Extraneous Strangescapes
2014
"Every photograph is a certificate of presence."[1]
Strangescapes
In Wolfgang Weileder's Seascapes there predominates a palpable and insistent quality of strangeness - that is to say something from elsewhere, but also something estranged or exiled. The word and its cognates are revealing: `strange' is from the Old French estrange, foreign, alien, unusual, unfamiliar, curious; distant; inhospitable; unknown, unfamiliar; and the Latin extraneus, foreign, external, separate, from without. But the word also means surprising. There is another interesting sense according to which strangers are not `unknown' persons, but those who have stopped visiting - the infrequent ones who no longer come, but who, when they do come upon us, literally apprehend or seize us from above. This experience of being taken-up clearly implies a change of location, a vertical transposition - maybe from the everyday to the extraordinary and the unknown or unknowable that lie not elsewhere but deep within the reaches of the known.
One condition that produces this strangeness is the sense that the images harbor something extraneous; something invisible yet pervasive that makes us apprehensive in relation to what they might contain and say to us. In them, multiple instants are `contained' and assembled to suggest a temporal sequence, a passage between night and day; but these discrete moments are not a set of sections of time that might be reconstituted as in a flipbook or film. Rather, they form a seamless continuum. The images eclipse the discontinuity of individual frames that haunts cinema's attempt at temporal continuity by including multiple times in a single image. Consequently time appears to stand still even as each scene portrays an inexorable transit into the gloaming. This simultaneity and overlay of movement and rest confer on the images an indelible sense of aeviternity - the condition of `ever-being', suspended between time and eternity.
Because the images do not show an actual place, but the collation of an infinitesimally narrow vertical band of spatial extension, they also escape Barthes' frame of reference for photography, which reads the image as the emanation of a referent and a "certificate of presence" of that referent. Here there is no subject that emanates, no "real body, which was there" and from which proceeds "radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here."[2] If for Barthes "photography offers an immediate presence to the world – a co-presence" then by contrast, what the Seascapes present correspond with no `there', since the images depict scenes that can never have taken place.
Hence the matter of evidence is put into question; and yet each image works as the cipher of a place it cannot represent but only intimate. For example, Morecambe Bay, Irish Sea, UK, 2014 - an expanse of estuarine mudflats into which five rivers drain - conveys something intrinsic to the slow turbulence and incremental transformations of that particular place, but without depicting it as such. In that sense the images are haptic place markers or charts that fix the imprint of a specific location's situatedness, its existential and affective qualities as they play themselves out in time through modulations of light, colour, climate, water and wind. The real (from which an image have been extracted) does not function as a referent, and the image does not represent the real; rather, the image projects the real by making it (up).
The matter of indexicality is likewise foregrounded. If, as Barthes writes, the photograph's essence is ratification and authentication of "what has been"[3] - or if, as for Susan Sontag, "all photographs are memento mori"[4] - then what are the mnemonic conditions produced by Seascapes; what do they recall? For Barthes, "in the photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation”; but with Seascapes, the reverse is true. The images' powers of representation exceed their powers of authentication. They shift the denotative character of the photograph into "the rhetorical power of its connotative overlay."[5] In other words, these photographs are not scientific records but productive frameworks for confabulation and narration. Their essential register is mythopoetic because what they bring to mind and into view is not the concrete reality of a place, but its magnification as both originary essence and futural potential.
One thing we confront in Seascapes is our presumption and expectation of ostensibility and verisimilitude - that what we see is an authentic depiction of an actual place at an actual moment in time. That is, we encounter the images as photographs, as indicators of an anterior reality projected into the present. The reality, however, is that we are not looking at photographic representations of natural scenes. The images are reconstructions that use photographic fragments to build fictive scenes whose artificiality is equal to their veracity. This elision between truth and fiction - that the natural is conveyed through artifice, that ingenuity is equally genuine and disingenuous, that the images fictionalise the real by depicting an impossible presence - produces a deep ambiguity that also contributes to their strangeness.
Undoubtedly the times depicted are familiar. Their hue, luminosity and atmosphere make of them evident portrayals of twilights, of the gloaming in which gloom and gleam become indiscernible; and so there is in them something odd, something that does not add up and eventually becomes unsettling. This quality is delivered by the setup of the images and how they have been produced. We see what appears to be an image of the horizon around daybreak or nightfall - that is, we see what appears to be a continuous sequence of time within the same extent of space. In fact, the spatiality of the scenes is unrealistic. It is constructed out of pixel-wide vertical strips placed side by side to produce a simulated view of the horizon. Each strip shows a different moment of the same vertical slot of space. Effectively, space (the horizon) has been reduced into an infinitesimally narrow band, while time has been cut up into fractions of duration. While we see what we believe to be a contiguous horizon line observed over a continuous duration of time, what we actually see is an additive line made up of a narrow band of the horizon over a discontinuous timeframe. This non-apparent coexistence of continuity and discontinuity, contiguity and difference is not rationally apprehended but affectively sensed. It destabilises images that otherwise show familiar and benign scenes. Our perception of the images is therefore double and inherently contradictory - hence our experience of them will be uncanny, unfamiliar and disturbing. At the same time, the unfamiliarity or unusualness they convey produces a sense of wonder:
“Not knowing the way out or the way in, wonder dwells in a between, between the most usual, beings, and their unusualness, their “is.” It is wonder that first liberates this between as the between and separates it out. Wonder − understood transitively − brings forth the showing of what is most usual in its unusualness. Not knowing the way out or the way in, between the usual and the unusual, is not helplessness, for wonder as such does not desire help but instead precisely opens up this between, which is impervious to any entrance or escape, and must constantly occupy it.”[6]
technics
Much of the aesthetic, formal, thematic, metaphorical and semantic dimensions of the Seascape images derive from the technical conditions of their production. What they say largely comes from how they have been made. Rachel Wells summarises the process:
"The artist takes multiple digital images of the same scene at regular time intervals, and then extracts one pixel-wide vertical strip from the same point in each photograph, laying the strips out in a row so that the composite image can literally be `read' as a record of day turning into night."[7]
Each final image is therefore not a definitive rendition of a single scene at a moment in time but only one of an innumerable constellation of possible seascapes. Each actual scene is photographed on average every 4 seconds over a 5 hour period, giving a potential 4500 initial images. The number of pixel-wide vertical slices in each initial image (from which the frame used to assemble the final image is selected) is 3310. Every final image we see is therefore a version or versification drawn from an enormous set of compossibles that we don't see, but that is implied in a setup which functions like a semantic, genetic or informatic system capable of producing indefinite permutations. This excessive, dissimulated potential haunts every scene, which interminably threatens to translate (Latin versio) and turn-into (Latin vertere) its multiple alterations and variegations[8], hence putting into question the veracity and verisimilitude of photographic representation.
The question of selection then arises. Which of the 3310 vertical slices in each of the 4500 initial photographs will be chosen to produce the final collated image? Weileder writes that his "work is not about possible permutations of slices, it is about recording one slice of space over a period of time (5 hours)."[9] Because of the relatively invariable horizontal prospect, Weileder looks for frames that contain "human traces (like boats, which leave a tiny mark)." By contrast, the Atlas series privileges frames that contain "the most human action and interaction."[10] The setup involves foregrounding something that moves over against something immobile - clouds, waves, ships, birds against sea, sky and horizon in Seascapes; and people, vehicles and lights against buildings, parks, footpaths, squares and roads in Atlas. The vertical slices function like cartographic meridians. They are frames against which the occasional, circumstantial and accidental are registered: what passes quickly is recorded as a speck, while what lingers and tarries is recorded as a streak or block of contrasting shape or colour. The play of mobile against immobile produces the nap and pile of each woven scene which, as Wells notes, spatialises time.[11]
Because we do not see an actual scene but an entirely constructed one, the Seascape series breaks with the real and is thus brought closer to cinema, whose essence is, according to Christian Metz, trucage: trickery, fiction, deception and illusion; together with the apparatuses and machinations (trucs) that produce them.[12] More specifically trucage relates to the equipment, mechanisms and procedures for moving stage settings to produce unexpected and surprising effects.[13] In that sense, Seascapes is more scenography than photography:
"Trucage is avowed machination... (there) is always a certain duplicity attached to the very notion of trucages. There is always something hidden inside it (since it remains trucage only to the extent to which the perception of the spectator is taken by surprise)... It is in fact essential to know that the cinema in its entirety is, in a sense, a vast trucage, and that the position of the trucage, with respect to the whole of the text, is very different in cinema than it is in photography."[14]
In the case of Seascapes, what is striking is the recognisability of the scenes, which is only made possible because the forms of the subject matter remain unchanged along the horizontal dimension of the frame. Were the subject matter to be a portrait for example, then the eventual image would not be recognisable as such. We would more likely see a sedimented layering or weave of horizontal and verticals that record the movement of emotions across a portion of the face over a space of time, but without a clean outline of its form. This is evident in the Atlas series (for example Place des Vosges, Paris, Slice 2356, 2012) whose subject matter - the everyday movement of people, vehicles, reflections and refractions of an urban setting - is likewise unrecognisable and yet evocative of a city: we suspect as much, but without certainty and without evidence. This unfamiliarity contributes greatly to the uncanny quality of the images.
As for the Atlas series, the Seascapes are a kind of mapping of movement and duration. The cartographic tropes deployed in Atlas (the reference maps, geographical information, historical narrative, image capture details, camera position and orientation, scale of the `map', nomenclature, keys, coordinates and distances along x and y coordinates) establish credentials for a kind of urban diagnostics framed by cartographic precision, but also challenged by the flexuous materialities and turbulent grain so characteristic of the images. Throughout, the camera functions like a scientific instrument - a spectrometer, seismometer, ophthalmoscope or interferometer that captures spectral shifts and quakes, displacements, movements and surface irregularities passing through the frame; and the images become analogues - so many seismographs or spectographs produced by a kinemetric practice that measures the movements, velocities, densities, shifts and processes of a complex and evolving system.
How, then, can such a strictly methodical, calculated process produce images of such ravishing beauty, so redolent of the romantic sublime? How can such an analytical, reductive undertaking deliver images in which meaning and affect are so extensively conjugated and concatenated? How can more arise from less? The theme of emergence is pivotal here. The permutational system and apparatus of production provides a network of affordances that is mobilised once the individual slices are selected and brought into proximity. It provokes emergent conditions into the (one pixel-wide) frame, enabling them to be documented and depicted - that is, enabling the elusive to be fixed and grasped. The aesthetic qualities of such emergences are therefore not produced `by design', according to a premeditated visual intent, but arrive serendipitously, by happenstance.
What does surprise is the constitutive opacity of the scenes. Their production takes digital processes to the limit, whereby sharpness, precision and repetition are challenged to the extent that they begin to form representations of imprecision and ambiguity belying the rectilinear setup and processes of capture, slice-selection, cut and systematic, linear re-assemblage. At the same time, the processes deliver texture and weave into the surfaces of the pictures, which add considerable grain to their dense materiality and monumental scale. They recuperate something like the Benjaminian `aura' that the age of mechanical reproducibility denies to photographic representation, but without recourse to supplemental depictive metaphor. This aura comes entirely out of the machinations of production.
meridian veils
We know the series relates to the meridians in two senses: firstly with reference to cartography and the grid of longitude (north-south) and latitude (east-west) overlaid on the earth to register spatial orientation, or with meridian lines and gnomons in particular locations to indicate days of the solar year; and secondly with reference to noon (Latin meridie, `at noon'; from medius-die, mid-day). Figuratively, the meridian suggests a "point of highest development or fullest power"[15] - that is, a state of maximum potential and implementational energy, corresponding for example to the point of contraflexure at the summer solstice when the sun reaches its highest elevation of the year before `turning' towards its lowest elevation at the winter solstice, or the moment between the ebb and flow of a tide called `slack water' or the `stand of the tide'. At these instants, the impending `turn' is accompanied by radical stillness - a total absence of stress and movement that nevertheless carries a premonitory sense of advent; of apprehension toward something that is about-to but has not-yet arrived. Such moments are out-of-time since time palpably appears to stand still and hang suspended in wait.
Such virtual dimensions may not be perceptible but they are not neutral. They work into the fabric of the images and in the background of our perception and reception to render them complex, to virtualise and increase their potential to become other than they appear. According to George Simondon, the moment of maximum potential energy corresponds to a pre-revolutionary state “where an event is just about ready to produce itself, or where a structure is just about ready to gush out.”[16] This sense of the impending is a critical and liminal moment that, in Seascapes, marks a threshold of destabilization; a state of crisis that is not debilitating because, at this very moment, the system inscribed in the images reaches supersaturation of potential sufficient to trigger indefinite modulation, variation and versification. In that sense, the images produced within such a metastable field approach a state of paradox or contradiction, yet without themselves becoming paradoxical or contradictory.
A further quality of the images is their geometric structure. The pixel-wide frame of space, repeated across the width of the photograph, constitutes a vertical dimension that is barely visible in the materiality of the image; while the horizon, which is in fact produced by the additive process of stitching together the vertical bands, is its horizontal counterpart. The weaving and crossing of these two dimensions, like the crossing of warp and weft that produces a fabric, produce the image. A third zone of black extending the full height completes the frame. In this tripartite setup the horizon line appears as a thin extrusion of the blackness (Collywell Bay, North Sea, UK, 2014), or else disappears behind its darkening veils (Morecambe Bay, Irish Sea, UK, 2014). The distinctness of the horizon counters the indefinite, smoky edge of the black band that blots or bleeds across the frame.
These transitions can be read in several ways. Across the borderline, the blackness absorbs or drowns the gloaming; it exhausts itself into the rising dawn; or else an intensification of gradual darkening sweeps up into streaks of gloom. This black border feathers at the corners, against the light, so that day seems to fold into the curvature of a vertical cylinder in relief against a black background (Sacca di Goro, Adriatic Sea; Collywell Bay, North Sea, UK, 2014). Streaks of mist sweep up into it, or streams of sea overflow in waterfalls (Malmöfjord, Skagerrak, Sweden, 2013). Scenes shift from flat patterned surfaces to deeply layered turbulence. In some instances (Marsden Bay, North Sea, UK, 2014), the horizon is effectively dissimulated into extensive sheets of billowing clouds and haze.
Another antinomy is one between sky and sea; a relationship made more complex by the presence of the land that is out of frame and off screen, but no less formative. Sea and sky are both mobile and dynamic, though they move to different rhythms and systems of duration - the sky animated by clouds moving horizontally across the frame and the sea by the ebb and flow of its tide, and the shimmer, chop or shine of its surface produced by vertical displacements of the water. Again we have a parallel crossing of space, time and materiality: day and night, dawn and dusk, north and south, east and west, vertical and horizontal, sea and sky, light and dark, vapor and smoke. None of these antinomies are explicit however. The images evoke what Paul Carter has called the “colloidal anatomy of the visible,” or the `calligraphic’ and kinesthetic underlays, lines and linings that surface in its representation[17], rather than anything Euclidean or orthogonal according to which we might seek to understand a scene. The images build into swales, sheets, swells, squalls, stains, streaks, screeds, slurs, smears, smudges, tints, shades, shadows and taints. Everything is plunged into uncertainty; objects lose their defining contours and blend or pale into interpenetrant, pallid veils where singularities appear to merge and transform. The pall of twilight is the complexion of time's drowning.
As when on a clear desert night, when the atmosphere is amenable, the shadow of the earth cast in the sky by the setting sun can be read as the arched selvage of a vast curtain rising from the eastern horizon to slowly cover the firmamental sphere, these equinoctial apparitions alight from a penumbral nether world - a gap-space or stillstand spliced into the midst of temporality and spatiality, and so belonging to no antinomy, subject to no confinement and wholly immanent, elusive and evanescent.
times
How do the Seascapes deal with time? Each image is a cross section across a continuum; but what we see is not a moment `in' time or an instant that denotes an arrest of time or deceased event. Rather, we see multiple times at the same time. We see time itself, its passage, its duration; yet not as kinematic flow but as pure extensivity and distension. If the images fix time it is not in the sense of Henri Cartier-Bresson's `decisive moment' or Roland Barthes' `punctum'. There is nothing in the images to delay us, no instance or instant that might be more essential or significant than another, or that might take us outside the coordinates of the image. On the contrary, Seascapes delivers us deep into place, and into the time of its taking place, each time different and grounded in specificity (Foce del Rubicone, 2014; Mouth of the Tyne, 2014; Malmöfjord, 2013). Each image shows not `a moment of time' (one definition of photography), but the multiple times of a single place: a single (narrow) extent of space mobilised by what moves through it. We do not see time's chronological, cinematic passing but its discontinuous, suspended stillstand in one infinitesimal spatial interval, constrained `between the walls' of an artificial frame of reference that both miniaturises and magnifies the world.
Ultimately what are these images of? What do they seem-like? What role do the seams between slices play in their materiality and affective qualities? Here, semblance is an entirely emergent condition, since the process is not geared to the mimetic figuration or representation of a scene but to its disfiguration and dissemblance as the wholeness of the original view is violated by the extraction of only a single slice, `cloned' to produce a new scenography. The resultant scene in no way resembles the source. In fact each scene contains within it a fragment of each of the 4500 four-second time-lapse photographs. Each is an archive of virtual or potential scenes that could but will never be actualised. As Giles Deleuze noted:
"The virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual… Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it is plunged as though into an objective dimension… The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them."[18]
Seascapes convert the actuality of a concrete moment in time (nightfall at Tynemouth) into the virtuality of `any-time-whatever', wherein potentiality and reality, type and example fuse and become indistinguishable. The ambiance of such a state – its atmosphere and aura – is the halo[19]:
“One can think of the halo, in this sense as a zone in which possibility and reality, potentiality and actuality, become indistinguishable. The being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility. This is that potential permixta actui (or that actus permixtus potentiae) that a brilliant fourteenth-century philosopher called actus confusionis, a fusional act, insofar as a specific form or nature is not preserved in it, but mixed and dissolved in a new birth with no residue. This imperceptible trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminate and allows it to blend, to make itself whatever, is the tiny displacement that everything must accomplish in the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of a potentiality that comes only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo.”[20]
The Seascapes are so many manifestations of the halo of situated twilights; their pervasive luminosity and quiet, nocturnal gleaming suffuse and perforate the field, absorbing the gaze into a world and time apart, and into time itself.
Notes
[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981, 5-6, 87.
[2] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80-81.
[3] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85-89.
[4] Susan Sontag, On Photography. Delta, New York, 1977, 15.
[5] Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, 442.
[6] Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected “Problems” of “Logic,” translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, 145.
[7] Rachel Wells, `Space-crossed time: mapping the coordinates of Wolfgang Weileder's photography and installation', in Alistair Robinson (Ed.), Wolfgang Weileder. Continuum. Berlin: Kleber Verlag, 2013, 105-141.
[8] The etymon is *WER, to turn, wind, bend; and its cognates are revealing. Consider for example Old English -weard, turned-toward, weorthan, to befall and weorðan, to become. What turns becomes and comes into its own, or else it fundamentally alters and turns-into something else.
[9] Wolfgang Weileder, personal communication, 16 July 2014.
[10] Wolfgang Weileder, personal communication, 18 June 2014. On the Atlas series, see Alistair Robinson, `Wolfgang Weileder: material performances', in Robinson (Ed.), Wolfgang Weileder, 39-69.
[11] Wells, `Space-crossed time: mapping the coordinates of Wolfgang Weileder's photography and installation', 105-141. The spatialisation of time is a foundational and symbolic tactic in sacred architecture, which aims to align the six directions of space and the multiples phases of times within a centralised structure that `stills' the world and gives access to the ubiquitous and the eternal. See Adrian Snodgrass, Architecture, Time and Eternity. Studies in Stellar and Temporal Symbolism. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1990.
[12] Christian Metz, Trucage and the Film. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1977 and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, 482.
[13] Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé http://atilf.atilf.fr accessed 5 July 2014.
[14] Christian Metz in Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 2000, 66. Note that French trucage is synonymous with machin, thing - cognate with machine, from the etymons *MAGH, to be able, to have (the) power (to do); *MECHANE, device and *MAGANE, that which enables.
[15] http://www.etymonline.com accessed 17 July 2014.
[16] Georges Simondon. L'Individuation Psychique et Collective. Paris: Aubier/Flammarion, 2007, 53-4; and Gilles Deleuze, `The actual and the virtual', in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.
[17] Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
[18] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 208-209.
[19] On atmosphere, aura and the halo see my `Vaporous circumambience: towards an architectonics of atmosphere', in Interstices 2013. Moved: On Atmospheres and Affects (forthcoming, 2014).
[20] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 56.