Evolved Photography: The Image-Sphere, The Terminal and Comprehending Closed System Ecologies
This talk was presented on Sunday 5th September, 2021, as part of the Digital Research in Humanities and the Arts conference taking place at Humboldt University, Berlin. It was co-written by Pita Arreola-Burns, Elliott Burns and Jason Isolini.
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The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole is [to our knowledge] the first group exhibition situated within a cyclical (meaning looped) 360° video. It is an exquisite corpse of four-dimensional collage featuring ten artists’ responses to the looming AI Industrial Revolution. It is a disorientating assemblage of scenes that depict and predict a future of fully automated living, a psychedelic day-in-the-life cycle of a worker who moves between home — transport hub — work — solar decontamination and back. It is not a virtual reality environment toured by left & right analogue sticks, but an on-rails experience through spherical vignettes, tethering the viewer to the center of a spherical image depicting spatial depth.
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We refer to this specific form of media as an ‘Image-Sphere as its emergence has parrelled an evolution of the camera apparatus (from single to dual, or multi lenses) as well as prompted a new kind of photographic processing. Slipping through the cracks of proper categorization, 360° media (as opposed to other forms of virtual reality architectures) is related to cartography in that it is processed as a flat, equirectangular image, with the ability to wrap around the viewer when experienced in a VR headset. Similarly, 360º video has followed suit with a mode of processing media that can be experienced as a flat 2D image or transformed into a seamless immersive environment. Outside of the Image-Sphere’s ability to function as a map projection, it is a media inherently tied to geological perception.
In terms of capture the ‘Image-Sphere’ does not involve framing nor a specific subject. It is a medium focused on spatial understanding rather than perspectival authorship. Whilst the SLR camera apparatus exerts power over a subject through the direction of its author, the ‘Image-Sphere’ reduces its author as subject to their domain. Image capture with a 360º camera is an act of centering oneself in the circumference of an image-as-environment seamlessly becoming enveloped in it. On the contrary SLR photography can be understood as a directional exchange — one that flattens space as a product of perspective and subjective focus. In this regard, the SLR camera divides the author from the subject in the hierarchy of: Lens > Mirror > Sensor. Unlike SLR, the ‘Image-Sphere’ subconsciously sets the image-maker and viewer in relationship to the world-as-image, arguably more connotative of world ecologies in both form and representation.
Distinct from any other kind of image-making, the cartographic-map-projection of the ‘Image-Sphere’ emerges adjacent to another form of cognitive environmental awareness, the Anthropocene. While the ‘Image-Sphere’ continues its transformation to seamlessly encompass the human body (making it the subject of its atmosphere), what becomes apparent is a closed-system ecology.
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Atop its employment of the ‘Image-Sphere,’ The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole layers a second metaphorical and cognitive nod to sustainable world ecologies. Presented as a spherical and seamless looping film it can be understood as a celestial body, a film set in orbit, a planet or in reference to the great futurist Buckminster Fuller: a Spaceship Earth.
Running eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds, each orbit around the film is both a year and a uniform day experienced with convincing groundhog-ian similarity, a nightmarish expression of what the fully automated workers life will become. On a dividual level, the clockwork succession of scenes becomes the backdrop for a human mind no longer able to govern its own movement, tied like a logistical parcel to a scripted route. Only never reaching a destination of delivery.
However, linked to this diminished sense of human autonomy, to the AI-generated sense of certainty, is a utopic form of thinking dating back to B. F. Skinner and his behaviourist notions laid out in Walden 2 and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In this model carried forth by the great real-time behaviourist Big Tech firms, the challenges facing the world, the encroaching climate catastrophe can only be solved by absolute ordering. Fuller’s sustainable vision is enacted by big data and push-notification operant conditioning.
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By merging the metaphorical implications of its form with the critical faculties of each featured artist, The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole places itself amongst the contrary demands of individual authorship and systems thinking. It centres us within an aesthetically articulate debate about the conditions of our future.
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The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole was directed by Jason Isolini, curated by Off Site Project, and featuring works by: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis. It was first presented at anonymous gallery in NYC from Thursday 8th April — Saturday 1st May 2021.
