16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 TEST EXPOSURE

transformations its geological actions undergo on the Internet. In what sounds like a playful rebuttal of the more solemn tenor of certain philosophical propositions about the death of the sun, Umbrico pronounces that ‘the sun is dead but we make our own light’30 – and then goes off to rephotograph the suns from Flickr as displayed on the screen with her iPhone, and to explore the new light effects produced in the process. The result is a followup project, Sun/Screen (2014), in which sunset-like hues merge with a moiré pattern caused by the superimposition of the pixel grids, meshes or dot patterns upon an image. The image then emits an uncannily beautiful light, which does not belong to the sun anymore, but which is not entirely ours either. Yet our human perception, with its specific visual apparatus and its colour recognition capabilities, is required to acknowledge this very denaturalisation of the sun into a moiré pattern. In other words, the denaturalised sun needs the human body to experience this ‘denaturalisation’.

Umbrico’s playful projects can be seen as an unwitting response to the philosophical problem posed by Jean-François Lyotard in his essay ‘Can Thought Go On Without A Body? ’, first published in 1987 and included in The Inhuman. Lyotard declares there that the ‘sole serious question facing humanity today’31 is the solar explosion that awaits us in 4.5 billion years, as a result of which ‘everything’ will come to an end. The sun’s death presents itself to us as the ultimate event of extinction. Yet, for Lyotard, the actual disaster that should concern us involves the disappearance not of the solar system as our matrix of reference but rather of the body, i.e. the extinction of the human as we know it – while we are still around. Accusing philosophers of extricating matter from their writings, Lyotard reminds us that the materiality of the human and of the Universe needs to be read alongside its technicity, with matter being taken ‘as an arrangement of energy created, destroyed and recreated over and over again, endlessly’.32 He pinpoints that As anthropologists and biologists admit, even the simplest life forms, infusoria (tiny algae synthesized by light at the edges of tidepools [now termed Protista – JZ]) a few million years ago are already technical devices. Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information …– that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment, so as to assure its perpetuation at least.33 Positioning the emergence of life in early microorganisms as a technical process, Lyotard goes beyond the humanist logic of originary technicity that shaped the work of his contemporaries, such as Bernard Stiegler, whereby it is the human that is seen as constituted by, and emerging with, technicity. For Lyotard, technicity is already the condition and driving force of primordial life. Picking up on this idea, I want to suggest that the process of the emergence of life also reveals itself to be inherently photographic, with light being needed to initiate photosynthesis, i.e. to make a lasting change on an organism, and then triggering off further changes. Yet, even if we continue pursuing this expanded understanding of photography as a nonhuman process 52