The end of an eye (feedback checks)
2007-2009
— A photographic inquiry into the conditions under which an image comes into being. By entering the electronic mosaic of a cathode-ray television, the work explores the moment an image emerges without yet requiring an object.
Patterns I — 35 mm black-and-white negative film
Patterns II — 35 mm colour reversal film
TELE-VISIONS
“A photograph is, visually, ‘high definition’. [...] The TV image is visually low in data. The TV image is not a still shot. It is not photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger.”
(Marshall McLuhan)
The end of an eye investigates the conditions under which an image comes into being. By entering the electronic mosaic of a cathode-ray television through the combined use of optical and electronic devices, the work activates a feedback system in which unstable visual phenomena continuously emerge, dissolve and transform.
Visibility no longer requires an object. Photography isolates a single configuration from this continuous flow, recording and materially preserving the transient state of a visual event unfolding within the medium. Before becoming a photograph, the image exists only as a possible visual configuration, held at the threshold of legibility.
Detached from any stable referent, these images remain on the threshold between representation and abstraction, where electronic signals temporarily give rise to landscapes, structures or unfamiliar forms before dissolving back into the recursive logic from which they arise. Photography produces an image of these images, isolating and fixing one of their possible states.
The end of an eye shifts photography from the representation of the visible to the conditions of visibility itself. It asks not what images show, but how they begin.
Source material
Feedback video recordings produced through the same experimental device.