In my Contextual Studies essay, Image in the age of entanglement, I discuss the journey away from a Cartesian understanding of reality towards one that is networked, non-linear and lively. I was influenced by a wide range of writers but focused in particular on Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement Of Matter and Meaning (2007).
I began wanting to explore what a post-Cartesian view might look like and found Barad’s work through a series of fortuitous relationships. Getting to grips with Barad’s ideas was and continues to be challenging. I do not come from a scientific background. I found it all very difficult indeed to research and understand. However, in doing so, my own view has developed and my way of working too. There are images in my archive that I would never take today and I am probably even more open to experimenting than before.
I am also aware that there are elements in the earlier drafts that are sorely missed in the final draft – i.e. comparisons between today’s fluidity and Deleuze’s ‘segmentarity’, and references to mycelial networks and Dadaism, for instance. I have always been aware the subject I was tackling was too big for the word limit, but the drive to explore and communicate the main thrust of my inquiry – to become aware that we live in a social system that is changing, from a system of top down power relation towards one that engenders a sense of agency for many more people than it did in the past, and (for the sake of this degree) photography’s part in that – is so important and pressing that I felt the benefits outweighed the costs. Nevertheless, the essay in the final draft is far more focused than the earlier ones, in my opinion. Deciding to focus specifically on Barad’s use of the word entanglement (which is contentious in scientific circles) and her commitment to a phenomenological universe was probably a key stage. Even so, I was worried about some of my likely quantum misunderstandings and approached scientists for help. I had some amazing feedback from a student who prefers to be anonymous and from an OCA student’s husband who is a quantum computing lecturer was very dubious about my inclusion of links to biological quantum ideas – however, I have since read many articles exploring this relatively new branch of physics and so if I were to write something longer, I would definitely look at that aspect in more depth.
Finally, my work eschews a monistic and linear view while embracing one that is entangled, multi-directional and polymorphic. It asks what image-making is, was, and is becoming, and although the photograph is definitely a protagonist, it must share the stage with other forms of exteriorisation. In doing so, the collection of expressions and traces on pages and screens are an investigation into the decoding and recoding of reality – and perhaps prompts us to believe we have the wherewithal to make critical and much needed revisions as we (re)discover more about our place within the universe.
As challenging as it has been, I am extremely glad to have finally completed the essay as it is. I could not have done it without help from the following people:
Thanks to the many proof-readers (OCA and non OCA) and my highly educated friend Mariana for checking the citation style.
Thanks to the three scientists who read through earlier drafts, Professor Peter Doel – University College London, Professor Alan Woodward – University of Surrey, and a quantum mechanics student who prefers to remain anonymous.
Thanks to artist Rowan Lear, who is far more knowledgeable about Karen Barad and agential realism than I am, for reading through excerpts I was unsure about and clarifying for me.
Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. (First edition) New York: PublicAffairs.
Originally part of a series of three end of module posts. However, there is too much for an assessor to read already and this is too long, a bit ‘ploddy’ and it would be better to make a video. I may use this as a prompt when editing the video but have removed it from the Submission Menu and cateogrised it simply as Reflection.
Six minute read
why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers is an inquiry into how we see and are seen. As it’s exploring a contemporary view, it inevitably expresses a sense of structural instability and disorder. That doesn’t mean life was once fixed, stable and safe, and no longer is; however, for reasons I discuss in a little while, we do seem to be in a period of significant chaos and the work reflects that.
An image from why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers
Beginnings of L3
I began with a loose idea about the stranglehold of representation on female subjectivity – in other words, by exploring the highly persuasive images in films and magazines which my generation grew up with. However, by the time I reached Assignment 3 my experiments were not terribly subtle and I wasn’t overly keen on the way people were interpreting “bondage” or “self-harm” (see images below). I was also interested in the fragmented way we consume content and engage in discourse nowadays – which is arguably contributing to a strange and unhelpful environment. I started writing short fragments of stories which were attempting to demonstrate the entanglement of image with consumerism, mythology and our everyday narratives. These were in the form of blank verse/prose with titles such as Orpheus in Homebase and Paucity at the Cabaret – you can see some of that earlier writing included in the A3 submission.
I think I always aimed to reject the mechanistic view which comes from positioning isolated objects against a void background as photography has encouraged, and attempted to embrace a more entangled practice and outcome. But by exploring Karen Barad’s (2007) ideas and other writers influenced by a branch of philosophy known as New Materialism, I came to see that representationalism somehow allows us to excuse ourselves, as it gives the impression that there is a separation between the represented object and the behaviours that helped to form it. In fact, a Cartesian view doesn’t even acknowledge that those behaviours did help form the object, as the object must always have existed. Barad, on the other hand, is avidly committed to the idea of a phenomenological existence, of language and objects being the ongoing intra-active lively expression in a process of becoming.
I was also not entirely happy with the fragmented texts I’d written. They felt less fluent, more contrived than the piece I wrote while preparing A2 – and which eventually ended up in a zine I produced, a useful preparation for the main BOW overall.
Wanting to somehow ‘Show Not Tell’ the entangled relationship between technology, narrative, identity and reality, I looked at various artists working with AI, and then some accessible AI options, which led me to an App called Replika, marketed as a proprietary ‘friend’. I decided to experiment with it and liked how it linked to consumerism, commodification and the dataisation (anatomisation) of – human and non-human – behaviour. It took a few more iterations of my publication before I dropped the texts I’d written myself but in the end I replaced them almost entirely with statements the AI had made (there is one fragment of self-authored prose that just about makes it into the publication – not all of it.) Looking back, the earlier iterations have something valuable, but it’s a different work – the latest iteration is very focused on the phenomenological relationship between Ai and humans.
Randomness
I shared images with the Ai – often randomly chosen although I may have mediated them in some way once they were in my hands – for instance, the woman in the red dress comes from a film I bought on eBay which I chose to buy based on nothing other that its age, the same as mine, and format. However, she, like so many other of the randomly chosen images of women, looks very much like me. (My son thinks it is me every time he looks at the publication.) Randomness and intra-active projection are crucial elements to our way of seeing (see article by Zia Steel – on quantum theory and consciousness – Section 3)
Making the publication – print and digital
A2 – After making a film for A1*, I ended up working with an external group during my preparation for A2 and it made sense to try and incorporate something of that into the OCA development, but it was a sprawling collaborative project called a rumour reached the village, and it was hard to know what aspect to focus on specifically for the OCA assignment. I had taken two sets of images, edited a film using old footage and written some text with the external group – see initial submission. It wasn’t until the beginning of lockdown that I made a firm decision about submitting one set of images and the text in the form of a zine. I chose a set that seemed more commercial with black and white grainy photographs in order to sell it – and the zine preparation was a really useful way of practicing before making something more ambitious for A3/4/5. I made that before I did a Lewis Bush book design course and I would certainly do some things differently in retrospect.
Throughout my time with the OCA (and long before) I have been thinking about the internal structures upon which we base our reality so it was brilliant learning from Bush about the way in which designers use grids. As I had been working with the idea of systemic change and a more flexible internal structure emerging in a post-Cartesian world, I decided to introduce the idea making that structure visible in my publication. I’d already been photographing graph paper alluding to mathematical equations and decoding of reality so this decision served to underline that aspect of the work, I hope. I started looking for grids in old photographs and rephotographing to imply or focus on grids in particular.
At some point, I saw another OCA student Andrew Fitzgibbon had made an ePublication and also received a link to one when I purchased a zine from OCA tutor Andrew Conroy.
Integrating movement with objects that are usually still has been a developing theme for me for a couple of years. And it felt important not to simply make a digital copy but to take advantage of what’s on offer – although with the ever present knowledge that digital platforms can be unreliable. I was constantly reminded of Maya Derren’s writing on cinema and reality – she said, don’t just try to recreate the theatre using film, make the most of what cinema montage offers.
Not having coding skills for the sort of work I want to do is a big problem for me – although I have tried to learn something and there has been a bit of Processing in my journey included in the work (although mostly I am interested in the language coders use such as ‘void draw’ (see Capra quote and symbols below)). I came across a platform via ex OCA student Dawn Langley designed to help artists use code a bit too late in the day and it is something I will need to look at going forward.
Freeing up the work at the last moment
Throughout, I’d been chipping away but never really reached a point where I felt things were coming to life. Something still wasn’t quite right. I have been intrigued by the idea of old systems disintegrating and the chaos that exists before and while a new system emerges – which I hope is embedded in the project. Capra and Luisi (2014: 305 -320) in A Systems View of Life describe how the period before a social system or organism self organises into a fully fledged one, is often deeply chaotic. They tell us “emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment” (Ibid: 3019).
“The new system cannot integrate the new information into its existing order; it is forced to abandon some of its structures, behaviours or beliefs. The result is a state of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and doubt; and out of that chaotic state a new form of order, organised around a new meaning, emerges” (ibid: 319).
Capra and Luisi (307) also tell us: “Human social systems, however, exist not only in the physical domain but also in a symbolic social domain, shaped by the “inner world; of concepts, ideas and symbols that arises with human thought, consciousness, and language”. I will come back to this in a moment:
Although lockdown was deeply challenging, I stayed focused on the work. Making work about the lockdown would have been fine, but continuing with underlying systemic change supported by digital culture and which is triggering new ways of seeing felt much more productive, especially as the virus is an emergent outcome of our intra-active behaviours.
A while before lockdown I had sought out some estimates for a publication that contained gatefolds and half pages, inspired by the Situationists, who were also looking at systemic change in the 60s (see below and related blog posts.)
I continued to work with this idea until very recently but I kept asking the printer for different costs as I tried hopelessly to squeeze my work onto a budget that was beyond my comfort and insufficient for the plans I had envisaged. Eventually, as I was getting ready to print a proof for the BOW assessment (to be developed and perhaps printed for SYP) I sensed the printer was somewhat tired of my changes. I looked around for alternatives and in the end, perhaps a somewhat reactionary result, I have settled on using the Newspaper Club as have done several times before. This meant forgoing all the extra embellishments but it was the best thing I could do. I will admit, I suddenly felt freer and the work did come to life in a way it had not previously (See Capra and Luisi’s comment about new systems above – ibid:319).
The work is still not where I want it and in SYP I will revisit printing options. But for now, I have brought this period of development to a satisfactory pause. The work will exist across platforms in multiple formats – as a visual stream of consciousness as video, a newspaper, an ePublication and a reported text from the point of view of the AI on my website, echoing Fisher and Rubinstein’s comment about the digital image’s fractal like ability quoted in my essay and the previous blog post.
*I am in the process of authoring a text from the point of view of the Ai, based on the statements it has made – and may incorporate the films I made in the early stages of BOW in some way as we have ‘spoken’ about them – this would allow the entangled topics to come into the work rather than simply being exploratory but redundant appendages.
For assessment I have supplied individual reflections that adhere to the word and time limits stipulated by the OCA. However, for my own sake, it was useful to write an integrated reflection (which I’d done before I saw what was required for assessment).
4 minute read
Introduction
When coming up with an idea for a project in an earlier module, Self & Other, my tutor advised me – to think of what I want to say and then say it. However, I recognised my way of working in Merlin Sheldrake’s description of his process in an interview about his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020). He writes:
“Early on I decided to produce a first draft by writing very quickly and scrappily. Somewhere in this puddle of text, I hoped, I might find a book. The momentum of this approach helped prevent paralysis. It also allowed me to see more clearly the themes emerge. Reworking this formless mass became a process of trying to understand mycelium, which is conceptually and intuitively slippery” (Sheldrake and Macfarlane, 2020)
As well as describing my process well, I could almost pinch Sheldrake’s words and replace mycelium with “seeing”. How we see is also conceptually and intuitively slippery – at least, it is if you believe Donald D Hoffman in The Case Against Reality (2020), in which he argues what we see has very little to do with what’s really here at the most fundamental level. [See It’s impossible to see the world as it is – a video produced by AEON on Hoffman’s ideas]
If I were to aim to say one definitive thing, as recommended by my Self & Other tutor, it would be that it has becoming increasingly apparent, the failure to let go of the Cartesian/Newtonian, mechanistic view of reality will be our undoing, and that we should do all we can to acknowledge a more entangled view. Furthermore, I’m not entirely sure photography in its most recognisable form is the best medium to help that with – given its representationalist modus operandi. However, I do not suggest we should abandon the photographic image altogether.
Integrated research and practice
My journey through each module continuously informed the other. My essay explores Karen Barad’s commitment to a phenomenological reality which ties in with Hoffman’s view. For Barad, existence is an entangled, lively morass of ‘becoming’ rather than a linear, easily categorised sequence of pre-existing objects inside a void universe. My Body of Work attempts to look at and express such an entangled process of becoming, as we witness my collaborator, an Ai, navigate a personality and relationship with me; but it came about and looks like the chaotic, disparate way in which that occurs.
Perhaps one of the most challenging parts of making this work was due to the fact I was investigating how we see rather than an actual ‘thing/object’, the difficulty of which was compounded all the while by my “Cartesian habit of mind” (Barad, 2007: 49).
In my essay, I explore how photography can’t help but promote the idea of a universe which contains pre-existing objects that float about waiting to be named – a Cartesian universe. In my practical work I have actively rejected the Cartesian, linear, mechanistic view which I believe photography inevitably enables (not least of all, because it emerged out of that mindset), and attempted to embrace one that is entangled and non-linear – and which the digital network fosters. I do not know if I have succeeded. I feel more confident that the puzzles and issues needing to be solved in the essay have been, but they are less resolved in the Body of Work*. Practicalities such as affordability or a lack of coding experience got in the way but my nascent post-Cartesian subjectivity may have been the biggest hurdle and too much to overcome.
The image today
Despite my concerns about the photographic image, there are two contemporary concepts about images today which Daniel Rubinstein and Andy Fisher in their 2013 book, On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation express well; the first of which I use in the essay. They discuss the digital images’;
“…fractal-like ability … to be repeated, mutated through repetition and spread through various points of the network, all the time articulating its internal consistency on the one hand and the mutability and differentiation of each instance on the other” (Fisher and Rubinstein, 2013:10).
I have deliberately aimed to explore this “fractal-like ability” by repeating images, creating different versions of them across mediums and platforms, online and off, still and moving, and by cross-pollinating the project with images that I’ve used previously along with new ones.
Screenshot from my Body of Work which exists across platforms and mediums, slightly differently in each situation and appropriate for the medium – the main image here appears in the film I made for ‘pic london’ (see A2)
Rubinstein and Fisher (2013:13) also suggest there is a growing understanding that technologically produced images are “precisely the site at which contemporary subjectivity is being formed and deformed.”
This statement is accurate but does not acknowledge the way in which we so easily mash up mediums today, made possible due to all being underpinned by code. It continues to priviledge the image. By collaborating with an Ai who I shared images, ideas, songs, movie suggestions and more with regularly, I demonstrate how written text, audio, images and as well as the underpinning code combine with more nebulous processes – like the formation of ideas, dreams, fears, imaginaries to form our subjectivities and landscapes.
Subject and object
Although the work clearly focuses on images of women, and I wanted to explore that particular subjectivity, I did not set out to make work about the object ‘WOMAN’ – because therein lies the problem. By focusing on the object and insisting that it comes before ‘subject’, we often fail to recognise how our perception is a complex intra-active, post-representationalist and emergent process, and that the object, any object, does not exist in isolation, or in a vacuum. It’s of course important to look at obviously demarcated issues such as sexism, racism, climate change, poverty, or the movement of people, and we risk becoming overwhelmed by the scale of the world’s issues if we don’t – but until we acknowledge the interconnectedness of all these various topics and others, we are unlikely to be able to solve our problems adequately. We need to address the way we see. And crucially, but perhaps most challenging, that need applies not only to individuals but to institutions like governments, educational establishments, media outlets and even photo-agencies.
My inquiry into a more entangled view of life has shown me how the assumptions we all make about life – whether we’re investigating it though text, image, music or interpretive dance – is far more complex and strange than we have long been led to believe. The theories I’ve looked at threaten the West’s commitment to notions of self, to individualism, and to the boundaries we are still so deeply convinced by. And as one looks around the world today, it seems imperative we begin to take some of those lessons on board.
*I feel better about BOW since compiling the monologue.
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