There’s Nothing to See and I’m Seeing It
Installation
Floating University, Berlin
- 2024
Taking a photograph is, in the words of Susan Sontag, ‘an act of non-intervention’. The photographer chooses between intervening in the scene unfolding before them - participating in, contributing to, preventing, or perhaps even sustaining whatever may be occurring before their two eyes and the camera's single optical lens - and releasing the shutter. Therefore, recording an image is the photographer's choice to be a forever witness to an event, and never to become the event itself. Shoot or intervene, observe or experience, in or out, in front or behind. Photography is fundamentally a matter of positioning.
However, taking a photograph cannot be seen as a passive act. The word ‘take’ itself implies at best removal and at worst possession, processes that reveal photography's more parasitic and predatory traits, especially when the subject is a living thing. Indeed, photography's other verbs do far less to forestall the collapse of any remaining notions of passivity associated with the medium: frame, capture, expose. Yet, to live in the world today - a world in which photography is an almost omnipresent phenomenon - begs the question, do events still precede photography as they once did?
Does the camera still react, or preempt?
There's Nothing to See and I'm Seeing It was presented at Floating University in 2024 in the exhibition Friction and later at Swamposium. The installation was produced in the context of the seminar (Para)Sites, facilitated by Prof. Pauline Doutreluingne at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.
Installation:
- Materials: C-Stand, Arduino Mega, Breadboard, Servos, Camera Shutters, Jumper Wires, Sand Bags
- Dimensions (HxWxD): 250cm x 150cm x 50cm