Visibilities and Invisibilities of Wonder: A Practice-Led Exploration of Optical Image Systems

Abstract

This interdisciplinary practice-led project began with two investigations, both pivoting around the central material of glass. It explored whether glass, with its unique logistics of perception and ability to render invisible phenomena visible, could make visible an imperceptible process of slow change. It also endeavoured to understand how glass, in transporting its image-light across space and time evokes the experience of wonder. These two strands of enquiry were brought together through the research and development of my optical image systems, which serve as perceptual tools for exploring wonder and time. What initially began as an experience of observing slow changes in nature, transformed into a wider consideration of critical wonder, time and visibility. Critical sensibility became fundamental to my explorations of the materiality of wonder, but also crucial for the generation of wonder was a momentary interruption of this criticality by means of the imperceptible and immaterial transfer of light.

My hybrid devices incorporate a wide range of old and new technologies, spanning from sixteenth century optical objects of natural magic to contemporary electronics and digital fabrication processes. I relate my efforts to the work of contemporary interdisciplinary artists Adam Brown, Attila Csorgo, Julien Maire and Olafur Eliasson and discuss specific works by Jan Dibbets, Johannes Vermeer and Anthony McCall with reference to visual strategies for directing our attention to the invisible. Historians, philosophers, theorists and a sixteenth century natural magician helped establish the framework for the development of my optical systems. Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Kate Warren, Tom Gunning and Jason Leddington informed my investigations into natural magic and wonder through their various practical and theoretical approaches; and Charles-Emile Reynaud, Jonathan Crary, Hans Jonas, Paul Virilio, Henri Bergson, Mary Ann Doane and Charlie Gere contributed to the framing of my investigations into time, materiality and visibility. The projected image systems I created, 'Hollow Lens' , 'Ghost in the Machine' and 'Object-Image', bring the visible and invisible, and material, digital and virtual into service as a means of evoking wonder and visualising time.