Seeing

As we begin to dwell in the optical and temporal mechanisms of seeing, we also become part of translation processes. We actually experience a transitioning of proportions and sizes, their temporality, resolution, depths, and colors. No longer are we looking at spectacular scale jumps from the cosmic to the molecular. We calm down. We perform modest, tiny gestures, with a curiosity towards the turbid in the image, the machine, the material. We practice a different focus, possibilities of shifting views (Blickverschiebungen) across and between human and plant modes of perception and wakefulness. Experiments with the mechanisms and anatomies of seeing and being in the world, as potential forms of world-making.

We work with a middle format slide projector, Götschmann, and prepare slides with droplets, for example, collected from the Danube river, or different pea plants species which we grow in intervals. Alike the situation in the greenhouse, we are interested in the disparate bodies, timings, sensorial capacities and at the same time how it is that they seem strangely familiar. We are interested to enter the dialogue via questions about technology and translation. For example, as technologies of mediation and observation inevitably translate an object into a very specific form of legibility, how should we understand that process and the nature of the evidence it produces? This is one of the reasons why working with film and analogue projection apparatuses has proved to support the fleshing out of the thresholds in seeing/observing and the actual recognition of patterns and its moments of transitioning.