XXXL (2022)
XXXL takes as its subject the technical image, and question of which ‘truths’ around emotion and the sublime are aesthetically constituted through image-making. The project was conducted through the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research, hosted by transmediale and Universität der Künste Berlin.
The philosopher Vilém Flusser describes how images are mediations between the world and human beings: “Human beings ‘ex-ist’ - the world is not immediately accessible to them – and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible”. He differentiates the worlds made by ‘traditional’ and ‘technical’ images. Traditional images, such as painting or drawing, are hand-made, generated through human action; they abstract reality to interpret the world in such a way that ‘everything lends meaning to everything else and anything can be meant by anything else. Technical images, however, adhere to a different code: mediated through apparatus such as photography or software, they abstract from text and in doing so sever the relationship between the world the image exists in, of cause and effect, and of linear time and history.
XXXL scrutinises the points where technical images are taken as a greater truth of human exception and emotion in a way which is legible and valuable to institutional apparatus. It reflexively focuses on two places where images do work. In contemporary technical job interviews of the type leading to work coding for the construction of technical images, and more, applicants are often asked to show their working of problem-solving by hand on whiteboards, reminiscent of Flusser’s description of the co-ordination of hand and eye as principle in constructing traditional images.
Drawing on Flusser’s experience of emigrating first from Prague to London, and then later, with his partner to Brazil, XXXL also examines the work that images do in demonstrating ‘true’ emotion, such as the genuine love of a couple who wish to have their relationship recognised by the state. How are these aesthetics evaluated and do they lose power if they appear too artificial? As Flusser writes, ‘The critical reception of technical images demands a level of consciousness that corresponds to the one in which they are produced.’
The work from this residency was put towards a visual essay, ‘XXXL’, exhibited at silent green, Berlin, August 2022; and developed further into the performance work ‘Blue? Probably!’ (2023).
