TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

. . . art tries to represent nature. Not necessarily in a direct sense, like you paint a nice field and in that painting, you’ve represented it one to one; embracing that you’re capturing something very fundamental there.. But even in abstract painting and various forms of sculpture or digital art; that what you’re really trying to capture is a representation of the process of representation itself. That’s basically how Schelling discusses art. To say that art represents nature, you’re not saying that art represents a representation of nature in an image, but that an image is actually pointing to the processes within nature that creates not only what we would call natural objects – plants or animals – but also thought. So art in a sense, is thought’s attempt to capture itself as a creation of nature, as creation.

So, how do we move beyond the past? How do we move past the phallocratic traditions and its subjective invariants? In the aftermath of emancipatory politics and within a current age of media deliriums, where we are all allowed to scream and cry our outrage and become the users and producers of media and the illusions and dreams of detournements of Debord have been given to us all within the virtual-actual spaces of social networks; or at least, keeps us chained to a Freudian unconscious (a Freudian Robot). The question, Ex Machina then brings to the forefront, is more than a simple question of Feminist emancipatory politics, it’s a position outside of striving perhaps to take on the compulsion of consumption today: the consumption and compulsion to Identify, to share Identification, and to consume Identity. Then, how can we begin to grasp a capacity to think within the ever-changing landscape today in a manner where we take up a mode of consumption that would be akin to a capacity and novel mode of thinking within our current landscape of post-digital culture?

I think that photography is digital – if you understand photography in the classical sense – and that it has always been digital. Such a position only holds if we accept the previous definition of the digital, which has to do with subscribing to a fundamental rivenness of the world. Photography must reflect on or orient itself toward an object or toward the world. The viewer (or the camera as a ‘viewer proxy’) is already divided, or apart, or opposite from its subject. The viewer is inside the world of course, but the structure of immanence is not in effect. Rather, a structure of distance, difference, relationality predominates. If the dominant structure is distance, difference, relation, etc., it’s digital as far as I’m concerned. But that might not be a very satisfying answer!