ISH #5 2 – 5th October 2009 Perceptions of a Clandestine Resident & Privat Talks 1. During my time as a clandestine resident at ISH, I was granted unlimited powers by the management to use and define the facilities as I pleased. This was of course an honour, and I felt quite happy with the arrangement. I had three days to explore the functioning of my timely residence. For three days I used the space as a lecture- and training-hall, dormitory, temple and finally as a fantasy-machine. 2. Before defining the space, I submitted it to a series of tests [e.g., identifying the active/passive elements, 1) immediate experience and 2) deferred effects, frequent and alternative uses, as well as the operational and intermittent functionalities]. As I came to the end of the series I concluded: this is a place left pending. In fact, it isn't a place at all. Rather, it constitutes a device, or an invention. 3. I will name the device camera chiara. And the reader will thereby have guessed that the invention presents itself as such in the history of photography. If the camera obscura is constructed to catch the lights of the surrounding environment in their 1) chromatic reflections and 2) differentiated intensities, the camera chiara – literally 'clear room' – is constructed to catch ambient obscurities and their patterns. 4. The inventor of this device – Victor Boullet – was originally a photographer. His interest in scotography (the imprint of obscurity in the chromatic space of living forms) is at the basis of his project on human hypocrisy, from which springs the Institute of Social Hypocrisy (ISH) in Paris. His new vocation as a scotographer has evolved gradually, in time. At the beginning because it seemed necessary, and then because he found it more and more interesting. 5. Boullet’s interest in hypocrisy therefore has a technical origin, rather than a moral or existential one: scotography begins with digital printing. Since this technique brings us an optical translation of a digital code – rather than an imprint of light – digital prints cannot be considered as photographies. The digital print interposes a darkness between the viewer and the motif. 6. The attitude of the viewer – who naïvely accepts that the motif is projected unto the surface of the print – is thus structurally hypocritical: i.e., given in the social presuppositions of the digital print – one pretends that the constitutive darkness of the digital print does not exist; one puts up an act before a reality which, henceforward, is barred by images; and even so, one proceeds as though this new technology eventually can be bent by human conventions. 7. This user illusion, however, is contradicted by actual behaviour. With the proliferation and online connection of digital cameras, a new possibility is cast open: that of coding and disseminating human gestures – the users' real-time gestures, whose snapshots celebrate a variety of events and, through this readability of gesture – establishes a new contract between the eye and the hand. 8. The invention of the camera chiara drives this development one step further. It represents an exploratory return to analogue technology. All one needs is a white room, neon lighting, and a door-entrance (shutter) with a peep-hole. With this optical one is prepared to receive human projections in flesh and bone, who carry within them the very obscurities that the Institute has made its subject matter. 9. Victor Boullet’s discoveries in the camera chiara again point back to the invented relation between the hand and the eye: in this between-space the obscurity that defines human being draws a path tending towards being (which the reader will access by downloading my talk The Will of the Place). And the reader will also realise that the scotographic project, from this point on, is essentially a classificatory one. 10. It proposes, indeed, to survey the configuration of actors who are engaged with the device at a projection – e.g., mine – the contact points at their disposal (internet site, flyers, illustrated boards and beer), the transactions that take place (interruptions and exchange), the emergent opportunities (meals and hospitalities), and finally the gap between the immediate experience and the long-term effect of a projection (which, in the last instance, determine the effectiveness and value of all the other elements above). 11. The scotographic enterprise therefore, in the last instance, represents one of the several contemporary ventures to explore contemporary archives. In this relation of alterity, scotography distances itself critically from the Lager (as the logistic paradigm of current values [Agamben]) to which it proposes to reveal altermodern modes of subjectivation and devices (Bourriaud). For the time being, the optics of scotography remains manual – and anchored in the the simple and analogue technology of the camera chiara – for a period of two years (ISH). 06.10.09 |