Cole Robertson

‘The significance of the image as revealed in the process of scanning therefore represents a synthesis of two intentions: one manifested in the image and the other belonging to the observer... While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them.’

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Question

What specific mechanisms are involved in what Flusser terms the ‘production of temporal relationships’ that result from viewing and interpreting a photographic image? I believe embodied, primary metaphor accounts for the seeming invisible underpinning of these relationships. That is, photographic image viewers and makers come to photography with pre-encoded embodied models for creating meaning, thereby drastically expanding the ability of the medium to communicate.

These types of shared unconscious knowledge bases contribute to a relatively frictionless visual communication. While this is advantageous for effective communication, it’s terrible for contemplation or thoughtfulness. The image, slicked with the grease of commonly held information, glides from producer to viewer with very little interrogation. This smooth flow of data (the ‘visual transaction’) needs slowing, disrupting, questioning, queering, transmuting, challenging, and generally fucking up. This is the driving force behind my work as a visual artist.

Context

While there is an abundance of literature on the topics of photography, perception, cognition, and language separately, these discourses often speak independently of each other. My visual and written research brings together concepts of embodied thought, cognitive linguistic metaphor theory, and visual communication (both image creation and interpretation), all for the ultimate purpose of my visual practice - that of disruption.

Previous studies have unified concepts of linguistics (most notably semiology) with image theory, but this only tells part of the story. Starting with the written work of Flusser, Ian Verstegen, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Hito Steyerl, cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and artists from Caravaggio to Amber Hawk Swanson, this practice-led research elucidates the invisible (and often unconscious) ‘connective tissue’ that contributes to the image’s facility to (seemingly) create meaning spontaneously.

Method

Periodically throughout this work I switch between personal, analytic, and pseudonymic voices. This is both to employ the concepts at hand in a practical way, but also to provide a method for additional questioning of the texts. Thus the linking metaphoric structures are shown to pervade different writing genres and systems of communication.

Keywords

Photography, image, embodied thought, philosophy, aesthetics, metaphor, linguistics, haptics, touch, networks, afterimage, aggregation, rhizome