Abstract
The chapter engages with a specific photograph as well as a computationally based project about the representation of missing childhood memories. Over several years, the author created sensory systems deploying mild electric shocks and feedback loops, which altered an image in ‘real time'. The focus of the work is an exploration of the notion that memory is not an exact replica of events but is pieced together in a dynamic process that is strongly influenced not only by past experiences but by social and political contexts, by photography, and by other media. The practice aims to establish a theoretical framework for embodied autobiography while also creating installations that have communicated auto-biographical content via sensory photography technologies, which the author calls autopathography. It should be emphasised that although the author's own memories (and one family photograph) are the focus for this work, it is not a discourse on individualism, exorcism, or ahistoricism.
TopIntroduction
Like many people I have gaps in my memories, and thus in the symbolic narrative of my life. Before the age of nine my childhood memories are largely without detail. By and large those years may therefore be described (at least by convention) as ‘lost’. As a visual artist and critical technologist, the notion of such an aporia or cognitive deficit is particularly problematic. In the absence of representation what, if anything, can be retrieved, and what exactly can be communicated to others? In a wider philosophical sense such questions of representation and stable meaning have a high degree of cultural urgency. Sturken (1998) urges us to examine the “cultural coding of forgetting as a loss or negation of experience” (Sturken, 1998, p. 105). Sturken’s question “what is an experience that is not remembered?” (Sturken, 1998, p. 107) is one of the fundamental riddles of my own childhood. Sturken asks us to question the presumption that unmemorised experiences should be framed as a “loss of self”, and a “loss of subjectivity” (Sturken, 1998, p. 119). These are critical questions in the context of my own research into amnesia and photographic representation and performativity.
In pursuing this work, which deploys self-electrocution and sensor technologies, I have arguably set up a double bind in which Sontag’s (1966) critique of photography as an act of potential violence confronts Linfield’s claims for the immanent solidarity and agency of photography which confronts trauma. These ideas resonate in some ways with the investigative practices of Schuppli (2020) and Weizman et al’s Forensic Architecture (2017), positioning photography as politically and materially agential. In light of these tensions the following chapter engages with two specific photographs as well as a computationally based project about the representation of ‘missing’ childhood memories. The focus of the work is an exploration of the idea that memory is not an exact replica of events but is pieced together in a dynamic process that is strongly influenced not only by past experiences but by social contexts, including photography and co-embodied responses. This may seem like stating the obvious, but the idea of stable representation arguably underpins the project of Big Data and constructs such as ‘emotion detection’, not to mention the myriad forms of a priori categorisation implicated in machine learning and its associated technologies such as facial recognition. Nail’s (2019) Theory of the Image is a refutation of stability, which still needs to be asserted, but such counter constructs, of affect, embodiment and new materialism are also subject to critique, for example, Weheliye (2014) and Mbembe (2019), who I will also draw into this discussion. Over the next several pages I would like to explain how my work (which might be called arts-based research) attempts to establish a theoretical framework for embodied autobiography while also creating installations that have communicated auto-biographical content via sensory photography technologies, which I call autopathography.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Arts-Based Research: Arts-Based Research positions the arts as a means of investigation, valuing contingency and attention to the materiality of practice.
Enactivism: In contrast to the mind-body split of the Cartesian Cogito as a model for human cognition. An enactivist approach posits “the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). It is a theory of cognition that is inseparable from action and is therefore implicitly embodied.
Autopathography: A neologism invented by the author to describe a particular type of image making involving sensors and algorithmic processes.
Performative/Performativity: Performative understanding is Barad’s central challenge to the power we have placed in language as tantamount to reality, as the main agent in systems of representation. Barad’s agential realism specifically acknowledges and takes account of ‘matter’s dynamism’ ( Barad, 2007 :135). This approach is an opportunity to move away from the infinite regress of epistemological self-reflection and representation, to forms of knowing and knowledge generation that are rooted in practices, events and real-world action.
Entanglement: The notion of entanglement is central to Karen Barad’s (2007) distinction between intra and interaction, and the distinction between objects that are separable, and phenomena, which are inherently more fluid.
Posthumanism: ‘Posthumanism poses radical critiques and challenges to some of the most fundamental assumptions that underlie what it means or doesn’t mean to ‘be human’ in and amongst the entangled web of phenomena that makeup our world’ ( Bayley, 2018 :28).
Subjectivity: Subjectivity implies personal and individual thoughts, attitudes, and perceptions. A common definition will characterise subjectivity as emanating from an individual rather than the external world, highlighting the ontological separations at play in the notion of the subjective, particularly those of the self and other, the individual and society, but also of mind and body.