ITP Thesis Archive 2024

Abstract

Surrounded by a constant influx of images, ranging from static to dynamic, two-dimensional to three-dimensional, our environment feels inundated, almost suffocating, with their omnipresence. They seem to be appearing everywhere, in every medium, occupying and expanding to all surfaces and spaces. These images, consciously and unconsciously absorbed by our minds, linger as phantom imageries, prompting me to wonder: why are we so attracted to them, and what kind of influence do they inflict upon us?

This project began as an observation and introspection on myself. In the past few years, I started a practice of collecting images as an attempt to ‘extract’ a particular moment from the scene in front of me. Sometimes it’s a pond of water, and other times it might just be a wooden wall. It felt like I was not trying to take the ‘perfect picture’, but rather to take a surface out of space and time so that it can be projected back again. This act of ‘extraction’ gradually becomes a behavioral pattern, with the intention of ‘grasping the moment’. The outcome of this process led to ‘the redundant images’, as mentioned in Towards a Philosophy of Photography by Vilém Flusser. It prompts me to question: how do I deal with them? where do they belong?

As an attempt to further comprehend the intent and nature of these images, I started to cover up every available surface around me. However, this act of occupying surfaces in the physical space eventually came to a saturation point, where it seems like I need more surfaces to put them. Diffused Surface takes its stance from here, as a process to reconstruct the familiar yet foreign landscape that eventually reflects the omnipresence of pictures in modern society.

Technical Details

Diffused Surface is made with Unreal Engine 5, with supporting sound design accomplished with Ableton Live and various field recordings. All the sounds were collected at the places where the photos were taken in the physical world, and all photos were taken with Ricoh GRIII and Fujifilm XT-1.

Research/Context

The main research direction for this project revolves around W.J.Mitchell’s picture/image theory. It takes references from his way of distinguishing three kinds of metapictures:

1. the picture that explicitly reflects on, or ‘doubles’ itself, the picture re-appears inside the picture.
2. the picture contains another picture of a different kind, and thus re-frames or recontextualizes the inner picture as ‘nested’ inside of a larger, outer picture.
3. the picture that is framed, not inside another picture, but within a discourse that reflects on it as an exemplar of ‘picturality’ as such.

This project also takes an early inspiration from the band Offset Spectacles (憬觀：像同疊).

BOOKS

Georges Perec - Species of spaces and other pieces
Spaces of Remembrance. Forms and Changes in Cultural Memory by Aleida Assmann
Towards a Philosophy of Photography by Vilém Flusser
Metapictures: Images and the Discourse of Theory by W. J. T. Mitchell
Iconography by W. J. T. Mitchell
Picture Theory by W. J. T. Mitchell
Life and Death of Image by Régis Debray
The Vision Machine by Paul Virilio
Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-Practices by Ernst van Alphen
The Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

FILMS, VIDEOS

Takashi Ito - Spacey (1981), Box (1982), The Moon (1994), Thunder (1982)
Hiroshi Teshigahara - The Face of Another (1966)
Tsai Ming-liang - Stray Dogs (2013)
Wang Ping-Wen, Peng Tzu-H - A Journey in Spring (2023)

RELATED CONCEPTS

Man-made Landscape, miniature Landscape
Mirage
Camouflage
Persistence of Vision

Further Reading

Theoretically, human vision has one subjective flaw: one can only see what he sees, and can only see what’s already in his mind. Here I began to pose these questions: how do I get people to see what I see? How do I bring forth these omnipresent surfaces into other people’s eyes? What is so fascinating about these images that I made a whole virtual space to contain them?

Taking a closer look at my pictures, apart from the extraction part, the other ones also show recurrent motifs. Many of them include an imagery suggesting a natural environment being placed in a city setting, natural elements being next to industrial landscapes or, a miniature scene evoking nature being inserted into large cities, such as zoos, botanical gardens, water fountains and artificial palm trees. It made me realize that it’s always the multistable, ambiguous image that draws my attention, and putting the two opposite things together gives you the ‘mental hiccup’. These mental hiccups are actually the reason that makes an image irresistible to stop and look at for a long time. They become the symptoms of tearing by which we feel something is both missing and present at the same time.

During the research phase of this project, I came across W.J. Mitchell’s discussions around picture theory, and his concept of ‘metapictures’, in which he describes it as a kind of picture that reflects its own nature. The concept of ‘meta’ primarily refers to a moment of temporary stay or taking a step back, within this moment we will be able to reexamine what we are going to do. Defined as the nesting of images inside other images, the picture within the picture, Mitchell argues that they ‘exist as a potential blackhole and whirlpool, absorbing the consciousness of the bystander’. Unknowingly, they act like an infinite vortex that brings a certain dizziness to the viewer, grabbing our whole attention and ultimately absorbing us into its never-ending core. ‘Metapicture’ provides a point of reflection to carefully gaze at this image, and to think about what it means to look at it, how to respond, and what kind of influence it brings to the spectator. Similar to Mitchell’s argument, the Austrian Philosopher Wittgenstein has also quoted “A picture held us captive, and we could not get outside it” in his Philosophical Investigations. Both of them guide us to the origin of why we are so deeply attracted to the pictures in the first place.

With these ideas in mind, I began to see an interconnected relationship between the things I capture and the metapicture form. If you think about it carefully, metapictures’ nature also present signs of resemblance with pictorial concepts such as M.C. Escher’s ‘impossible drawings’(which often suggest a hint of infinity and confusion), the french phrase ‘Mise en Abyme’ (which is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence), and the ‘duck rabbit illusion’ (that flips the viewer’s gaze). These accidental yet inevitable correlations became a foundation for this project.

This is where I began to frame interesting picture relationships to put into the metapicture form. By attaching images of one thing taken in the real world back to its corresponding twin in the virtual world , adhering photos of real world water to the virtual body of water, putting the waterfall image back to the virtual mountain, placing the image into where they don’t seem to belong, and creating the illusion of the original space using flat photos diffused surface creates a re-simulation of the virtual. Thus, these layers of simulacra form a displacement and diffusion of the surface. In the real world, I move my body to find the image. In the virtual space, I move the camera. I ‘become’ the camera. In this sense, one thing can become another, yet they are not each other.

While leaving this project as an open ended space for people to navigate through and frame their own perception through shifting angles, it also exists as a personal attempt to replicate some unrepeatable fleeting moments observed in my random walks. These moments and their corresponding imagery have become an omnipresent being that envelops me, and eventually leads me to this moment in time. We have become a part of each other through me giving them a virtual body and personhood.