SUBLIME TIMESCAPES

Sublime Timescapes, 2015 – ongoing, photography, looking at the sublime and time as landscape. Natural elements and landscapes are used as abstract allegorical devices to posit a view of nature for understanding multilayered nuances. With interest to Place relative to Memory through a viewing field is informed by systems and psychological and physiological implications of analogue and digital photography. Examining Vision relative to Place and Memory through structures of flow become a thematic in the way this series looks at the ways human understandings of embodied cognition differ and share congruence in algorithmic learning methods used in Artificial Intelligence. The difference is discovered through relationship, or the way human imagination and perception conjugate in the viewing field. The Sublime Timescape landscapes becomes a relational frame-field for the body to relate to the the anterior as interior terrain. As the photographic medium forms from a referent, the memory of a reality existing a priori to the photographic event signifies invitation into the examine The Real. Water, terrain and stones are fundamental elements portrayed in the Sublime Timescapes as a means to activate embodied energy in each body to consider ways of seeing relative to notions of intelligence.

 

The ability to extract and invent new forms in visual flow through Mental Turbulence is well documented in Historical texts on painting. The images are often mistaken for paintings, while repetition of looking reveals slowly to the viewer over time, the innate human ability for Pattern Recognition. While pattern recognition is often discussed in Artificial Intelligence, the images remind viewers of the embodied ability to extract and invent new, imaginary forms through their different nervous systems. Painters used water to depict visible and ethereal flows such as Katsushika Hokusai, Gai Wang, DaVinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pollack.

Today’s machine translated representations from NASA’s imaging technology, geological terrain mapping, and medical imaging processes are common referents during our technocratic times. The use of digitally modelled stories rendered by machines contributes to Artificial Intelligence’s attempts to work mental turbulence processes painters used with their nervous systems, through technical depictions informed by sampling copies. Photography can serve as a mediary tool on a spectrum of painters and bodies on one end, and algorithms and copies on the other.

Kodak Gold film was selected for its reference to the everyday use of analog photography. Magenta and Amber’s hues were emphasized after film scanning. Magenta is understood as a unique facet of human vision, created in the mind and not existing at objective frequency wavelengths. Amber (chasmal) is a hue and resin related to the electron. The material of Amber can be negatively charged. While today’s view of ancient folk medicine considers the healing properties of Amber, a pseudo-scientific electrical conductor, accumulated sap hardened over time subtly interacts with electronics, such as blue-tooth headphones. In these often-overlooked nuances, the series points to the immediacy and malleability of vision through images relating to humanity. Whereas the notion of humans being part of nature was once new, the idea that all creation is part of nature often overlooks differences of significance. While photography serves as a mediatory tool along a spectrum often contextualised as containing painters and bodies on one end and algorithms and copies on the other, the references in the 1:1 results of exposing film through a rangefinder camera point to the sense of Place within Time and Memory. The viewers’ nervous system, informed by being there, becomes a critical element versus sampled copies A.I. relies upon. The inability to step in the same river twice, made known by Heraclitus, becomes a weight on scales of values and tonality for how far and deep learning can be carried forth with tools. The river or flow constantly replenishing itself represents an apopathic and imaginary way to understand the difference. In the reflexive process of making the exposures, the images concentrate on proposed divides between vision, imagination, psyche, and reality.

By working with what was already there instead of sampling representations, the exposures on Kodak Gold film were made with a meditative intention of un-selfing. Connecting directly to flow and turbulence within landscapes, the “I” disappeared to imprint film in a 1:1 moment using a rangefinder camera. Dissolving the self permits a sensuality and vitality in textural abstractions, merging the viewer and environment through images of water and stone elements.

Beauty lends itself to the dissolving of self. In watching, the viewer and nature subjects merge through the experience of the pictorial field. Working with qualities unique to the medium of film photography, the references to the elements in the exposures perform as extracted allegorical devices. Five-element theory as esoteric myth meets aesthetic notions of visual turbulence in looking at vision and images to understand aesthetic and philosophical differences. Mental Turbulence can also be explored in relation to Cognitive Dissonance and the ability to transcend, transform and integrate through nuance. In this way, the images exhibit ways and perform as physical proofs of human understanding considering difference and congruence in algorithmic learning.

 

The framed terrain refers to the real: that which is and becoming. The beingness of the camera as a reflexive imprinting tool, records impressions of what was there as well as the material of the film processes itself. Ontological significance in analogue photography relative to digital imaging,  painting and Artificial Intelligence have relationships to histories of visual literacy and mythology. Therefore, the embodied processes of visual material raises questions in the technocratic times of screen imaging and reconstituted images from digital databases. The analogue process is emphasized in the final images. In this way, memories and the subconscious are brought to the viewing field, and viewers are faced with sensual, textural, abstract forms speaking to the vitality of Beauty.