INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT: AFTERIMAGE

Creative practice interested in promoting an equality between the producer and the audience aims to avoid taking an opposing position to the audience, or establishing a relationship analogous to ‘prosumers’, (where the audience/consumer makes the work for free then buys it). Instead, by looking for ways that creative work can begin to produce individuals who can appropriate the story for themselves it encourages what Jacques Rancière describes as a ‘community of storytellers and translators’.¹ The previous project, Picture Yourself, had not created a sense for the audience of being in a collective, nor had it activated the audience into critical reflection on the environments they inhabited. Picture Yourself made me look at the image of myself as a producer, a role that had long worried me (discussed in more detail in Section 4.2). It was only through becoming the audience myself and interpreting the work through my own processes of translation in AfterImage, that I had a different story I could tell.

At this point I had begun to feel disconnected from my own practice of making things with my hands, having focussed my energy for ‘making’ on platforms that facilitated the practices of others. AfterImage began as a series of experiments, testing out ideas in the dark, trying to bring something that I couldn’t envision into existence. AfterImage was a disjuncture in the sequence of the earlier projects and so consequently functions on a very different register, but through its difference provides a vantage on the work that had preceded it.

AfterImage developed from a series of experiments making automated drawings using light. I had started by making ‘photograms’, a process popularised from 1922 by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, where objects are exposed to light to make an image on light sensitive paper. As these images materialised in the dark room chemicals, I thought about how in their abstractness they could only be understood through subjective interpretation, as a sort of gestalt image.² The image, and also the processes that made it, seemed to stand for something other than what they were, forming connections to other practices and processes.³ As I worked I wondered if some kind of mechanised drawing apparatus could function as a diagram of this process.

1 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,”

Artforum (March 2007):

271-280.

2 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was an early proponent of removing the artist’s physical touch by drawing with light and is credited with naming the photogram. Noam

3 Recently proponents of this technique are the New Zealand duo, photographer Mark Adams and jeweller Areta Wilkonson, who use photograms to photograph, and to also negotiate with, Māori taronga (a term that describes something that has become a ‘treasured item, prized possession or valued person or thing in that culture) discussed in more

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These were tentative, flickering thoughts, partially guiding me but also responding to what unfolded. I was working after the children went to sleep at night, initially making drawing apparatus with wire and ink, until the darkness suggested doing the same with light. I tried to capture on photosensitive paper and then on film a ‘diagram’ of the duration and engagement of working with the lights in the darkened room. As I worked I noticed bright haloes of floating white lights on the inside of my eyes, blinding me to the dark when I turned off the lights. This was an afterimage. The after image was persistent and eventually I decided to externally replicate the floating, dissipating lights that were forming internally by using filament and tiny LED bulbs. The tiny lights suspended on slim threads moved with the faintest touch, or even a breath.

Working in a vast space meant I was able to distribute the components more spatially. In the furtherest corner from the entrance I set up a glass surface supported on two trestles. The many small battery-lit LED lights that I had assembled and attached to filaments were strung up above the glass. Below the glass I positioned a movie camera pointing upwards to film the lights from below. This camera was connected to a projector that threw the image on the white wall in front of the viewer. The arrangement made a physical loop – as the viewer moved, the light sculpture moved, the recording of these movements made the projection, that was perceived by the viewer.

While the projected image was of the suspended lights that the viewer could see in front of them, because they were filmed from below and through the glass, the orientation and the slight delay in the projection meant the image appeared and moved in a way that the viewer was not immediately able to connect with the physical work. The spots of lights, distorted by the filming and projecting process, would blow out and waver, appearing to float and sway. The projected image on the wall was an external description of the floating and lucent implosions on the inside of my eyelids when apprehending the original afterimage but by looking at this image a new afterimage was constructed. Through moving the LED bulbs, I made an external light drawing that simultaneously drew an internal image. The external work replicated the internal image and simultaneously the internal image was conjured by the external image.

The structure functioned to make physically apparent the loop that is formed between interactions and an art work, a loop that is closed individually by the subjective interpretation of the precipitant. Rancière’s call for ‘spectators who are active interpreters’ had long influenced the way I understood participatory engagement as an open system, able to unfold in ways not yet conceived, for the audience and also because of them. This unfolding and reverberative processes of thinking and the making together reflects Rancière’s observation that ‘artists like researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and effect of their competences become dubious as they frame the story of a new adventure in a new idiom’.⁴ AfterImage became a way of understanding the interrelation of the observer with creative work, and the formation of meaning that makes the observer a participant in the apprehension of creative work.

Fig 7.1 a Preliminary light scuplture tests images. Fig 7.1 b Attempt to visualise the after image caused by the light experiments

4 Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator.”

Fig 7.2 Diagram of the loop from movement to vision to recording to projection back to vision

Fig 7.3 Image of the projection on the wall behind the suspended lights

Fig 7.3 Setting up the suspended lights over the glass table.

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