[-empyre-] Camera Obscura

Thu Jul 28 09:08:45 AEST 2016

Thank you for bring up this theme, Beatrice, and Christina and Johanna for elaborating on it. I was taken with this phrase, "deep penetration of a mechanical device through a domestic space,” because it implies the fundamental paradox I think your theory of Feminist perspective tries to resolve (I appreciated the bibliography). The paradox I see is between technology and embodiments, on this case, the domestic same being the space of the body. I am stiller interested in how a visceral experience of perception might be mediated more by sensory and tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi> 1958 Personal Knowledge), or what THICT NHAT H <http://www.lionsroar.com/author/thich-nhat-hanh/>anh defines as mindfulness (http://www.lionsroar.com/mindful-living-thich-nhat-hanh-on-the-practice-of-mindfulness-march-2010/ <http://www.lionsroar.com/mindful-living-thich-nhat-hanh-on-the-practice-of-mindfulness-march-2010/>). In my own experience of using a camera obscure, the meditative transformation of the mediated image was very beautiful, but very different than perception that strives to get past the photographic flattening we are all so familiar with. 

In Rebecca Solnit’s, “The Faraway Nearby,” she writes, “ I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization that sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony. the ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed. … Photographs preserve a little of this … but there is no going back. In our machines, we seek to speed everything up …” p. 84-5
Photographs give us the illusion of holding experience above time. But isn’t time exactly what gives meaning to perception? I don’t mean to disqualify camera obscuras or any other mediated experience but I do think most of us have unlearned how to see thru the technologies of our own bodies, and must undo that unlearning. I do suggest that resolving the conflict between assumptions of perception and actualization of experience remains unfinished business, that might contribute towards reconciling the “penetration …( into) domestic space."

“What the world needs is a good housekeeper.”
Aviva Rahmani, PhD
Affiliate INSTAAR, University of CO. at Boulder
https://www.nyfa.org/ArtistDirectory/ShowProject/1446ef3a-0a9d-4449-96be-74023eb9c376
Watch “Blued Trees”:  https://vimeo.com/135290635
www.ghostnets.com
www.gulftogulf.org

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 10:48 AM, Johanna Drucker <drucker at gseis.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> All, 
> 
> Thanks for this excellent exchange, which is prompting me to take the opportunity to comment.  I want to propose a theory of feminist perspective as an extension of our group endeavor here. 
>  
> Some of you will recall that the feminist film journal founded in the 1970s in Berkeley was named Camera Obscura. The title implied an engagement with the analysis of the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus, a phrase that included psychoanalytic theory of subject formation, in combination with feminist critiques. The image of the camera obscura, as well as the specific technology by which it operates, inscribes a static monocular position as the place from which and the place within which the image is produced. Early images of the camera obscura all bear its masculinist origins in a optics and mechanics that supports and reifies constructed perspective: depictions of male artists in full mastery of their gaze, the world projected for them onto a surface they control. Following Stephanie Strickland’s astute comments last week, I would suggest that we explore our engagement with the camera obscura as a way to consider a theory of feminist perspective in which the monocular point of view is always subject to at least a splitting into two views, which cannot be reconciled. The principles of this Feminst Perspective would be to demonstrate and embody epistemological principles of situatedness (within cultural, historical, gendered, class-based, and other conditions), of partial knowledge (the parallax between two views demonstrates the processes of selection that give rise to a representation, rather than obscuring it), constructedness (the enunciative, aesthetic, deliberate decisions of making). To me, these are the foundation of a political epistemology that recognizes specificity in every instance, differentiation as fundamental to identity, and positionality as an explicit feature of human experience and expression. 
>  
> I do not, however, think we can get to that place through images of the deep penetration of a mechanical device through a domestic space that has been softened with earth. Really? Please. That image is a parodic refutation of our conversation here. Made me laugh, but that’s about it. 
>  
> For those interested in a bibliography of discussions of perspective and also mechanical devices for optics, theories of vision, and other related matters, here is a brief list of fundamental texts:
>  
>             Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (finally translated into English by Christopher Wood and published in 1997 by Zone Books)
>             John White, Birth and rebirth of pictorial space
>             Marilyn Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting
>             Richard Lindberg, Theories of Vision
>             Victor Burgin, “Geometry and Abjection,” still one of the best pieces on subjectivity and vision. 
> 	    A good bibliography on devices, mechanical and visual, also exists and Wolfgang Lefèvre's edited volume, Picturing Machines is a good place to start on that. 
>  
> Much remains to be done to bring these historical models, critical concepts, and feminist principles into an applied politics of representation/construction of knowledge. Great to think that there is so much interest among this diverse community of practioner-scholars.
> 
> Johanna
> 
> On Jul 26, 2016, at 9:49 PM, Cortez, Beatriz 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.beatrizcortez.com/>
>> http://www.csun.edu/humanities/central-american-studies/beatriz-cortez <http://www.csun.edu/humanities/central-american-studies/beatriz-cortez>_______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20160727/6d0114af/attachment.html>