed in order to have a workspace. Her studio-shed marks the triple limits of domestic and public, social reproduction, and cultural production, the process of creation and the obligation of the market. The power and beauty of Shed Cubed rises from McPhee’s assertion of skill to mark the space-time of those limits — to articulate their chronotope. When McPhee traces the sun’s line on the shed walls, she captures an originary index of time, the sundial before sundials: she draws time passing in the problematic site of ma(r)king as cultural production which itself constitutes the limits of the domestic.”  http://www.christinamcphee.net/on-christina-mcphees-shed-cubed-louis-georges-schwartz/

Beatriz, how does light work as a medium for ‘nomadic collective identities”— in the context of the Camera Obscura…. or is it too soon to tell ? 

my best

Christina

Christina McPhee
naxsmash at mac.com

http://christinamcphee.net

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 5:49 AM, Cortez, Beatriz <beatriz.cortez at csun.edu> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello again,
> 
> Since we are talking about the eye and vision, I wanted to share a few ideas that I have been thinking about as I have been putting together a proposal for a site specific installation. My intention is to build a Camera Obscura:
> 
> Throughout history, philosophers have theorized about our perception of reality. In the Ethics, and in his Letters, Baruch de Spinoza wrote about the dislocation between the idea of man and the scientific idea of man. Marx also wrote about a skewed version of reality in 1846, in The German Ideology. For Marx, consciousness emerges out of the material conditions of existence. Within that context, ideology functions as a Camera Obscura because it shows an inverted perspective of reality. However, Marx believed in the possibility of overcoming the distorted vision produced by ideology, in the possibility of seeing reality as it actually is, of achieving objective vision. Wilfrid Sellars stated in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, a lecture he delivered at the University of Pittsburgh in 1960, that the "manifest image is a refinement or sophistication of what might be called the 'original' image; a refinement to a degree which makes it relevant to the contemporary intellectual scene" (7). In other words, for Sellars, the original image gained content as it was placed in relation to the historical context of Western philosophy. In this sense, the manifest image was based on the construction of the concept of a "person" (10), a concept that is linked to one of the most prevalent ideas of Western philosophy, the idea of the transcendental identity of man. For Sellars, however, the combination of the manifest image and the scientific image has the potential of producing a stereoscopic vision, a virtual reality of sorts. As Ray Brassier explains in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Sellars' concept of the manifest image is inscribed within humanist (5-6). Brassier is interested in Sellars' stereoscopic vision, as he strives to move beyond historically conditioned meaning," and therefore, towards other speculative possibilities that are beyond humanism, beyond a transcendental construction of identity, and that are closer to what Rosi Braidotti calls nomadic collective identities. 
> 
> 
> 
> Beatriz Cortez
> Http://www.beatrizcortez.com
> http://www.csun.edu/humanities/central-american-studies/beatriz-cortez
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