MARI AMMAN, SUBLIME TIMESCAPES

Images are forms of virtual, projected, embodied material woven with time.

Sublime Timescapes, 2015 – ongoing, photography, looking at the sublime and time as landscape. Natural elements and landscapes are used as abstract allegorical devices. The immanence of place is informed with analogue and digital photography to examine Vision through structures of flow. The series looks at the ways human understandings in embodied cognition differ and share congruence in algorithmic learning methods used in artificial intelligence. The main difference discovered through this project is through the realms of subjectivity and empathy. In this way, the landscape as a body relates the vision of the outside world not as mere projection or simulation but as existing a priori to the photographic event. Water, terrain and stones are the fundamental elements portrayed in the Sublime Timescapes as a means to activate the embodied knowledge of power each person circuits and the way things are seen relate to intelligence.

The ability to extract and invent new forms in visual flow through turbulence are well documented throughout histories in painting. A first look may deceive the viewer into believing the images are paintings. Repeated looking reveals forms of pattern recognition within the viewer’s awareness. 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 afferent 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 modeled stories rendered by machine, contribute 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 emphasised after film scanning. Magenta is understood as a unique facet of human vision, created in the mind and not existing on 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 mediary tool along a spectrum often contextualized 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 apophatic 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 permitted 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 seeing, 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 Mental Turbulence in looking at Vision and Image 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 expose ways and perform as physical proofs for human understanding to consider difference and congruence in algorithmic learning.

The framed terrains refer to the Real, meaning 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 photograph relative to digital imaging, painting and Artificial Intelligence have relationship 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 emphasised 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.