Permeable Borders

Introduction

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.

Benjamin (2008, p. 23) Our age is one of imagetic excess and communication overflow - more and more we are able not only to access visual material but also produce and share it. But how much of this visual saturation numbs our perception and hurts our contemplation abilities? In the age of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram and other social networking tools, how much of experience is only produced and validated through and for such purposes? Present technology allows people not only to freeze the present, but to do it in a way where it sometimes replaces experience itself.

Since the industrial revolution, with technological advance and the rise of urban societies, mankind has been moving away from nature. Urban dwellers worldwide are mostly surrounded by buildings and other man-made structures, leaving little space for admiration of natural form and beauty. We humans tend to be obsessed with our own accomplishments, treating the world like a mere scenery in a play where we are the leads, but a close look at nature reveals patterns, orders and rules that show we are part of a much more complex network that has been perfecting itself for ages. As James Turrell once put it, ‘that's one of our greatest conceits, to even think that we're somehow apart from nature’ Turrell (1999). 1 This essay complements and contextualises my MA Art and Science final piece – Permeable Borders - a collage made out of microscopic images of the materials that make up the Elizabeth Tower (known worldwide erroneously - as “Big Ben”). By stripping the landmark of its recognisable facade and transforming it into an abstract work of art, I intend to question concepts such as solidity and reality (especially in relation to photography), while analysing the role of technology in art and the possible interactions between the two.

1 <http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=32>

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As a theoretical background for the work, I will be focusing mainly on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy – his analysis of the role of the work of art in modern society as well as the effect of technological development in both.

Despite presenting technology as the reason for the decay of aura in art, Benjamin acknowledges its role in presenting us with new possibilities of representing the world. In his comparison between painting and film / photography, the former is said to focus on the surface while the latter, due to characteristics of the equipment, is able to penetrate reality, capture it from multiple points of view and then re-present it as something completely new.

Throughout the essay the argument developed will be that, if increasing technology is one of the causes leading to a “superficial” interaction with our physical environments, it can also, through art, present new views into that same environment and restore our connections with it by showing us nature under new light.

Art in this sense serves as a site in which to explore possible futures of the relationship between technology and the human which will create unprecedented experiences of space and time, which will bring with them the dissolution of previously valid experiences of identity…(Caygill, 1998 p.107) Photographer Eugène Atget (1857 –1927) was the first to shift his focus from the popular and common portraits to the empty streets of Paris, in work that was described by Benjamin as setting the scene for the Surrealist movement’s “salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings” (Benjamin in Jennings, Doherty and Levins eds., 2008 p.286). He also steered clear of “great sights and so-called landmarks” (Benjamin in Jennings, Doherty and Levins eds. 2008 p.286), focusing on the unnoticed details of the city. It’s interesting that while our subject choices are directly opposite, the underlying thought seems to be quite similar: focusing on the surroundings to comment on human condition.

My image also combines scientific technology and art to address issues related to my personal experience as a foreigner as well as analyse contemporary urban dwellers’ relationship with their environment. By choosing a symbolic piece of architecture as the subject of my artwork, I am acknowledging Benjamin’s theory on the experience of the city playing a vital

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role in the development of a contemporary philosophy focused on transitivity and how actual urban life affects the characteristics of experience: ‘It was only through the analysis of these other urban experiences that Benjamin was able to understand his own’ (Caygill, 1998 p.128).

Micrograph of Clipsham stone -­‐ one of the building stones of the Elizabeth Tower. Courtesy of Dr Stephen Parry, BGS

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The Elizabeth Tower. It’s one of the most famous pieces of western architecture, recognised in several continents and ultimate symbol of one of the most important cities in the world. And yet, its name might not ring a bell when heard. Big Ben is what people usually call the whole clock tower adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, in London, even though that name, officially, refers only to the bell itself.

Aided by the advent of high-speed air travel and globalisation, for the past century, year after year, thousands of people gather in front of the building and snap away, taking ‘Big Ben’ home with them as ‘proof’ of a visit to London. But how ironic is it that one of the city’s most recognisable icons, illustrating all sort of cheap tourist memorabilia from postcards to mugs to calendars, is mostly off limits to the general public? Although one can photograph it from afar and can eventually sign up for a guided tour of the inside, access to the building is highly restricted.

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This can be used as an analogy for the experience of mass tourism and, by extension, of perception today. While travellers in general seem to be very interested in capturing and sharing evidence of their experiences through video, photography and social media, one can’t help but wonder how many of them are actually developing any kind of meaningful relationship with that temporary reality they are inhabiting. As tourism grows and the world becomes more accessible, does the desire to see it all overshadow the possibility of slower, deeper experiences in a single place?

The very nature of experience is a transient one and, according to Benjamin in his essay The Storyteller, modern man’s notion of it suffered severely after World War I: Men returned…grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience…What ten years later was poured out into floods of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny fragile human body. (Benjamin cited in Agamben, 2007 p.15) While this is a very Eurocentric view (Latin American countries like Brazil, who weren’t direct participants in WWI combat, for example, will not fit this description – or at least not for the exact same reasons) it does successfully acknowledge not only the impact that economic and political systems have on shaping collective consciousness while emphasising the apparent detachment between human physicality and the workings of modern society.

Giorgio Agamben’s essay Infancy and History (Agamben, 2007) not only highlights Benjamin’s theory, but develops it, pointing out that industrialisation of society has led to a “banality of the quotidian” and modern man’s apparent inability of communicating experience (as in common sense knowledge that isn’t scientific or market oriented), making it lose its power and leading us to transfer it onto something external:

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This does not mean that today there are no more experiences, but they are enacted outside the individual. And it is interesting that the individual merely observes them, with relief. From this point of view a visit to a museum or a place of touristic pilgrimage is particularly instructive. Standing face to face with one of the great wonders of the world (let us say the patio de los leones in the Alhambra), the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should (Agamben, 2007, p.17) As we shift the value of individual, personal experience towards a sort of collectively (pre) approved one, we inevitably move towards a standardisation of it as well. This is fertile ground for a dangerous scenery to arise, one where the advent of communication, and, consequently, the control of information, lies almost entirely in the hands of media empires and corporations.

In

Marxism

and

Form

(Jameson,

1974)

Walter

Benjamin’s

appropriation of the Freudian theory of consciousness is described as being a shock absorber for the organism2. For Benjamin, because of the increasing number of ‘shocks’ (or stimuli) in modern society, consciousness is not enough any more – now ‘a whole series of mechanical substitutes intervenes between consciousness and its objects, shielding us perhaps, yet at the same time depriving us of any way of assimilating what happens to us or of transforming our sensations into genuinely personal experience’ (Jameson, 1974 p.63). The reality of contemporary city dwellers is one of ‘increasing shocks and perceptual numbness of daily urban living’ (Jameson, 1974) and for Benjamin, it was machines that were the embodiment of such ‘peculiar and nervous modern state of mind’ (Jameson, 1974). Well, they still are, only their communication skills have vastly improved since Benjamin’s time.

Today there are more “shock absorbers” than ever – not only do we have access to news from all over the world in every media possible, but everything is shared through email, facebook, instagram, twitter, tumblr, flickr, etc. Everyone’s personal life, in one way or another, appears to be up for grabs and it is this act of sharing that seems to legitimise experience. As a

2 see Marxism and Form, p. 63

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recent internet meme inquired: ‘If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to tweet about it, did it really happen?’ 3 My work is a comment on this mindset that permeates urban society.

By stripping a well known landmark of it’s recognisable visual appearance and substituting it by another “layer” of its own material reality, I am questioning our ability of perception and contemplation while commenting on our detachment from nature and our disconnection to the natural world. “The issue of what constitutes a work of art is symptomatic of the broader question of how to respond to the change in the character of experience provoked by technological progress” (Caygill 1998, p. 95).

Just like Caygill describes Benjamin’s experience of the city as being ‘double-edged, regarding it as both home and alienated visual spectacle’ (Caygill 1998, p.117), as a foreign artist living in London, my relationship with the city was always that of investigation and deep observation. I remember seeing some place for the first time and focusing on the isolated parts that made it up – a single building, a remarkable piece of street art, a well known shop, a sign. And then slowly, unconsciously, through repetitive exposure, those little pieces start linking to other little pieces in a mental map. Visual references are the first key to understanding a new environment ‘...like a standing invitation to some inaccessible, irritating journey, whose code the foreigner does not have but whose mute, physical, visible memory he keeps’ (Kristeva 1991, p.4).

Suddenly comes the turning point, the moment when an image becomes so familiar that it is impossible to isolate it from a greater context.

Images are not alone anymore – they are accompanied by sound, by feelings, by memories. What was at first a somewhat objective and one-way process becomes more and more subjective, with our mental baggage adding meaning to these places each time we revisit them, our physical bodies navigating through them effortlessly.

3 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:If_a_tree_falls_in_the_forest.jpg>

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While for a tourist these experiences might be temporary and fleeing, to a foreigner they are intensified each day, branching out and connecting to another ‘interactive mental map’ – that of their home town. A strange hybrid develops, where the present scenery seems to somehow always contain a hint of the past, each new input activating a hard-wired connection to that distant land they know so well. It’s that familiarity with the new land that starts to stir things up inside. Suddenly, one is left in between two places, simultaneously at home in both, but somehow belonging to neither.

From within the experience of a given urban environment, as within the experience of a particular language, it is difficult to see what is peculiar, what is unsaid what is excluded, without the shifting points of vantage offered by other cities or languages (Caygill 1998, p.119) It is this mindset that leads me to question reality as we know it.

Coming from Brazil, where nature is still, in some places, untamed and abundant, the process of recognising this new environment (London) naturally leads to constant sensorial comparison, even if unconscious. The sudden lack of bodily contact with more raw and wild forms of nature leads me to displace my contemplation to the urban landscape and the materiality of it, trying to look past the phantasmagoria of it all.4 My condition of foreigner also allows me to feel the responses of my mind and body to this new environment – a different weather, different tastes and smells, different sounds… Such extreme change of habitat and new sensorial stimuli can leave one more aware of their physicality, of their instinct, of their animal nature – it is precisely the cultural clash that brings awareness to the important role of physicality in one’s sense of self. Ironically,

4 “Underlying all of Benjamin’s thought is the conviction that the seemingly most obvious things – who we are, the character of the physical environment in which we live – are in fact denied to us. The world in which we live in fact has, for us, the character of an optical media device: his most frequent description of our world is in terms of phantasmagoria. Originally an 18th century illusionistic optical apparatus involving shadows of moving figures projected past an audience and onto a wall or screen, phantasmagoria as redefined by Benjamin becomes a figural image of the world of urban commodity capitalism: an environment so suggestively “real” that we move through it as if it were given and natural, when in fact it is a socioeconomic construct”. Jennings, M W 2008, ‘Production, Reproduction and Reception of the Work of Art’ in The Work of Art in the Age of its technical reproducibility and other writings on media, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p.11

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author Julia Kristeva points out that ‘… settled within himself, the foreigner has no self’ and classifies the foreigner as an ‘exterior hard shell revealing a vulnerable inside’ (Kristeva 1991).

The foreigner’s mind and body become fertile grounds for the fusion of “objectiveness” and “subjectiveness” due to these simultaneous states of belonging and not belonging. I believe it is precisely this blow to identity suffered by the foreigner, this transient state, that allows his observational and critical skills to flourish, no longer bounded a single culture’s restraints, yet so aware of his condition as a primarily cultural being. This selfless state of the foreigner finds representation in my visual work – like myself, my surrounding is also permeable, subject to natural rules and part of a more complex arrangement than that seen in the surface. The destitution of this landmark British monument of its identity, its historical value, its placement in time and space revealing the workings of its material essence, is an analogy to my own identity as an outsider and a statement of my own physicality as a human animal.

It is this dual state of civilised member of society and instinctive member of nature the driving force behind ‘Permeable Borders’. While the technological revolutions of our times have made life easier in many ways for some, they have made it extremely harder for others. Ultra capitalist society has also caused its members to move towards a more fast-paced lifestyle where consumption and financial welfare seem to be the ultimate goals. In a way we have been replacing ‘being’ with ‘having’ through a culture of accumulation.

Cited by Caygill, Benjamin’s essay One Way Street mentions a new physis – a technologically reformed body and corporeally informed technology. According to Benjamin the work of art in the technological world has a purpose of opening up the space for humanity to “commence its process of adapting itself” to a technological second nature and “exceeding the new technological physis” (Caygill 1998, p.111). So, for Benjamin, humans are supposed to adapt themselves to technology but also to master it and adapt it to their own corporeal needs. But where is the line drawn? To

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what point have we become so adapted to this second nature that it is taking over human instincts and purely sensorial experiences?

Benjamin’s theories focus solely on photography and film as being able to transcend space and time because they were developed when both mediums were being introduced to the public and had, therefore, not yet penetrated society as deeply. But today, new forms of technology like the Internet and mobiles, and the extension of film and photography into pretty much every aspect of our lives has created such a strong virtual space and a new instant sense of time that is leaving almost no ground for experience to develop. In accepting technology as a second skin are we slowly shedding our own?

Most social interactions of urban dwellers today seem to have a technological mediator of some kind. It is hard to look someone in the eye at the tube since they will probably be staring into their smartphones and electronic reading devices. It is almost impossible to get through a meal with someone without them checking their mobiles for messages or emails. You can have over 500 friends on facebook and actually meet only a dozen of them. Skype has allowed us to connect to people all over the world, and sometimes, in the case of foreigners recently arriving to a new country, they might choose to spend time with their acquaintances back home than get to know new people where they are. You can film an entire concert on your camera without taking the time to actually dance to the music.

To battle digital addiction an elementary school in South Korea makes students hand in their smartphones (Image: Associated Press)

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All these impersonal connections seem to distance us from the here and now and affect out abilities to perceive and actively engage with the world around us. Our minds appear to be functioning more and more independently from our bodies in this parallel universe of digital relationships and experiences which coexists with our physical selves and the “real world”, and lots of people seem to have trouble finding a balance between the two.

But if we are living a time of ‘replacement of human perception with those substitutes for and mechanical extensions of perception which are machines’ (Jameson 1974, p. 76), it is, paradoxically, these same machines that have also allowed us to dive deeper into the physical reality of our world.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘reality’ is defined as ‘the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them’5. But how does that definition apply when evolving technologies have led us to constantly discover hidden depths to our physical world?

There are two definitions of reality that are much more successful: The first equates reality with a world without us, a world untouched by human desires and intentions. By this definition, a lot of things we usually regard as real – languages, wars, the financial crisis – are nothing of the sort. (…) The second equates reality with the most fundamental things that everything else depends on. In the material world, molecules depend on their constituent atoms, atoms on electrons and a nucleus, which in turn depends on protons and neutrons and so on. In this hierarchy, every level depends on the one below it, so we might define reality as made up of whatever entities stand at the bottom of the chain of dependence, and thus depend on nothing else.

(Westerhoff, J 2012, New Scientist, vol.2884, p. 35) More and more, reality seems to be defined not by us, but by what is there regardless of us. Our limited physical capacities lead us to inhabit an apparently solid world of illusion, but we have been able to transcend this scale boundary and peek into several other layers of our so-called reality. ‘A first fact of human existence is that we live out our lives in three dimensional space surrounded by definite shapes, constant or changing. Yet we are here fundamental ignoramuses. Why three dimensions? Is the three fact or

5 <http://oxforddictionaries.com/>

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artefact?

Why

regular

forms

at

all,

amidst

so

much

confusion?’

(Whyte in Kepes 1965, p.21) No matter if one derives intellectual pleasure from the knowledge of an underlying structure which organises our material world or aesthetic pleasure from the observation of pure, dynamic, organic form - anyone with interest in art or science will certainly find it very hard to face this microscopic world with indifference. According to Cyril Stanley Smith’s essay Structure Substructure Superstructure (Kepes 1965, pp.29-41) while physicists and mathematicians may enjoy the ordered structure of crystals6, the perfect arrangement of atoms and the models and equations fit for representing them, “the more complicated crystal patterns observed by the metallurgist or geologist, being based on partly imperfect reality often have a richer aesthetic content”. (Smith in Kepes 1965, p.31). ‘Anyone who works with the microscope for an intellectual or practical purpose will frequently pause for a moment of sheer enjoyment of the patterns that he sees, for they have much in common with formal art’ (Smith in Kepes 1965, p. 29).

A page from Blossfeldt's book shows the architectural forms of nature

6 In

his essay Atomism, Structure and Form (Kepes (ed.) 1965, p.21) Lancelot L Whyte defines structure as “form seen inside, as a definite arrangement, static or changing, of localisable parts, such as a pattern of points. (…) To the mathematical logician structure is a formal system of relations of certain logical types, and the emphasis in all usages is on the relations rather than on the terms or entities which they relate. Structure is thus the antithesis of matter”

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Knowing that the visual world we inhabit is just a slice of something much bigger stirs a feeling of excitement, as if there is a treasure to be found everywhere we look. The dynamism of pure form created not by our minds, but by nature’s own set of rules adds an element of “ordered chaos” to our lives – it’s proof that even though we try shape our physical world and tame our environment, there is always something hiding beneath the surface which we cannot fully understand but instinctively or even metaphysically might be unconsciously aware of. In Little History of Photography Walter Benjamin mentions Karl Blossfeldt’s 1928 book Originary Forms of Art (Jennings, Doherty and Levins eds. 2008, p.279) where he photographed plant parts with extreme magnification revealing in nature forms similar to man-made objects7.

Viewing the world through “microscopic eyes” awakens a child-like wonder which is vital for any artist. As Brancusi said, ‘When we are no longer children, we are already dead’ (Krauss 1986, p. 57). It’s as if there is a chance to rediscover familiar forms and objects under a different light, with a sort of naïve look that opens the gate to creative interpretation of said forms.

‘Something of the quality of a child's delight in playing with colours and shapes has to be restored to us before we learn to see again, before we unlearn the terms in which we ordinarily see’ (Kepes 1995, p.10) It’s no wonder then that throughout history art has always flirted with reality – sometimes trying desperately to portray it “objectively”, others going to great lengths to distort it and some using it to deny the concept all together.

In the late 19th century with the advent of accessible photography, painters suddenly found themselves free to explore their own individual views, initiating a quest for expressing not what was there, but what they saw. Impressionists left the studio and went outside to focus on light, creating tiny colour clusters that, when viewed from a distance, generated a recognisable and, why not, “real” image. They ‘took the scrupulous fidelity of the photographic image as a

7 ‘One senses a gothic parti pris in the bishop’s staff which an ostrich fern represents, in the larkspur, and in the blossom of the saxifrage, which also does honour to its name in cathedrals as a rose window which breaks through the wall. The oldest forms of columns pop up in horsetails; totem poles appear in chestnut and maple shoots enlarged ten times; and the shoots of a monk’s-hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer (Benjamin 2008 p.272)

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good reason to work imaginatively or conceptually and thus liberated their art from the requirement of pictorial verisimilitude’ (Markwood 2010)8.

Art Nouveau went further in, getting inspiration from the invention of the microscope and the sudden access it gave to a whole new world of organic, round, wave-like forms, as well as the development of cell theory, which ‘opened up an entirely new understanding of the world. It brought the realization that all forms of life are closely connected on a deep structural level. Artists interpreted cell theory as proof that all forms of organic life share the same microscopic unit. (Blakeney 2009)

Even Modernists, with their absolute negation of Realism and their search for true form, stumbled upon a kind of representation of reality. In her essay Grids Rosalind Krauss calls the Grid a ‘modern institution’ pointing out the endless depiction and variance of this same form in modernist art. ‘No

8 < www.agorajournal.org/2010/Markwood.pdf>

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echoes or footsteps in empty rooms, no screams of birds against open skies, no rush of distant water - for the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely cultural object’ (Krauss 1986, p.09).

Despite that description, the grid is stated by the author to be a representation of the surface of the canvas. So in itself, even being a completely manmade form distancing itself from nature as much as it can, the grid is eventually echoing the surface that contains it.

Agnes Martin, Tremolo, 1962 (left) and Piet Mondrian, Composition 2, 1922 (right)

Meanwhile, photographic images, described by Susan Sontag not as ‘statements about the world (…) so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire’ (Sontag 2002), seem to have had their artistic value restrained precisely by the iron grip of ‘reality’ since the beginning of their widespread use for journalistic, commercial or personal purposes. It’s been more than 70 years since the first edition of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was published and with it, came the discourse of the problems of acceptance of photography as art when opposed to traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture.

In the essay Benjamin establishes the concept of aura, which he claims to be ‘a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’. The aura fixes the non-reproducible work of art in space and time, in a point in history, closing off its borders to any subsequent

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meaning it may acquire throughout its duration and maintaining its cult value.

Decay of the aura is linked to a historical moment of ‘emergence of a new form of experience “closely related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life”. This form of experience has two familiar characteristics: it dissolves the borders of objects by bringing them “closer” spatially and humanly, and overcomes the “uniqueness of every reality” ‘ (Caygill 1998, p.104).

With regards to Permeable Borders, even though it is composed of photographs and thus does not fitting of Benjamin’s description of an auratic work, it also lacks that immediate link with “reality” so often attributed to photography. The work in a way subverts the medium by taking away from it the one thing that made it so fully appreciated and criticised – the “faithful reproduction of reality” aspect. It is precisely for that reason that it gains value when one finds out about its context. The awe comes from placing the image in space through knowledge of its origin since most viewers will probably know the building, will have a mental image of it, but will now be looking at a reality of it that is completely unfamiliar. But if in one definition of aura Benjamin claims that through it the ‘mysterious wholeness of objects become visible’ (cited in Jameson 1974 p. 77) then what could be said about a microscopic photograph that reveals the material essence of an object, the workings of its inside, the substance beneath the visible facade?

Micrograph of Gunmetal, courtesy of Dr. Hiren Kotadia, Brunel University

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By that reasoning, the abstract work resultant from my collage of microscopic imagery could be thought of as devoid of aura not just because it’s reproducible, but because one will never be able to relate to the wholeness of that object without additional information. And yet, not only does the work reinforce the idea of “distance, no matter how close it may be” in quite a literal way, but once the composition is identified and one learns about the content of the image, the missing element retroactively adds value to it.

Once the origin of the patterns in the image are revealed, the viewer can never see them the same way again, and this revealing shatters whatever mental interpretation of such forms one was developing in their minds. In a way the work reinvents itself through the revealing of the technique.

For photography to reach its artistic potential it had to go past the passive ‘reproduction’ process, ‘…for art attempts to create new relationships between familiar and as yet unfamiliar data, optical, acoustic, or whatever, and forces us to it all in through our sensory equipment’ said Laszlo MoholyNagy in his essay Production-Reproduction (Jennings, Doherty and Levins eds. 2008, p.11). In that sense, macro lens, heat sensors, infra-red, filters, editing tools, film techniques such as slow motion and even primarily scientific equipment like MRI machines, X-Ray machines and the microscope can be used as photographic tools and do precisely that - they allow you to notice previously unnoticed details of an object, place, person or action and isolate these details so that they seem abstract and completely lost in space and time.

Again, technology is a crucial part of ‘Permeable Borders’ and while the work criticises this decline in our society’s abilities of perception and contemplation due, greatly, to technological advance itself, it is only possible because of machines. It is precisely this aided perception of the microscope that will allow people to see a side of the world that is beyond their control. In ‘The Colour of Experience’ Howard Caygill says that technical development can ‘spur to the invention of concepts and forms of expression appropriate to the change in the character of experience’ (Caygill 1998, p.102).

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Our society is a numb, visually saturated and rather impatient one, so to make a point in criticising our habit of looking rather than seeing, it seemed crucial to present a piece that challenged the viewer’s perception of such an “obvious” image. In that sense, the work is in accordance with Benjamin’s idea that ‘images should be understood as a technology for organising experience, and that visual art was a way of speculating upon limits of experience from within it’ (Benjamin cited in Caygill 1998, p. 81).

Just as art served in ancient history as a technological means of mastering the elemental forces of nature, it can serve in modern societies to master the elemental forces of a technological second nature. It provides a technologically informed place for education and reflection within the epoch of technology. (Caygill 1998, p.107) I believe art to be an important communication tool, feeding on concepts and ideas and regurgitating them to the viewer in a non-literal way which stimulates critical thinking or some sort of emotional response. To use Benjamin’s words, the work is permeable, precisely like its subject - it is not to be passively contemplated, but actively investigated as it ‘changes in response to use’ (cited in Caygill 1998, p. 94). Caygill mentions Benjamin’s knowledge that, although the decay of aura is a ‘shattering of tradition’, ‘the crisis engendered by the dissolution of the identity of an object through the permeability of its borders can be an occasion for regression and resentment or of affirmation and renewal’ (Benjamin cited in Caygill 1998). If one finds new uses and meanings to the reproduced object, then that object can develop a value of its own.

But then what is the artistic value of a microscopic image if scientists deal with those every day inside laboratories worldwide? When working with images extracted from science, I believe one should be very careful not to fall into the trap of getting excited by the visual content and relying simply on that.

‘The issue of what constitutes a work of art is symptomatic of the broader question of how to respond to the change in the character of experience provoked by technological progress’ (Caygill 1998, p.95). The simple reproduction of images acquired through specialised and largely inaccessible technology cannot be considered art just because it is taken from a restricted

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specialised environment and presented to the general public in a gallery or museum.

The choice to work with scientific imagery places a lot of importance on composition, which is ‘what organises both form and content. It is the means by which what is exterior to the medium of art is brought into it, whether this exteriority is thought in terms of content or in terms of form’ (Caygill 1998, p.

88). I believe artists must be conscious of their intentions when appropriating themselves of scientific images and displaying them as art, and be very successful in communicating them clearly – artwork deriving from scientific imagery relies on context. Another element must be added to the images, giving them extra meaning and depth through conceptual or visual interference, expanding their purely illustrative functions.

However, it is impossible to control what the interpretations of these intentions will be, since according to Benjamin a permeable work of art is open to ‘an immense number of possible uses and identities, increasing its possible futures and thus ‘reactivating’ the object produced’ (Benjamin cited in Caygill 1998, p.103). This provides the work with a speculative character - ‘the idea that they have wrapped within them possible futures which are invisible to their authors’ (Caygill 1998, p.103).

In the case of ‘Permeable Borders’, I can already see it dialoguing with several current social and political situations that have nothing to do with the original context of the work and which didn’t influence me in any way during its conception, but nevertheless can contextually fit it quite well. Because of my subject choice and the work’s place and time of creation, the current economic crisis in Europe and the budget cuts in art funding in Great Britain, for example, can easily penetrate its conceptual space. ‘Transformation, for Benjamin, we have seen, is always associated with permeable boundaries, open to influence from outside and this in a state of constant change’ (Caygill 1998.

While Benjamin sees reproducible art as distanced from ritual and therefore less dependant on humans, my work seeks to touch exactly upon this human element of perception and awe by presenting a beautiful and

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largely unknown side of a rather well-known site. The image I’m creating is possible only through technology, which ironically is supposed to be the force that drives us away from nature, but the reason I’m creating it is precisely to reveal and revere nature, to acknowledge our ignorance of “reality” even when we think we have it mastered, and to highlight our own permeability as beings subject to direct influence from our surroundings – both physical and cultural.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Agamben, G Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. Verso, London, 1993 - Agamben, G “The Melancholy Angel” in The Man Without Content. Trans.

Georgia Albert. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999.

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