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 ISBN 978-3-030-16290-0 ISBN 978-3-030-16291-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16291-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover image: gremlin/Getty Images Cover design by eStudio Calamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland FOREWORD 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 per- ception.”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 ques- tion 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.