J.Dorothea Smith

Speculations/Spacetime Mattering/Autism/Synaesthesia. 

“Ahhh, I SEE!” – Susan finally understands quantum entanglement. 

I am super aware just not in relation to you. My connectivity is electrified upon avenues that lead past you. Into what you feel is the void.

Space between us is nil.

Between does not exist.

“For instance, we talk as if there are things, objects around us that are fixed and solid—that table, this book—things that are there. We say we see this book, but we actually interacting not with the book but rather with the light reflected from the book. Further, the properties of the book are not at all what our senses tell us. It is made of gigantic quantities of tiny bits, ‘subatomic particles,’ that are constantly in motion, with big spaces between them and forces that pull the bits together and push them apart. We talk as though in between objects there is just space, maybe filled with air and sometimes light, but the spaces are actually packed with streams of waves of all kinds of energies” (Cornsweet, T.2017).

The circular flow of experience, existence in the quantum. The photons arrive within me flowing around my perception and I throw them back out, transformed into the representations you see here. 

For example, a single photon blinks into existence, as a mote somewhere, a massless energy and is extinguished immediately as it is absorbed into the retina. The starting point of this energy was not observed and for the photon this journey is instant, no time has passed for this massless particle that travels at the speed of light. In the 2019 journal article, Can Quantum Physics Help Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness? A hypothesis based on entangled spins and photons, Christoph Simon uses understandings of physics and hypothesises that it is reasonable to consider that entanglement can support consciousness, and that the photon is essential to this process:

“I propose a concrete hypothesis as a basis for further investigations, namely that subjective experience is related to the dynamics of a complex entangled state of spins, which is continuously generated and updated through the exchange of photons… “ (Simon, 2019)

But how to catch the light? In what ways? Facets, cameras mirrors and glass, to capture the ineffable, the unknowable. Nebulous quantum qualities making matter beautiful with essences of invisible magnetic electro scatterings of the molecular that does not matter. Imagining we have the power or control to catch the uncatchable, that it is not too big and not too small, too random or too old and way beyond our physicality. Age and time are exposed by illumination, there seems to be a futility in trying to apprehend the edges of experiences. Is it the ultimate reality? Light? Catch it and put it in a box, keep it for when the darkness is encroaching. 

Nyctophobia. 

Who is an expert in light, the light that falls, the light that doesn’t and the light in our minds that remember the illuminations of the past? The things lit and the things imagined that we could swear were lit. Do we ever know what we saw? Abstract experience translates into abstract representations, we then see this and that, the process evolves into entirely abstract happenings. 

"Is light an energetic ray, a beam, the illumination of surfaces, an atmosphere? Is it the shining of the sun, the moon and the stars? Is it a flickering flame, a lamp or torch, the glowing embers of a fire? Is it whiteness, or a spectrum of colour? Is it a release from darkness, an enlivening of the spirit, divine presence, the power of reason? In this commentary I show that light can be all of these things but only because, as we pass from one to another, our understanding of the material world, and of ourselves as beings within it, is profoundly transformed…"(Ingold 2021)

These artefacts are deliberately destroyed to highlight the photograph as a thing, that is made by a series and course of actions that will never be known. These are found photographs, but also , in a way, known as they have matter and ways of creation in common - an anonomous photographer, a disclocated series of photons from the scene to the darkroom, then it comes out into the light to be seen again. In the book Found Photography Ann-Marie Garat talks about the bizzare photograph, one that is found out of place, removed from the owner or photographer. Garrat describes these as a kind of challenge to us and our realities. 

Photographs can be imitations or creations, confirmations or refutations, proofs of resemblance or dissimilarity, truths made false or faslehoods made true. All of these paradoxes come together in the genre of the bizzare photograph, which seems to go against all reason, uncovering unknown enigmas or perhaps giving us a sense of deja vu, a mysterious intuitive awareness of a world beneathe the one we know, with all its menacing duplicity. This kind of photograph captures the underlying chaos that we always suspected was there, and by capturing it in a single moment, it revaels to us the radical otherness of visible reality. It only needs that one moment to dislocate the tectonics of the world we think we know. 

"If it can be grasped by the eye of the camera, it can be grasped by the mind. The magic of a surreal photograph offeres us an experience that is thrilling, frightening and fascinating, all at the same time. It has much in common with wordplay, in the sense that the unusual combination of elements creates a disurbing effect - What is seen is more than what is seen, just as what is said is more than what is said, and the image and the words take on new and disconcerting meanings." (Garat 2013)

The unreality, the idea that it captures some sort of truthful moment, that it is an instrument and not a pen or a brush, a tool for artists, it is a foe from a reductionist tradition - accuracy is extremely deniable.

Using found photographs and re-contextualising them, destroying them and placing them out of their original contexts gives then an uncanny quality that exposes the artefacts as delicate and the people in them as vulnerable. They are at the mercy of the universe, the artist the veiwer - what will happen to the photographs of us in the future? Is a kind question that could also be What will happen to US in the future, what if our realities mean nothing?

The camera and the authority bestowed upon it is powerful, it has explanatory force and specific histories that can be problematic, but it is not an organic capture system. This work will consider the reasons why it is different to an eye. It is not dynamic in the same way as a being with agency. By highlighting areas of divergence could the ubiquitous linkages to vision, and comparisons to the eye be un-coupled by feminist, molecular and neurodivergent descriptions?

Sowing/Synesthesia/Divergence

Sow yourself to the end of the universe with threads of my nerves made from light, attach them to your eyes, skin heart and know they are visible only to you.

Gossamer? No. Intangible, an invisibility that matches my existence in this world. 

Pull the gravity out from my lungs, one at a time and feel the weight of the moon upon them. Slowly pulling me apart and taking my water with them. 

Ride the sounds from the distant city, folding me up like origami. In in in, then take both ends and pull hard, ripping until I am thin and broken. 

I wonder if everyone felt the attachment to the universe and knew its taste, would they like it? 

My mother thinks I should settle and be happy with what I have, what I have is stretched so thin she cannot see it and would not want it. 

Then…

The universe slowly asks me to follow. Immensity cannot be described as rhythm or cadence. Feeling patterns and shifting moments that are so distant, somehow, I do not exist, and neither do they.

The girl the ghost.

I can manifest myself, materially on the walls 

Scrape, write, scratch

Becoming, not a ghost but a real girl. 

Do you believe in ghosts?

The seeing and understanding of the world has always included everything, but the finer details of some things may be important. The tales that include both the things we see but do not understand, such as ghosts, monsters and pareidolic impressions, and more recently, the things we do not see and feel that we do understand as ‘the scientific’ by way of experiments and explorations that are then communicated via diagrammatic visuals and taught explanations of some kind or another. 

The finer details, the sublime scale of everything and the intangible ‘in our heads’ visual memories, dreams and imaginings are also somehow ‘seen’, but how much of this is, or was, actually as it is? These descriptions of everything could be poured into a crucible and re-looked upon, using creative abstraction to understand that which IS abstract. Images with mutable meanings and visual creations could be interchangeable with diagrams to demonstrate the places that are under investigation by the sciences and in particular, neurodivergent experiences and synaesthesia. 

How should one create something for sharing that illustrates a lived experience that is part of a constellation of divergences that feels somehow 4d? Is something that is almost impossible to describe, but could be unlocked by a multiplicity of aggregated creative works. Might this allow an expansion upon the reductionist ways the evidence is being interrogated currently? Non-medicalising, de-stigmatising, using the visual as an entryway to these experiences could be useful. 

Just as we describe seeing we are also describing many things about experience, understandings, myth, legend, memory, histories and science due to the ways we use truth/accuracy and seeing as interchangeable. The ability to hold myth and banality at the same time as a duality of truths is intertwined within this. We do this with language that is visual, and our perception allows this duality of being. 

Whatever is true and regardless of logic or explanation, it matters not, we somehow see spectres in the night, and experience creeping dread - we are told “it is a ghost or a portent of the future and we say “I see!” Just as we don’t, we say, ‘If I see it I will believe it” and we don’t and then we ,again, say ‘I SEE!’ when we understand something new – Does this create a kind of flux, a backwards and forwards of perceptual experiences that means we really do understand that our vision and it’s inaccuracies are representative of our frailty. 

Incedentally, these ghosts could also be an access point for non-synesthetes and the neurotypical to understand something of what it is like to tangibly experience something that is understood to be ‘not actually there’, to understand the impressions that heightened emotional, perceptual and sensorial experiences can leave, and, that this is how a large number of people live in the world. 

Matrix

The matrices, printed mono, ethereal and technical. Produced with lithography, every print different, every print an evolution of the first. Palimpsests, growing through one another, flowing embodied printing from a single day. The energies taken through the body, vision and its dynamism. Reproduced in a kind of way, individual to an image. A wall of ‘after visions’ replicating energetic flows and the memories of them, a body repeating processes, again and again and again. 

Does the location of our artistic identity and practice also involve the print matrix - an inky middle ground between paper and pressure? Is this plane of activity a centre or a non-centre? And if the matrix is a centre of activity is the print then a non-centre? Derrida in structure, sign and play, described the ‘non centre otherwise than a loss of centre.’ Does the existence of multiple impressions of the same image also point to the print as a non’centre? The absence of the matrix in the visible artwork seems to point to a loss, an absence which serves to decentre attention from the art object. In modern printing technology and terminology, lithography was reinvented as offset - a term which implies a compensating equivalent, that is, compensation for a loss incurred by distancing the art object further from the matrix” (Reeves 1999, Pelzer-Montada 2018)

Cornsweet, T., 2017. Seeing : How Light Tells Us About The World. Oakland: University of California Press.

Garat, A.-M. (2013) Found photography. London: Thames & Hudson.

Ingold, Tim, ‘Afterword: On Light’, in Costas Papadopoulos, and Holley Moyes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Light in Archaeology, Oxford Handbooks.

Pelzer-Montada, R. and Reeves, K. (2018) Perspectives on contemporary printmaking: Critical writing since 1986. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Simon, C., 2019. Can quantum physics help solve the hard problem of consciousness? A hypothesis based on entangled spins and photons. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26, [online] 26, p.204. Available at: <https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03490v1> [Accessed 25 February 2021].