Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture

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Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture Asbjørn Grønstad · Øyvind Vågnes Editors Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture Editors Asbjørn Grønstad Øyvind Vågnes University of Bergen University of Bergen Bergen, Norway Bergen, Norway

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In his chapter in this volume, Henrik Gustafsson articulates one of the abiding themes that guided my own exploration of the invisible: “less and less of what determines contemporary life is accessible to human perception.”1 There are many considerations that make this true. For one thing, we have simply become more aware, through the techniques of analytical science, of what was always there out of sight: viruses and bac- teria, molecules and atoms, photons of infrared, radio waves, gamma rays and X-rays, quarks and gluons. A cosmos of inconceivably vast, perhaps infnite, extent. Dark matter, which exceeds the mass of all visible matter by a factor of fve (and is better called invisible matter, since mere soot is dark). Dark energy, which exceeds the amount of mass–energy inherent in visible and dark matter around three-fold, and which is accelerating the expansion of the universe. It is enough to make you paranoid—or at least to make you wonder whether the central role in the narrative of the universe that we have tra- ditionally allotted to ourselves is a delusion of comic as well as of cosmic proportions. But is all that really ‘everyday life’? Yet however you defne it, the quotidian existence is spun with invisible webs. We can stand on a moun- taintop and pluck a facsimile of, say, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy out of the ether. (We steadfastly refuse to give up, at least linguistically, the

1Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (Bodley Head, London, 2014).

v vi Foreword notion of an invisible ether, no matter how little use science now has for it.) Empty space is animated by signals that might as well be magical. Things have become enchanted, although we prefer to call that phenom- enon the Internet of Things. Transistors far too small to see with the naked eye crunch computational bits of information to do our bidding. We are not so far away from creating ‘smart dust’: motes that harvest energy from the ambient environment to move around, sense their sur- roundings, keep an eye on us. We can see through walls purely by mon- itoring the wi-f background. Our existence is half-virtual already, and a little bit more so every day. It seems a little tragic, then, that the long discourse on the semiotics of invisibility within cultural, art and aesthetic theories has made so little connection to the technologies of invisibility. I worry, to be honest, that many scientists and technologists seem to think they are merely working their way toward a technical triumph when they try to make things dis- appear, or to harness invisible forces and energies for control and com- munication. (I have just read a proposal to turn a vacuum, devoid even of light, into a medium for transferring information, via particles pulled out of quantum uncertainty…) For the history of invisibility shows that there has never been a time when this concept was not political. Plato invoked the story of the magical Ring of Gyges in his Republic to make a point about political power and accountability. You could hardly, in the era of Trump and Brexit, of the hiding of misdeeds and the manipulation of opinion, fnd any theme more resonant. Yet here we are, exchanging invisible money, creating ‘invisible’ (because anonymous, or so we might hope) avatars and personas, sending invisible, encrypted signals across the globe at the speed of light, and imagining that this is simply the appliance of science. It is concerns like these that make me welcome this book, which shows us how important and sometimes urgent questions raised by such technological trends can be productively interrogated and critiqued through art and theories of visual representation. I am struck by how the themes explored here are deeply embedded in the cultural history of invisibility; some, indeed, are at least implicit in Plato’s tale. For example, surveillance. If accountability depends on visibility, the most just system should be one in which every act, every event, is recorded for posterity. Nothing escapes the all-seeing eye—an argu- ment which has of course in past times shored up the morality of theistic beliefs that insist on omniscience and omnipresence. Good behavior is ForeworD vii ensured, even enforced, precisely because it is seen. Looked at this way, our security cameras become almost a technological divinity, a guaran- tor of morality. Or to turn that notion on its head, should we wonder why for centuries an omniscient deity was not regarded as a violation of the human right to privacy? The answer, of course, is that human rights are a modern invention—but in this view they sit uneasily with a long tradition that accepted the presumed visibility of every act. And it is still not obvious where the proper balance between visibility and privacy lies, for the link between anonymity (especially in online behavior) and an erosion of moral inhibitions is so well established that it has even been dubbed the Gyges effect. But beyond questions of morality, the issue of whether objects or events leave visible traces has an ontological aspect too. The old question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it only scratches the surface of the problem. In what sense can things be said to have existed that fail to leave any trace at all? Science, at least, can- not admit them, although this is an uncomfortable fact: the entire edifce of science must assume specifc things happened—individual organisms lived, say—that can never now be verifed, even indirectly. Their silence, their invisibility, is even more profound than that of dark matter. Or… does anything ever truly vanish completely? It’s a deeper question than you might think. Every encounter between subatomic particles entangles them in a quantum-mechanical sense, and current quantum theory contains no prescription for ever entirely washing traces of that encounter out of the universe, even if we can safely assert that for all practical purposes it becomes harder than trying to locate a specifc mol- ecule in the oceans. How and if complete disappearance of the record occurs is one of the central problems that the theory confronts. Charles Peirce pondered that question when the photograph was invented, speculating that somehow the vibrations of Aristotle’s voice may have been imprinted on nature, waiting one day to be rediscovered and played back. Marconi speculated about whether radio technology might one day pick up the last words of Christ on the cross. Recording and surveillance technologies in the broadest sense are making such notions seem ever less fantastical. We document our lives exhaustively, including things we might one day wish unseen and unseeable. A key function of the mobile phone has become to record and document events: a function perhaps now as important as the one for which these devices were originally intended. There was that uncanny moment when viii Foreword

Google Earth and its Street View frst came online, when you realized that you could zoom in to the very window at which you were sitting looking at your screen—and you half-wondered if you might look up through the window and see your face looking out from the screen. (This real-time response may not be so far away.) Will we in the future record everything, and thus duplicate reality many times? The zoom function is a signifcant factor here: it is not just that we are given the god’s-eye perspective of the satellite, but that the vision is so penetrating, far beyond the normal level of human visual acuity. There is no longer invisibility conferred by sheer scale, or not at least to the extent we instinctively expect. Here is an image of the tower blocks of Shanghai, and I can zoom in to see a woman speaking on her mobile phone on a crowded street. (Maybe she is zooming in on me.) How far can this zoom go? The suggestion in the seventeenth century that a microscope applied to the ends of the nerves in the brain might reveal thoughts as if playing like little movies down a fber-optic cable sounded absurd three centuries later; but make that four centuries and this is not so obviously the case. Using brain-scanning techniques such as fMRI accompanied by machine-learning algorithms to interpret the signal, researchers have now deduced rough impressions of the content of people’s dreams and have reconstructed (albeit in fuzzy, impression- istic form) the images being viewed by participants. This emerging technology for plucking imagery straight out of the neurons that register it opens up new vistas for scholars of the invisible. Are imagined or dream images ever truly ‘seen’ if they are unmediated by the eye? And in any case, do we really want them drawn from our synapses and projected onto a screen? Even the most incautious of self-revelatory bloggers, vlog- gers and Instagrammers is acting as a curator and gatekeeper of sorts, selecting what is exposed to view—but who can select (and suppress) their thoughts? Such neurobiological mind-reading looks like the ultimate in surveillance, but it also implies a complete breakdown of the boundary between the internal and external worlds, bringing the mind out into the public space. It also raises the question of whether other senses can be comman- deered to stand in for the eye and create a sort of vision without light— which, for all we know, is how bats and dolphins perceive sonar. That the relationship of visibility to perception is complicated has been recognized at least since Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics in the eleventh century. Vision is not simply a matter of what enters the eye; ForeworD ix

Ibn al-Haytham considered illusions, and it is no mere metaphor to say that the prestidigitating magician already possesses the secret of invisibility. The human brain plays, to some degree, the role of an invisibility machine, editing out information that we do not need (or perhaps do not wish) to incorporate into our best guess about the external world. Censorship is after all the fip side of surveillance: even if nothing escapes view, views that are denied call existence into question. Because this kind of editing has disturbing and portentous historical resonance (and of course let’s not pretend that editing history is a thing of the past), we struggle to weigh up the arguments for editing footage for the sake of propriety. Is editing the ‘seen’ always an act of violence on reality? Here too there are foundational questions for physics: ‘cosmic censorship’ refers to ideas about whether, for example in the black holes and spacetime wormholes that general relativity permits, some law of physics will intervene to suppress contradictory truths. Whether information can ever be wholly destroyed (and thus edited out of the universe) at the light-swallowing event horizon of black holes is still not a settled question, and the answer has wide ramifcations. The paths that light can take through empty space more or less defne the allowed causal connections between events—which is what makes the ‘spacetime invisibility cloak’ that I described in my book Invisible, a hypothetical structure made from so-called metamaterials, such a challenging idea. This theoretical proposal shows how a region of space and time might be walled off—in effect snipped out of the narrative of history like a bubble from a soap flm. Censorship—what is permitted to become or remain visible—is not then simply a means of control but an essential function of cognition. It also protects social norms and taboos. (The idea that some general prin- ciple of censorship might intervene to prevent ‘naked singularities’—the seemingly infnite densities at the heart of black holes, where laws break down—from being directly visible arises from a sense of impropriety as much as anything else, as the language alone implies.) Few people question that there are sights children ought to be shielded from; it’s a point of contention whether the same applies to adults. So the boundaries of what ought to be visible have to be socially negotiated. And that’s complicated. Plato wanted to show how concealment is an instrument of power, but social invisibility is typically a sign of power- lessness. We both desire to be seen and fear it. Alarmingly, our new technologies can exacerbate discrepancies in visibility, as for example when x Foreword algorithms inherit the biases of their creators (to such absurd degrees as computerized registration systems that will not accept female names after the title ‘Dr’) or when sensors for hand-driers are not calibrated to darker skin tones. Some people have been rendered literally invisible to the machines. And so we return to the central fact: invisibility is not simply a technological challenge but also a social, political and philosophical affair. All of these matters, and many more, are investigated in this stimulating book—I have purposely not cross-referenced them, because I hope it will be more satisfying simply to encounter them as you go along. This col- lection of essays make a strong case that we need art and imagination to try to make sense of how our societies venture into the unseen.

London, England Philip Ball

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and has worked for many years as an editor for Nature. He writes regularly in the scientifc and popular media, and has authored many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Philip is a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. His latest book is Beyond Weird (2018), a survey of what quantum mechanics means. Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the contributors for their excellent work and for their lasting commitment to this project. Thanks are also due to the anonymous readers of our manuscript for their incisive and helpful suggestions, as well as Ellie Freedman and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan for their enthusiastic support throughout. The origin of the current book can be traced back to the “Invisibility Conference” hosted by Nomadikon and the Center for the Ethics of Seeing in Memphis, right on the eve of the US presidential election in November 2016. We are grateful to the Meltzer Research Fund and the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen for co-funding this event.

xi Contents

1 Invisibility Matters 1 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes

2 Archaeologists of the Off-Screen: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen 17 Henrik Gustafsson

3 Literary Device: Invisible Light and a Photo of Photography 47 Ari Laskin

4 Tomas van Houtryve’s Packing Heat and the Culture of Surveillance 75 Øyvind Vågnes

5 Neurointerfaces, Mental Imagery and Sensory Translation in Art and Science in the Digital Age 91 Ksenia Fedorova

6 Invisibility and the Ethics of Erasure: Khaled Barakeh’s The Untitled Images 111 Asbjørn Grønstad

xiii xiv Contents

7 Neither Visible Nor Hidden: The Structuring of the Sensible 127 Carolina Cambre

8 Reading the Invisible in Marjane Satrapi’s Graphic Memoir Embroideries 149 Jena Habegger-Conti

9 Hearing and Seeing the In/Visible: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary 165 Anjo-marí Gouws

10 Power in Partial Invisibility: Reframing Positions on Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Photography 179 Lucy Bowditch

11 Materiality of the Invisible in David Wilson’s “California Letters” 201 Lene M. Johannessen

Index 221 Notes on Contributors

Lucy Bowditch is Professor of Art History at the College of Saint Rose, and received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1994. She regularly teaches history of photography and modern art. Her work is found in numerous publications including: Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; History of Photography; The Photo Review; The New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters; Art Criticism; and Source: Notes in the History of Art. She has contributed chapters to several books: Ecologies of Seeing (2016); Art in Time: A World History of Styles and Movements (2014); Art & Place: Site Specifc Art of the Americas (2013) and Dialectical Conversations: Donald Kuspit’s Art Criticism (2011). Currently, she is working on Gustave Courbet’s paintings from the 1850s. Carolina Cambre is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Education at Concordia University, Montreal in Quebec, Canada. Her work explores vernacular visual expression, asking questions such as: how do people produce and direct the visual space? How is the image a doing? What are the social and cultural workings of images? Cambre’s research situ- ates itself at the crossroads of pedagogy and policy, visual sociology, and image studies. More specifcally, two recurrent topics have been central to her work over the years: the social and cultural work of images (especially pedagogically and politically), and questions of the limits of available methodological approaches. Through interdisciplinary approaches, she has explored a range of topics from visual processes of social legitimation

xv xvi Notes on Contributors to digital identity formation through images. Her interests range from critical policy analysis, sociology of information and image studies to the politics of representation. She has ongoing projects in Argentina and Canada on visual processes of legitimation, representation of online shar- ing, selfes and the politics of identity, and polymedia literacies. Ksenia Fedorova, Ph.D. is a media and media art researcher and curator. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Art and Image History at Humboldt University in Berlin, working on a manuscript of her book Tactics of Interfacing. Encoding Affect in Art and Technology. She is the co-editor of Media: Between Magic and Technology (2014, in Russian) and an author of articles in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Media & Culture Journal, Acoustic Space, Dialog of Arts and other journals and edited volumes. From 2007 to 2011, she was an initi- ator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, Russia). Ksenia’s research interests encompass media art theory and history, aesthetics, philosophy, techno-cultural and science and technology studies, with a specifc focus on the affects of new technologies on human perception and interaction. Anjo-marí Gouws is a PhD-candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, where her research explores philosophies of cinematic world-making. She is interested in how cinema records and articulates the making of the self, the home, and the world, through questions related to gendered labour, mental illness, and transnational trauma and diaspora. Her dissertation, Recording the Work of a World: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Diary Film and the Domestication of Cinema, takes on some of these concerns. Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. He is founding director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture and the author/editor of ten books, the most recent of which is the monograph Film and the Ethical Imagination (2016). His ongoing book project is entitled Figures of Opacity in American Visual Culture. Henrik Gustafsson is Professor of Film, Media and Visual Culture in the Department of Media and Documentation Science, University of Tromsø. The author or editor of fve books and numerous articles, his latest publication is Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography (2019). Notes on ContributorS xvii

Jena Habegger-Conti is Associate Professor of English at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) in Bergen where she teaches English literature and culture at B.A. and M.A. levels in the teacher education program. Her research interests include transcultural and critical literacies, and her most recent publication is “Transcultural Literacy: Reading the ‘Other,’ Shifting Aesthetic Imaginaries,” in Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, ed. Lene Johannessen (2018). Lene M. Johannessen is Professor of American literature at the University of Bergen. Her research and teaching are in the general areas of American studies (Horizons of Enchantment: Essays in the American Imaginary, 2011), Chicano studies (“Regional Singularity and Decolonial Chicana/o Studies,” Routledge Handbook of Chicano Studies, 2018) and postcolonial studies (“Palimpsest and Hybridity in Postcolonial Writing,” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson, 2012). Most recently she co-edited with Mark Ledbetter the interdisciplinary Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries (2018). Ari Laskin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is a flm theorist, media historian and flmmaker who teaches courses in global flm and media, critical and visual studies, and flm production. He frequently works as an editor in academic publishing and flm programming, and serves on the juries of flm festivals; his flms have been shown inter- nationally. Ari is currently writing a book-length project exploring the social history of infrared from 1800 to its current uses within militarism, art, cinema and science. As a flmmaker, Ari is nearing completion of a feature-length flm examining conceptions of authenticity, race and privi- lege in foodie culture. Øyvind Vågnes is Professor in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen. A writer, scholar and journal editor (Journal of Visual Culture), Vågnes has published widely on visual culture. Among his publications are “A Day in History: Andrea Gjestvang’s 22 July Photographs” (Journal of European Studies 47(4) 2017) and Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture (2011), which received an honorable mention at the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in 2012. List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Eye/Machine II (Harun Farocki 2002) 24 Fig. 2.2 Parallel I (Harun Farocki 2012) 35 Fig. 3.1 Salt print from a calotype negative, early 1840s. 13.2 18.0 cm. From the negative in the NMPFT, × 1937–1301. Schaaf 18. William Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969) 48 Fig. 4.1 Brooklyn to Manhattan subway. Temperature range: 20.4–32.0 degrees Celsius (Tomas van Houtryve/VII) 78 Fig. 4.2 A woman on the streets of lower Manhattan, New York, United States. Temperature range 18.6–29.1 degrees Celsius (Tomas van Houtryve/VII) 82 Fig. 7.1 Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei face down on the beach on the Greek Island of Lesbos (Rohit Chawla/India Today) 128 Fig. 7.2 Kurdi (2012–2015) on beach (darkened), from Facebook feed (original Nilüfer Demir from DHA Agency, Turkey) 129 Fig. 7.3 refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the North-Eastern Greek Island of Lesbos, January 29, 2016. Mstyslav Chernov/ Unframe (Source Wikimedia Commons) 135 Fig. 7.4 Untitled painting by Hrishikesh Sarma, 2015 (with permission) 138 Fig. 7.5 Untitled drawing by Mostafa Ismael in Gaza (with permission) 139

xix xx List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 B. Bontecou, MD, Sutured Gunshot Wound of Upper Arm, c.1865, albumen print (© Stanley B. Burns, MD and The Burns Archive) 185 Fig. 10.2 Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, two-channel video with overlapping projections (color, sound with Anders Guggisberg), flm still, dimensions variable, fractional and promised gift of Donald L. Bryant, Jr. (© 2018 Pipilotto Rist) 186 Fig. 10.3 Abelardo Morell, Upright Camera Obscura of the Piazza San Marco Looking Southeast in Offce, 2007, inkjet print, 24 30 inches (© Abelardo Morell, × Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York) 188 Fig. 10.4 Edward J. Steichen, Bartholomé, 1901, platinum print, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Acc # 2013.159.48. Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 (© 2018 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York) 190 Fig. 10.5 robert Frank, Save—Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1956 (© Robert Frank from The American; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York) 191 Fig. 10.6 John DeSousa, Peace of Sheet, 2017, flm still Property of the artist (Property of the artist) 193 Fig. 11.1 The David E. Wilson letters, BANC MSS 2001/134 cz, box 1:12. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 208 Fig. 11.2 The David E. Wilson letters, BANC MSS 2001/134 cz, box 1:12. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 213