Florian Dombois and Julie Harboe Introduction Introduction Publication Size Matters Acknowledgements References Authors Biographies
4 7 13 14 15 16
Introduction The People’s Republic of China and Switzerland have had a Free Trade Agreement since 2014. Eight million people live in Switzerland, more than a billion in China – can concepts, modes of production, and methods be transferred from one country to the other? Since 1890, Levi’s has produced a pair of trousers called 501 – is it still the same pair of pants today? Natural radiation exposure amounts to 0.3 mSv on average, and radioactive radiation of 7,000–10,000 mSv is fatal – what does the maximum legal value of 1 mSv mean for people in individual cases? As diverse as these examples are, and despite the number of areas involved, there is a common theme: scaling. Scaling is a technique of changing size that has been used by people from time immemorial. Even as children, we begin to explore scale when playing, for example, with dolls, toy cars, and building blocks. And even in the oldest artistic artifacts such as the Venus of Hohle Fels or the Chauvet cave paintings, dating
4
Florian Dombois and Julie Harboe
back to the beginnings of human history, the idea of representation and the notion of scalability seem to be twinned. In the course of industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this anthropological technique of scaling took another surprising turn. First, the art of engineering developed so dramatically that ever-higher towers and ever-longer bridges were built, for which small models were enlarged cleverly and thus scaled. The work of Gustave Eiffel, for instance, would be inconceivable without free thinking in different scales. In addition, because of mass production scaling achieved a further incredible reality. Things that are developed in one place subsequently assume a global existence. Today, we live in a world that is dominated by scaled objects. Unique pieces have become special cases among our household goods, our clothing, our public spaces. Actually, is there any object at all in our surroundings that does not have scaled relatives or that was not, at least hypothetically, conceived originally in a different dimension? And haven’t we even gone so far as to introduce scaling in our gestures since 2007, when we started enlarging and reducing photographs with thumb and forefinger on our smartphones to adapt the size of pictures? This book and the conference preceding it were the result of a further observation: The omnipresence of scaled objects in our surroundings has been accompanied by photography for nearly 200 years. And it is
Introduction
5
Florian Dombois and Julie Harboe Introduction Introduction Publication Size Matters Acknowledgements References Authors Biographies
4 7 13 14 15 16
Introduction The People’s Republic of China and Switzerland have had a Free Trade Agreement since 2014. Eight million people live in Switzerland, more than a billion in China – can concepts, modes of production, and methods be transferred from one country to the other? Since 1890, Levi’s has produced a pair of trousers called 501 – is it still the same pair of pants today? Natural radiation exposure amounts to 0.3 mSv on average, and radioactive radiation of 7,000–10,000 mSv is fatal – what does the maximum legal value of 1 mSv mean for people in individual cases? As diverse as these examples are, and despite the number of areas involved, there is a common theme: scaling. Scaling is a technique of changing size that has been used by people from time immemorial. Even as children, we begin to explore scale when playing, for example, with dolls, toy cars, and building blocks. And even in the oldest artistic artifacts such as the Venus of Hohle Fels or the Chauvet cave paintings, dating
4
Florian Dombois and Julie Harboe
back to the beginnings of human history, the idea of representation and the notion of scalability seem to be twinned. In the course of industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this anthropological technique of scaling took another surprising turn. First, the art of engineering developed so dramatically that ever-higher towers and ever-longer bridges were built, for which small models were enlarged cleverly and thus scaled. The work of Gustave Eiffel, for instance, would be inconceivable without free thinking in different scales. In addition, because of mass production scaling achieved a further incredible reality. Things that are developed in one place subsequently assume a global existence. Today, we live in a world that is dominated by scaled objects. Unique pieces have become special cases among our household goods, our clothing, our public spaces. Actually, is there any object at all in our surroundings that does not have scaled relatives or that was not, at least hypothetically, conceived originally in a different dimension? And haven’t we even gone so far as to introduce scaling in our gestures since 2007, when we started enlarging and reducing photographs with thumb and forefinger on our smartphones to adapt the size of pictures? This book and the conference preceding it were the result of a further observation: The omnipresence of scaled objects in our surroundings has been accompanied by photography for nearly 200 years. And it is
Introduction
5
Andrew Fisher Imaginative Variation: Photographic Scale and Photographic Horizons A reordering and re-envisioning of the photographic Scale and the photographic Imaginative variation: Discovering the principle of a variation in photographic scales Photographic horizons References Author Biography
18 22 25 28 31 32
[T]here is no single site of the photograph. […] There is a distributive unity to the photograph itself. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All A reordering and re-envisioning of the photographic This essay sets out to explore three terms that are important to photography, namely scale, horizon and imaginative variation. The relationships between these will be explored with an emphasis on questions of scale, not only because it is the least familiar in the photographic context, but also because it links and gives shape to what the others might mean for photography. We use photography to establish horizons of meaning that might help to orient us visually within a complex world. But its promise to perform this function, to render the world proportionate, is often duplicitous. One might go as far to say that precisely insofar as it holds out such imaginative possibilities, photography also serves as an agent of disorientation and disproportion. In general, the term photography might be thought of as naming the set of horizons thus promised and the processes through which they are created, used, contested and dissolved. In this light, photography appears as a massively determined and complex form of social imagination: a complex process of imaginative variation on the world. Since its inception, photography has come to inform and to transform the spatial and temporal, epistemological and phenomenological horizons
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Andrew Fisher
of experience associated with almost all spheres of life, and has done so in many and various ways. It has long since served, for instance, as an important vehicle of practical and imaginative possibilities taken up by individuals. And it endures as a major instrument through which the prospects offered by political, cultural and economic institutions are given shape. One can link these functions of photography to recent critical debates and ask whether, perhaps, we have ‘lost’ the horizons of meaning and value that might have oriented us in the past and now need to turn to image forms that could help us construct new horizons. Or, alternatively, one might ask whether the expectation that new social forms might constitute themselves through the image’s projection of novel horizons is fatefully circumscribed by a broader and overdetermining “horizon of endless accumulation […] politically coded in economic terms as the freedom of ever greater consumption”, as Peter Osborne (2011: 127) has it. This essay adopts a metacritical approach to these questions and possibilities. It sets out to think of photography as a form that promises and withholds, constitutes and dissolves the very possibility of establishing horizons of meaning and value. Hence, the essay’s remit is to work towards understanding the relationship between the imagination (figured as a technology of imaginative variation) and the horizons of meaning and value associated with it (through a kind of diastolic/systolic rhythm of promise and dissolution). In photography, I argue, a key mechanism of these operations and relations is scale. One might take a step to one side here and note that issues of scale are integral to photography and have been since its earliest days. Though much writing on photography and many different spheres of photographic practice entail significant questions and facts of scale, surprisingly little sustained and explicit critical or theoretical attention has been paid to this fact. In response, this essay sets out to explore the senses of scale encountered in, disclosed by and established through the photographic. In fact, it sets out to reorient the way in which photography is understood according to these relationships. Scale and horizon are explored here as closely related and vital aspects of the photographic and as two facets of a matrix of processes and possibilities that shape what photography might mean and what it might do in the present, that is, the horizons of meaning it both proffers and serves to destruct and the form photography takes as an imaginative variation on the world.
Imaginative Variation: Photographic Scale and Photographic Horizons
19
Andrew Fisher Imaginative Variation: Photographic Scale and Photographic Horizons A reordering and re-envisioning of the photographic Scale and the photographic Imaginative variation: Discovering the principle of a variation in photographic scales Photographic horizons References Author Biography
18 22 25 28 31 32
[T]here is no single site of the photograph. […] There is a distributive unity to the photograph itself. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All A reordering and re-envisioning of the photographic This essay sets out to explore three terms that are important to photography, namely scale, horizon and imaginative variation. The relationships between these will be explored with an emphasis on questions of scale, not only because it is the least familiar in the photographic context, but also because it links and gives shape to what the others might mean for photography. We use photography to establish horizons of meaning that might help to orient us visually within a complex world. But its promise to perform this function, to render the world proportionate, is often duplicitous. One might go as far to say that precisely insofar as it holds out such imaginative possibilities, photography also serves as an agent of disorientation and disproportion. In general, the term photography might be thought of as naming the set of horizons thus promised and the processes through which they are created, used, contested and dissolved. In this light, photography appears as a massively determined and complex form of social imagination: a complex process of imaginative variation on the world. Since its inception, photography has come to inform and to transform the spatial and temporal, epistemological and phenomenological horizons
18
Andrew Fisher
of experience associated with almost all spheres of life, and has done so in many and various ways. It has long since served, for instance, as an important vehicle of practical and imaginative possibilities taken up by individuals. And it endures as a major instrument through which the prospects offered by political, cultural and economic institutions are given shape. One can link these functions of photography to recent critical debates and ask whether, perhaps, we have ‘lost’ the horizons of meaning and value that might have oriented us in the past and now need to turn to image forms that could help us construct new horizons. Or, alternatively, one might ask whether the expectation that new social forms might constitute themselves through the image’s projection of novel horizons is fatefully circumscribed by a broader and overdetermining “horizon of endless accumulation […] politically coded in economic terms as the freedom of ever greater consumption”, as Peter Osborne (2011: 127) has it. This essay adopts a metacritical approach to these questions and possibilities. It sets out to think of photography as a form that promises and withholds, constitutes and dissolves the very possibility of establishing horizons of meaning and value. Hence, the essay’s remit is to work towards understanding the relationship between the imagination (figured as a technology of imaginative variation) and the horizons of meaning and value associated with it (through a kind of diastolic/systolic rhythm of promise and dissolution). In photography, I argue, a key mechanism of these operations and relations is scale. One might take a step to one side here and note that issues of scale are integral to photography and have been since its earliest days. Though much writing on photography and many different spheres of photographic practice entail significant questions and facts of scale, surprisingly little sustained and explicit critical or theoretical attention has been paid to this fact. In response, this essay sets out to explore the senses of scale encountered in, disclosed by and established through the photographic. In fact, it sets out to reorient the way in which photography is understood according to these relationships. Scale and horizon are explored here as closely related and vital aspects of the photographic and as two facets of a matrix of processes and possibilities that shape what photography might mean and what it might do in the present, that is, the horizons of meaning it both proffers and serves to destruct and the form photography takes as an imaginative variation on the world.
Imaginative Variation: Photographic Scale and Photographic Horizons
19
Sarine WaltenspĂźl (*1986) works as a research assistant at the Research Focus in Transdisciplinarity of the Zurich University of the Arts. She is currently doing her doctorate in media studies at the University of Basel. She studied philosophy, art history and cultural analysis at the University of Basel, the University of Zurich and Humboldt University of Berlin.
48
Helmut VĂślter
Masanao Abe: The Movement of the Clouds at Fuji
49
Sarine WaltenspĂźl (*1986) works as a research assistant at the Research Focus in Transdisciplinarity of the Zurich University of the Arts. She is currently doing her doctorate in media studies at the University of Basel. She studied philosophy, art history and cultural analysis at the University of Basel, the University of Zurich and Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Helmut VĂślter
Masanao Abe: The Movement of the Clouds at Fuji
49
Abe photographed this four-part picture series on 13 November 1934 between 7:55 and 10:35 am. He published the very special cloud shape under the title “Tsurushi”, a traditional Japanese name for these special clouds that only exist in the mountains. Abe frequently used picture series to document developments in the sky. This was part of his sophisticated observation technique in which photography and film intertwine: Abe documented static situations that do not change over a longer period with individual pictures. He captured movements and changes of shape with the film camera, and he always used the pictures to create time-lapse movies. In most cases, he used film and photography in parallel: the plate camera had a much more detailed, sharply focused image, which supplemented the grainy and coarse 35-mm film shots.
Two of Abe’s assistants at work in the observatory. The large camera on the left is a plate camera, the smaller camera on the right is a film camera (a French Débrie Sept). As a member of the high nobility, Abe had the financial means not only to buy a large number of meteorological measuring instruments for his observatory, but also to employ his own assistants for the tedious observation work.
52
Helmut Völter
For his research, Abe used these self-developed large-scale forms to record his observations. Under the contact print of a photograph is a drawing, constituting the first step of his analysis. In it, he further reduced the photograph to the essential outlines of mountain and clouds and added the movement directions with arrows. This, too, is a kind of scaling.
In 1937, Abe published the over 400-page book Distribution and Movement of Cloud around Mt. Fuji Studied through Photographs. Unlike in his scientific articles, in which he reported on the progress of his work and analysed air currents at the mountain, this book is purely a collection of data in which he revealed the results of his observations to enable other scientists to use them.
Masanao Abe: The Movement of the Clouds at Fuji
53
Abe photographed this four-part picture series on 13 November 1934 between 7:55 and 10:35 am. He published the very special cloud shape under the title “Tsurushi”, a traditional Japanese name for these special clouds that only exist in the mountains. Abe frequently used picture series to document developments in the sky. This was part of his sophisticated observation technique in which photography and film intertwine: Abe documented static situations that do not change over a longer period with individual pictures. He captured movements and changes of shape with the film camera, and he always used the pictures to create time-lapse movies. In most cases, he used film and photography in parallel: the plate camera had a much more detailed, sharply focused image, which supplemented the grainy and coarse 35-mm film shots.
Two of Abe’s assistants at work in the observatory. The large camera on the left is a plate camera, the smaller camera on the right is a film camera (a French Débrie Sept). As a member of the high nobility, Abe had the financial means not only to buy a large number of meteorological measuring instruments for his observatory, but also to employ his own assistants for the tedious observation work.
52
Helmut Völter
For his research, Abe used these self-developed large-scale forms to record his observations. Under the contact print of a photograph is a drawing, constituting the first step of his analysis. In it, he further reduced the photograph to the essential outlines of mountain and clouds and added the movement directions with arrows. This, too, is a kind of scaling.
In 1937, Abe published the over 400-page book Distribution and Movement of Cloud around Mt. Fuji Studied through Photographs. Unlike in his scientific articles, in which he reported on the progress of his work and analysed air currents at the mountain, this book is purely a collection of data in which he revealed the results of his observations to enable other scientists to use them.
Masanao Abe: The Movement of the Clouds at Fuji
53
Adrien Lucca (*1983, Paris) is an artist, independent researcher, and professor of colour theory at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, Belgium. His artistic work and research focus on light, matter, their interactions and their visual appearance. Using physics, mathematics, computer programming and colorimetry, he develops artworks with various media such as painting, drawing, digital printing and stained glass. In 2016, Lucca is working on a permanent glass-light installation situated in the Place-d’Armes metro station in Montréal, Québec, Canada.
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Frank Schweitzer
Limits to Scaling – and How to Move beyond Them
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Adrien Lucca (*1983, Paris) is an artist, independent researcher, and professor of colour theory at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, Belgium. His artistic work and research focus on light, matter, their interactions and their visual appearance. Using physics, mathematics, computer programming and colorimetry, he develops artworks with various media such as painting, drawing, digital printing and stained glass. In 2016, Lucca is working on a permanent glass-light installation situated in the Place-d’Armes metro station in Montréal, Québec, Canada.
160
Frank Schweitzer
Limits to Scaling – and How to Move beyond Them
161
ducing high levels of consistency from heterogeneous sources we believe that the wind being will propagate through it.” That is the incentive that we offer you in our proposed merger: if you provide us with the consistency that permeates your foodstuffs then we will provide you with an ideal consumer for it; one that thrives upon consistency. Our motivation for doing so is to populate the Wind Tunnel World and, if possible, eventually the world, with a non-corporeal being composed of wind. Furthermore, new forms of interaction and consummation between your 68 million customers and these beings could drastically increase the number of patrons frequenting both McDonald’s and the WTW. While born of standardization, these interactions would be novel and warrant further patronage to your existing 35,000 locations, joined in number by the hundreds of operational wind tunnels worldwide. If the initial Greek wind egg theories prove to hold true, this could lead to the possibility of human reproduction without men and with the wind. A note on isolated atmospheric particularity The Vortex-Faced Being is able to reside within the particular isolation of the atmosphere of the WTW. Fluid dynamics, the larger discipline in which aeronautics now resides, relies on equations like the Navier-Stokes equations to mediate between one scale and another. The realities produced inside of wind tunnels are to scale. However, this scaling is not linear. The density of air remains fixed in most cases but is experienced differently at different sizes and different speeds. For instance, a house fly flies by creating a cushion of air upon which it rides through space while a jet plane creates a pressure differential over and under its wings to create lift. This means that not all of the reality of a chosen condition transcends into a wind tunnel for observation nor all of what is produced in a wind tunnel transcends back to the outside world. This insulation allows the Wind Tunnel World to exist parallel to our own.
186
Haseeb Ahmed
Initial McDouble cheeseburger selection study
Fig. 5: HA 16. McDouble Wind Tunnel Calibration Test (Photo: Haseeb Ahmed at MIT Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel, Cambridge, MA, USA, 23 October 2015)
In Brussels on 27 August 2014 I ate the same hamburger as my brother did in Toledo, Ohio, at the same time. He ate his at the same McDonald’s where I had eaten one in 1992 prior to his birth. This uniformity of experience over wide geographic spaces connecting different experiences of time makes it hard to know where we entered sameness or when it began. The experience of eating this object transcends both time and space. Consumers are freed from the limits of geographic space because time is collapsed into it.5 The McDouble cheeseburger is one of the few remaining 5 This was written in 1923 in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Under Capitalism, “… [T]ime sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space. In this environment where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause and effect of the scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object of labour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented. On the one hand, the objectification of their labour-power into something opposed to their total personality (a process already accomplished with the sale of that labour-power as a commodity) is now made into the permanent ineluctable reality of their daily life. Here, too, the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system. On the other hand, the mechanical disintegration of the process of production into its components also destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still ‘organic’. In this respect, too, mechanisation makes of them isolated abstract atoms whose work no longer brings them together directly and organically; it becomes mediated to an increasing extent exclusively by the abstract laws of the mechanism which imprisons them” (Lukacs, Georg, 1971, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 90).
Wind Tunnel World: Where the Wind Blows Straight
187
ducing high levels of consistency from heterogeneous sources we believe that the wind being will propagate through it.” That is the incentive that we offer you in our proposed merger: if you provide us with the consistency that permeates your foodstuffs then we will provide you with an ideal consumer for it; one that thrives upon consistency. Our motivation for doing so is to populate the Wind Tunnel World and, if possible, eventually the world, with a non-corporeal being composed of wind. Furthermore, new forms of interaction and consummation between your 68 million customers and these beings could drastically increase the number of patrons frequenting both McDonald’s and the WTW. While born of standardization, these interactions would be novel and warrant further patronage to your existing 35,000 locations, joined in number by the hundreds of operational wind tunnels worldwide. If the initial Greek wind egg theories prove to hold true, this could lead to the possibility of human reproduction without men and with the wind. A note on isolated atmospheric particularity The Vortex-Faced Being is able to reside within the particular isolation of the atmosphere of the WTW. Fluid dynamics, the larger discipline in which aeronautics now resides, relies on equations like the Navier-Stokes equations to mediate between one scale and another. The realities produced inside of wind tunnels are to scale. However, this scaling is not linear. The density of air remains fixed in most cases but is experienced differently at different sizes and different speeds. For instance, a house fly flies by creating a cushion of air upon which it rides through space while a jet plane creates a pressure differential over and under its wings to create lift. This means that not all of the reality of a chosen condition transcends into a wind tunnel for observation nor all of what is produced in a wind tunnel transcends back to the outside world. This insulation allows the Wind Tunnel World to exist parallel to our own.
186
Haseeb Ahmed
Initial McDouble cheeseburger selection study
Fig. 5: HA 16. McDouble Wind Tunnel Calibration Test (Photo: Haseeb Ahmed at MIT Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel, Cambridge, MA, USA, 23 October 2015)
In Brussels on 27 August 2014 I ate the same hamburger as my brother did in Toledo, Ohio, at the same time. He ate his at the same McDonald’s where I had eaten one in 1992 prior to his birth. This uniformity of experience over wide geographic spaces connecting different experiences of time makes it hard to know where we entered sameness or when it began. The experience of eating this object transcends both time and space. Consumers are freed from the limits of geographic space because time is collapsed into it.5 The McDouble cheeseburger is one of the few remaining 5 This was written in 1923 in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Under Capitalism, “… [T]ime sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space. In this environment where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause and effect of the scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object of labour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented. On the one hand, the objectification of their labour-power into something opposed to their total personality (a process already accomplished with the sale of that labour-power as a commodity) is now made into the permanent ineluctable reality of their daily life. Here, too, the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system. On the other hand, the mechanical disintegration of the process of production into its components also destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still ‘organic’. In this respect, too, mechanisation makes of them isolated abstract atoms whose work no longer brings them together directly and organically; it becomes mediated to an increasing extent exclusively by the abstract laws of the mechanism which imprisons them” (Lukacs, Georg, 1971, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 90).
Wind Tunnel World: Where the Wind Blows Straight
187
Olivier Chazot (*1970, Lyon) is an aerospace researcher who studies aerothermodynamics phenomena in planetary re-entries, from ground testing facilities to real flight missions. He is the head of the Aeronautics and Aerospace Department at the Von Karman Institute and teaches hypersonic gas dynamics.
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