Many of us spend a fair part of our lives attempting to experience the pure phenomena of the physical world, and at 11 minutes past 11 on the 11th of August 1999, we may have attempted to do this collectively. Arguably, however, we never quite engage with this pure phenomena.

This is probably truer now than ever before, as we increasingly experience the physical world and its events through a matrix of representational systems in which the system of the image is becoming more and more dominant. This would logically be identifiable through the development of imaging technologies and their increasing ability to disseminate the image through such systems as video (and digital) technologies, television broadcast and the internet.


(Show Gulf War footage, Angle Leccia slide and describe Jean Baudrillard's 'circuit of hyper-real information')


Also, the imaging technology itself is being increasingly disseminated. More and more, with the cheap manufacture of cameras of all kinds, we can be concerned with the framing of our lives, the writing of our own histories by holding our views of the world on snapshot film and the home-movie tape so that we can reflect upon these documents as evidence of our experiences. We are framed, and we can frame ourselves!

But how else can we experience things outside of the systems of representation? How can we see thing outside of the frame of the image? When we ask ourselves these questions, we arrive at an unimaginable state of being. We can only speculate about a world without the representation of images, a world without the representation of language.

Jacques Lacan's theory of the 'mirror stage' perhaps, paradoxically, suggests a systemised and scientific view on this world, with his experiments on the recognizance development of the infant placed in front of a mirror. He notes that at six months the infant does not appear to recognise its own reflection within the mirror and that later at around twelve to eighteen months it starts to gesture as a response to its own reflection, and therefore, is seeing itself in relation to other things around it for the first time. Lacan speculates that before the infant recognises its own reflection in the mirror its experience of itself and the world around it is that of one entity. In other words, the world with all its objects and events, is the infant; there is no distinction between itself as an organism within the world and the world.

(Show slide of Cave Drawing)

If we look back to prehistoric times when the first drawings were marked onto the walls of caves, we can speculate perhaps that this was a kind of 'mirror stage' within the latter phase of our evolution. Paul Verilio believes that at this point of human development, in order to engage in the illusion and representation of the drawn image, a 'rational' society had to emerge and that this rationalism, derived from the image, formed language representation.

Though it is arguable that the appearance of images lay the foundation for a rationalised society and spoken language, the social role of the image as a way of forming and presenting representations, has been paramount in the forming and presentation of a society's culture.

The Renaissance, identified by some as the 'dawn of the Modern', brought a new world of uncertainty to European culture, that up until then had formed its understandings of the world through religious belief; the Church used the Image and its artists as powerful devices to position and order its subject's views. From the 16th century onward, Science started to reveal a world that did not necessarily conform to the Biblical scriptures and the Churches ecclesiastical frescoes. However Sean Cubitt has indicated that in painting from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century:

'Perspective in one way... [could] ...be seen as an ideological attempt to re-unify a world which actually in a modern period is increasingly fragmented in that entire history from 16th century onwards. Perspective is a cultural formation which allows us the pleasurable illusion of a world re-unified, re-ordered for our consumption'.

The positioning of a particular point of view by the artist and their work as mediator between the ideologies of capitalist Renaissance and its subjects has formed the basis of Western visual understanding. This, to a large extent, is still sustained today by the monocular perspective system inherent in the design of the lenses and frames of cameras, constructed to the geometric rules of 17th century Renaissance painting.

(Show slide of Pieter de Hooch's 'Marriage of the Arnolfini')

With the invention of photography in the mid 19th century and, later, cinematography, the artist's role as 'mediator' diminished, and the new users of these technologies took the artist's place, retaining the status-quo of visual understanding. This, in one sense, explains the shift to Modernist painting's assault on monocular perspective by artists like Cezanne and Picasso. The acceleration and industrialisation of the overtaking technology permitted the artist to explore realms of their media in a way that was free from serving a Capitalist view.

During the 1950's and '60's, the experimental film maker Stan Brakhage attempted in his films: 'to attack the strait-jacket of visual language that he sees as inherent in the camera's design'. His concerns were with other ways of perceiving the world than the Renaissance Capitalist visual understanding adopted and evolved by the mass film media of Western culture. Much of his film work attempts to re-unify himself/the viewer with a world of 'pre-social' existence by representing the fragmented experiences in life, often those of 'Nature' and the cosmos. Brakhage wrote:

'Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colours are there in a field of grass, to the crawling baby unaware of the word green? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heatwaves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movements, and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the beginning was the word.'

But this attempt at unification as through through the eye of a 'crawling baby unaware of the word 'green'', was an impossibility for the viewer and Brakhage himself, simply because the Western eye has been tutored to mediate the world in terms of Renaissance visual understanding and language.

What is interesting about this attempt at unification is that Brakhage, like many artists of the late Modernist period, set out to make such an attempt, to create a rational or systemised view of the world outside of conventional representation where, it can be speculated, a 'pure' and phenomenological experience of the physical world may be found.

(Show extract from Mike Snow's 'Wavelength')

Leading up to, during, and for some time after the 11th of August 1999, the phenomena of the solar eclipse was itself eclipsed in the eyes of its perceivers. Like the shadow of the real eclipse that raced across the Atlantic ocean towards the shores of Europe, the shadow of the Image Eclipse a far vaster shadow had started to form months before. As the 11th of August approached, the Image Eclipse grew denser and its shadow gained momentum, until at 11.11 on that day, it was so dense that it totally blocked out the phenomena of the 'real' eclipse, leaving only a corona of its 'realness' emanating from around the frame of its image.

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(Show Geoff Cox & Mike Lawson-Smith's 'Intermission' project and Mike Lawson-Smith's 'Eclipse: day 3')