The exhibition I Was Lookin’ Back to See if You Were Lookin’ Back at Me to See Me Lookin’ in the Main Program of Krakow Photomonth Festival is organised in cooperation with the Nowa Huta Museum.
Participants: Marek Chlanda, John Conway (demo: Fabian Hemmer), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Władysław Hasior, Henryk Hermanowicz, Karolina Jarzębak, Irena Kalicka and Jan Płatek, Katarzyna Kozyra, Ville Lenkkeri, Józef Lewicki, Marx Machines Inc., Andrea Natella, post_noviki, Mariusz Sołtysik, Dominik Stanisławski, Phil Wang / Lucidrains
Curators: Magdalena Kownacka, Anna Olszewska
The spectacle, displayed on the screens of phones and laptops, consumes our attention for hours at a time. We daydream. We look, we let others see, someone is watching. The split-second exchange of glances is unsettling, it catalyses an excited state. IWLBtS/iYWLBaM/tSMLBaY becomes the refrain of the thrill-seeking flâneur.
For a person venturing into foreign parts, the gaze is the first form of contact—a spark leaping between opposites, the preliminary exchange of information. In a city jammed full of electronics, along national borders, in offices, homes, and military headquarters, glances and signals, alarms and blockades crisscross.
Contemporary machines also ‘look back to see.’ But does a mechanical exchange of glances (machine vision) leave an enduring mark? Does a gaze repeated innumerable times accumulate on servers and thicken as algorithmic twines, linking memories and assigning names to things like a chemical signal transmitted along a chain of human neurons?
A key element of this story would seem to be naming things and vesting them in concepts. ‘The unnamed does not exist for us,’ writes Bruno Schulz in ‘The Mythologization of Reality’: To name something means to include it in some universal meaning. The isolated, mosaic-type word is a later product, is the result of technique. The original word was an hallucination circling the light of meaning, was the great universal totality. The word in its colloquial, present-day meaning is now only a fragment, a rudiment of some former, all-encompassing, integral mythology. For that reason, it retains within it a tendency to grow again, to regenerate, to become complete […] (Bruno Schulz, ‘The Mythologization of Reality,’ trans. John M. Bates, brunoschulz.org/mythologization.htm.)
Signification underpins the logos of our perception of the world, creating a sense of order and understanding. An equivalent order in the world of images was illumined by morphology.
Morphology, being the science of form, was established at the end of the eighteenth century. In a eureka moment, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe determined that behind the multiplicity and variety of forms of modern plants, there must be a first, most primal form: a ‘primordial plant,’ which he sought in Italian meadows and the gardens of Palermo—to no avail. Be that as it may, an image was created and the name stuck. The search for the primordial plant gave rise to the science of forms, which was to feed the trend of classifying and comparing the shapes of different things. Morphology excitingly teased the revelation of the order of nature down to its foundations. At some point, however, it began to seem that this morphological quasi-science was a dead end. Comparing forms and searching for a visual order was going nowhere.
A new morphology arises without the contribution of philosophers. It is rooted in technological systems and driven by the operation of digital machinery. Affinities between forms came into sharper focus with the development of modern methods ofimage processing: algorithms and experiments involving the generation of complex visual forms that shifted the search for Goethe’s primordial plant from the field of living, organic forms to the sphere of signals and information. However, it’s uphill from there. In the eighteenth century, Goethe, in a poem of his, bemoaned a lover’s undoing in the ‘thousandfold union / Shown in this flowery troop.’ And what to do with the staggering quantities of images being generated nowadays? With the enigmatic nature of the modern world’s technological backbone? To comprehend and describe an image today is an act of daring. It is here, paradoxically, that a conceptual discordance may come to the rescue.
One can imagine technology as the id of our times. It does not belong to the order of reason. It is fundamental, hidden, innate, impulsive. The reciprocal nature of the relationship between this technological id and the image is the recurring theme of the exhibition. Through it, we will examine the infrastructure of visuality: its history, varieties, and types, and the effects of its implementation. We will experience the instability of the system, a dream of late modernism, and the complex, inter-directional relationship between humans and images—and between images themselves.
