Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon. Distribuerad fotografi

Abstract

In recent decades, photography as a technology has undergone a series of transformative changes, which have, in turn, entailed different renegotiations of the functions of photography – as image or information, as inscription or transmission. Within the framework of such a radical shift, this dissertation in photography insists on probing into and exploring the persisting effects of analogue photographs within digital ecologies. Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon employs the “event horizon” as an image and a concept, as a space for projection, and as an interface through which reflections on the different ways in which we meet and associate with photographic images in a context of digital production, publishing and circulation are enabled.

Digital photography is a distributed form. This study, with its subtitle Distributed photography, explores the different visual and artistic implications of a disseminated position, proceeding by taking assistance from the octopus, a “soft intelligence” – which then, in turn, is the starting point for an eight-armed image- and text-based essay. This essay then tentatively follows the tentacular forms of manifestation that octopuses, these very complex molluscs, take on through history and literature – as life-forms and media systems.

Händelsehorisont is primarily a photographed book, with photographic practice not coming to a halt with the individual image that is produced, but where practice also takes place in the montage between texts, documents and contexts. In that regard the dissertation is also a book that generates a number of different constellations for reading, at the same time as it gives rise to specific fields of gravity where circulating or floating images can be captured through other images, thereby creating new densities and fields of energy. One of these gravitational fields is an essay that studies forms for what comes to be called montage-based visual historiography.

The dissertation is situated in a movement between different images and systems, between different technologies and ways of reading, and between different humans, animals, and software. It dwells at surfaces and spaces that can offer openings for future, not yet defined, photographic shapes and forms of life.