B

When talking about images we deploy

constellations of metaphors that are
historically grounded. The idea of
transparency and clarity comes from
the development of optics in the seventeenth century; point of view, vanishing point, figure and ground, from
Renaissance painting; focus and depth
of field from analogue photography;
and so on one could even propose an
excavation of all these strata and trace
their genealogy.

Unit as the figure which allow

us a possibility of discourse.

Units change while moving through

space and time since a process is necessary.

Macro
DISTANCE

SPACE

system

din

PERCEPTION
law

lreading

TIME

re
a

din

organs
PERCEPTION

TIME
SPACE

society

Collective

a
re

cell
nucleus

UNIT
methodological particle

TIME

group

molecule

TIME

particle
process

Singularity is just
a tool to create discourse.
(reference point)

Micro

PERCEPTION

individual

Game Piece
- Conference and
Examples

E (1)
This diagram is a proposal for how the
unit can be considered only a methodological issue. There are different
ways of making something appear, for
example by presenting the body of a
person as a defined entity; but at the
same time it can be a group of organs
or millions of cells. It can be a myriad
of molecules or a universe of atoms if
seen on a different scale. When do we
start speaking of the individual? What
exactly is an individual? How do we
recognize a thing? By seeing it? There is
a special relationship between the mechanics of appearance and the concepts
of unit, scale and entity. A scale is a
level where the relations among space,
time and perception permit visibility.

Colective

Erick Beltrn & Bernardo Ortiz

B
Consider the case of the painter
Frenhoffer in Balzacs The Unknown
Masterpiece. At one point he is correcting a painting of a woman by one of
his pupils, Porbus. But he is doing it in
front of Porbus and a very young Franois Poussin which is rather strange,
as we learn later on, since Frenhoffer is
quite the recluse and has been working
on a painting that no one has seen. He
is painting in public, and talking while
he is doing so. Describing what he is
doing. And this description touches on
all theories of painting; the opposition
between drawing and painting; colour
and form; aerial perspective; surface
versus structure. He talks about all this
while painting the air between the chin
and the neck. Painting air I must
underline this. There are microscopic
differences that when rendered make
the figure come alive. For example the
subtle difference in skin colour that can
be mapped on top of the circulatory
system the skin over an artery has a
different colour and temperature from
the skin that covers a vein. And these
differences in colour and temperature
produce micro-atmospheric effects that
will affect the transparency of the air
between the chin and the neck. And
rendering these micro-differences will
introduce the air between chin and
neck into the flat surface of the painting. And it is precisely air, that which is
barely visible, that makes the materiality of the picture, the paint-stuff that is
smeared on the canvas, dissolve, and
makes the image emerge.

PROCESSES ARE NOT DEFINED BY PUNCTUAL

BUT WITH ZONES OF INFLUENCE
Reading creates action zones where
units are tendencies and not coordinates.

Such a genealogy would be useful in

historicizing the relationship between
discourse and image. In other words
in understanding that these metaphors
have a limited use-value and cannot be
stretched indefinitely.
The idea of transparency, for example,
can be confusing when one is talking
about a digital image, because it can
erase the matrix from which such an
image emerges: the grid of pixels, and
behind it the software that maps it,
which is anything but transparent.
In that sense words such as resolution,
noise, pixelation, bitmapping, vectorization, are available for use as critical

The Imaginary Reader

101

metaphors that explain the image as an

information matrix that will be searchable and enhanceable in ways that will
be used to try to control the living.
E (2)
Lets suppose that we make a trip to the
Savannah to take photos of a famous
lion, and by chance we bump into a
local tribe. We show them images to be
sure we can find the right lion. To our
surprise senior hunters do not recognize the animal; and, even worse, they
havent seen any animal resembling it.
Nobody has ever seen a lion? Eventually a kid takes a look at our photos and
immediately recognizes the animal.
Silence. Seeking for a reason for this
non-recognition, we come upon
another anomaly: the ID photos of
most of these old people in the village
depict the same man.
Older generations not used to media
and image culture still face problems
of attaching representations to actual
elements of reality. When the Government arrived to implement personal
ID in the zone, the elders were able to
recognize the figure of a man in the ID,
but were unable to distinguish among
photos taken of individuals. To see is
to recognize? Can the untrained eye
identify the lion blending in with the
landscape? Can we see more by learning how to?
B (2.5)
This engraving comes from a medieval
bestiary. It depicts a plant whose flower
was a little lamb. The flower/lamb ate
whatever grass was around the stalk
attached to its belly. But as the plant
grew taller the grass would gradually
become harder to reach and the lamb
would die slowly of starvation eventually, as James Elkins put it, withering
away like a dandelion made of wool
and bones.

To our eyes this image is pure fantasy,

even surreal. But beyond that, it is
interesting to see that it is a fantasy
made up of known parts. Fantastical
bodies were constructed using parts
of known bodies, irrespective of the
differences in scale. The flower/lamb
has the same body as a regular lamb,
just smaller. This goes to show that the
world of small things was imagined as
a scaled-down version of the macroworld. A smooth continuity in the
material world from the micro to the
macro.

E
Imagine Andr Breton arriving in
Mexico to give a conference. He pictured himself giving the talk at a long
narrow table, so when he passed in
front of an artisan making some tables
at the side of the street, he decided to
ask for one. Avoiding language issues,
he drew a splendid perspective picture
of a long, narrow table. One week later
he returned for his furniture and was
appalled by the final result: a table with
one standard end but at the other end
extremely small and with short legs just
as his angular drawing had instructed.
Breton left the conference after saying
just two sentences: I do not dare to say
a word about Surrealism, since Mexico
is already a surrealistic country. I do
not know what I am doing here.

In the eighteenth century, when the

first microscopes were invented, this
continuous and analogous world was
forever shattered. Because the organisms that were seen floating about in a
drop of water were radically different
(2,5). Their body parts bore no resemblance to those of larger organisms.
Some were even able to move using
their hair!
2.5

B
A strange letter to the editor was published in an obscure sociology journal
in Bogot in the fifties; the Revista de
la sociedad colombiana para el estudio
de los tiempos modernos. A sociologist,
presumably a member of this society,
sent a report from Popayn, a small
city in the south west of Colombia.
He had been travelling through the
country doing field work for ongoing
research that the society was funding:
a material history of Colombia. But his
letter is not about this. He wanted to
report an encounter with an image that
he could barely perceive as an image.
While in Popayn he met someone
named Valencia who showed him some
Soviet pamphlets on painting from
the thirties. At the height of Stalinism
these pamphlets were discussing what
they labelled the errors inherent in the
painting and the art of the early revolution. Trained as a sociologist, our
writer was not very aware of the art of
the twenties, so to him it was troubling
to read about all these errors and see
the reproductions of the paintings
referenced in the article:

The pamphlet had some illustrations,

Valencias ironic tone aroused my
curiosity. I wanted to like those Soviet
painters. I must confess, however,
that I was speechless when I saw the
reproduction of a painting by Kazimir
Malevich; I didnt see a thing. I asked
for a magnifying glass and just found
the tenuous insinuation of a crooked
square among the screen dots, there
was nothing there. But why, then,
does the pamphlets author argue that
these paintings risk becoming mere
things? If we cannot see a thing are
we not at least seeing paint isnt that
something? I tried to discuss this with
Valencia but he was disdainful: This is
the problem with you people, he said.
You spend years working on the inventory and meanwhile all critical capacity
is lost in the minutiae of things.
E
There is a strange phenomenon with
the reproduction of images. Every
time an image is considered as a unit
to be multiplied, small parts of the
original are lost or misunderstood and
never reach the copy. Paradoxically,
the technical way of remedying these
gaps without returning to the original
is to add foreign noise to the image.
Intuitively we consider interference to
be reinforced chaos, since it is an added
obstruction to our perception, but our
visual perception tells us a different
story.
When generic visual pollution enters
our field of vision evenly, the eye is
not attracted to a specific zone. This
noise is then used to access the image
visually on a different scale, where
the whole overrules the misleading
details. The whole has a reality of its
own, independent of the parts.
This noise is added in the form of
rasters and screen dots in the world of
print, and by filters in the digital realm,
to help us to fill in the gaps directly in
our heads.

And the more trustworthy a copy is,

the higher or greater is its resolution.
An image with 100% resolution would
be an identical twin of the original.
High resolutions allow us to approach
or study it on a different scale of units,
as someone would do with a magnifying glass.
B
So I must ask What about people who
cry when they see images?
E
Stendhal: I was in a sort of ecstasy,
from the idea of being in Florence,
close to the great men whose tombs I
had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the
point where one encounters celestial
sensations... Everything spoke so
vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only
forget. I had palpitations of the heart,
what in Berlin they call nerves. Life
was drained from me. I walked with
the fear of falling
Paris: We were shocked everything
was so different. So many things
seemed strange, people were rude and
unpleasant. Nobody spoke English,
not to mention Japanese it is hard to
discover that it is not what it was supposed to be: everything is dirty and full
of trash bags and rats, cars and people,
things are expensivehow could they
forget Amlie
We had to called the Embassy. Luckily
they have a special 24-hour doctor
seems its not the first time.
B
I find it puzzling that at the same time
as all this neurological research into
the nature of perception is deepening
and radically questioning our models
for perceiving reality in other words
questioning our model of the aesthetic
art history and art theory continue
to despise perception in favour of the
textual.

The Imaginary Reader

103

Last year the Warburg Institute

published an interesting paper in its
journal that shows evidence of this
turn towards the textual. The author
had organized a list of references from
art literature (reviews, articles, papers,
books) that trace the growth of the
metaphor to read a work of art over
the past 50 years.
And when one looks at the report and
the graphs that accompany it, it seems
funny that art becomes something
that must be read. Perhaps this offers
a historical explanation of the use of
phrases such as this has nothing to say
to me or you are reading it wrongly.
E (3)
This image (3) looks like a standard
colour photograph, but in fact it is
exclusively in shades of grey and red.
This is a detail of the pixels. The
strategy used by our brain to read
any given image is to create a context
and to apply standard references to
construct a scale. It is known as the
Land Effect. The brain assumes that
despite the tonality of certain kinds of
light, colours will remain the same; so
a colour may appear different to our
brain if its surroundings indicate a
different tone in the light.
B (4)
An article by James Elkins, from the
University of Chicago, is called On
the Impossibility of a Close Reading.
In it Elkins returns to some classic
archaeological papers by Alexander
Marshack that study the markings
made by humans on bones. Marshack
tried to establish a definite reading of
these bones (4).
And what does a definite reading
imply? Basically one that accounts for
all the bits of information. In this case,
an account of each and every mark
made on the bones and their relation
to a system. To account for each and

every mark Marshack used all the

technology at his disposal including
microscopes and other apparatus. So in
this particular case a definite reading
meant getting as close to the object as
possible.
But the bones proved to be elusive even
to the microscope. When looked at
with the naked eye, it was evident that
the markings on the bones followed
a pattern, and it would not be implausible to derive meaning from this
pattern. But as Marshack got closer,
the marks became muddled, because
there were marks on top of marks. And
it was impossible to establish whether
some of these marks where intentional
or accidental. The closer he got, the
more uncertain was the nature of the
marks.
E
Carlo Ginzburg suggested that our
attitude to distance is not only a matter
of the extent of visibility, but is also
based on our ideological relations with
others (our morals). He asked Which
is easer to kill, an ant or an elephant?
Some of us have already killed an ant
but would never kill an elephant.
Deep inside we have the mental dictum
that the relation between distance and
closeness is regulated by how we see
things in nature. Very small things are
perceived as far off in the distance.
and consequently very large things
are really close to us. It is easy to kill
an ant because, being so distant, we
are in no danger from it. It is logical
to feel detached from it since it has
no consequences. On the other hand,
an elephant is so close that it would
not only destroy you immediately, but
even has the strength to do it five or six
times over. We grant political volume
to things according their potential
effect on a visual human unit.

Gilles Deleuze once defined the heart

of political and emphatic choice as an
issue of perception: if you think about
the world with the horizon (the most
far-off external sight) as a starting
point, you have to go through a certain
order of layers moving inwards: the
horizon, the world, the continent, the
nation, the city, your neighbourhood,
your house, you. In other worlds the
self is a layered entity with the horizon
as an inseparable part of it. The self is
multiple.
But if you think of it the other way
round, from a hypothetical centre
(you) to the world (the outside) a
problem immediately arises: since the
ultimate objective of the self in both
directions is to endure (to stabilize
conditions around itself), when the
starting point is itself it encloses the
rest immediately (no layers).The self is
defined by contrast with the rest and
starts a campaign to claim territory and
property.
B
Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University
is conducting research that one might
call the revenge of the rat, from your
example. He is looking at the toxoplasmosis parasite and its effects on large
mammals. It is common knowledge
that the toxoplasmosis parasite lives in
rodent brains but can only reproduce
in feline guts. So how does it manage to
live in a rat and reproduce in a cat? The
mechanism is very sophisticated. The
parasite rewires fear responses in the
brains of rats to the smell of cat urine
and feces. The rat loses all fear of the
predator and exposes itself to be eaten,
thus entering the cats digestive tract.
This rewiring is very precise, because it
does not change any other behaviour. It
is not a rat zombie, completely controlled by a parasite. It is just a rat that
has lost all fear of cats.

Where this becomes interesting is

when this toxoplasmosis parasite also
infects primates, including humans.
And studies have begun to show
that primates (humans included)
infected with toxo become reckless. For
example there is an abnormal incidence
of toxo infection among the victims of
motorcycle accidents. This correlation
could be proof of an alteration of the
fear response mechanisms in the brain
due to toxo infection. Among the institutions that are actively researching this
suppression of fear is the U.S. Army.
Modernitys obsession with hygiene
could be read (pun intended) as an
effort to shed all the microorganisms
that are hosted inside the human body
and which probably affect behaviour,
or even notions such as free will. The
properly human animal would be a
sterile environment.
E
In the fields of the Netherlands the
biggest fear is fire. Everything is so
flat that a conflagration can go on for
miles without stopping. When such a
fire starts at night, people immediately
wake their children, drag them into the
cold of the snow and, pointing to the
horizon, they shout: that is fire! and
afterwards hit them without remorse.

The Imaginary Reader

105

5
B
When I was ten or twelve I was home
alone watching television. I had a knife
in my hand. And without properly
realizing what I was doing I began to
carve a hole in my fathers drawing
board. Not until a good hour of carving
had passed did I suddenly realize what
I had done. In fear, I ran downstairs
to my fathers wood workshop and
gathered some balsa wood, some
watercolours and some shoe polish.
Carefully, I carved a piece to fill the
hole, glued it in, sanded, painted and
polished it. The table is still there.

E (5)
During the evangelization of Latin
America, Indians were obviously very
reluctant to accept the imagery of the
new religion, but with one curious
6
exception. The only group that showed
any signs of religious adoration was the
wood carvers/artisans who were forced
to make full-body reproductions of
Christ, the Virgin and other incarnations of the Holy Word. Seeing this as
a possible doorway to quicker conversion, the priests encouraged large
woodworking shops for the younger
generations and were not disappointed. 7
Enthusiastic communities were attracted into temples just as they had
been by the old, now-forbidden gods. It
seemed that the wood and the carvers
had a definite, seductive secret.
The use of neo-Hispanic sculpture as
a vessel for stone pre-Hispanic gods
and symbols is well documented by
modern anthropology. Artisans hollowed out altar figures to insert smaller
ancient gods.

B
So some gods can be parasites on other
gods.
E
A diagram is a function. It is something
that represents the minimized path
of energy needed to make something
happen. Since it is a minimal point,
it can be shared by many events. A
diagram can be used to explain multiple events. It is related to transmutation, since it deals with essences.
B (6)
In the nineteenth century Viollet-leDuc restored Notre Dame. He claimed
that the cathedral was now even
more Gothic than it originally was.
Obviously this was an exaggeration.
But it had a lot to do with Le-Ducs
unrealized project: his restoration of
a mountain, Mont-Blanc in France.
Le-Duc published a huge volume, Le
Massif du Mont-Blanc, which cited
all the geological studies that would
enable him to use some carefully
placed dynamite charges to restore the
mountain to its original state at the
beginning of time.
E (7)
The idea of unspecialized knowledge.
Imagine you are facing something with
no idea of what it is. What do you do?
Basically you have two options: a) you
can recall old information (something
that your family or society told you)
and try to use it to define this new
event; or b) you can return to your
own experiences and try to confront
it. But what happens if you are facing
something not clearly defined by these
archives? Reality urgently demands
an answer; you have to function, to
solve things!! so the quickest way is to
attempt a Frankenstein of an answer:
you pick things from here and there
and fuse them together. You make
up your own theory of what it could
be. For example, if someone asks you
how a mobile phone works? . You
have no idea but oh yes, it looks like
the classic phone, and once I heard

something about antennas and micro- 8

waves of course the microwaves are
in the air but wait; microwaves .. the
kitchen so if you use it a lot you
will cook your head with the phone!!!
And you start creating a new thing
out of the details and hints of things
you know, and suddenly your ideas
and behaviour are controlled by this
Frankenstein of an explanation.
Unspecialized knowledge is a type of
knowledge you use in practical life
knowing that it isnt completely true
or correct. It is a gathering of personal
theories that ultimately gives form to
the practical world. It is the real world.
B
While looking for these stories, I
bumped into a paper that Wade Davis,
an art historian, published in an
anthropological journal in the eighties.
It is called On the Origin of Images. He
proposed nothing less than a theory of
how the first image, the first representation, was made. His conjecture is that
since there is an uncontrollable impulse
to mark things, one could imagine
that at some point the accumulation
of marks on a surface would produce
something that humans could recognize as a representation. It is not very
different from looking for figures in
the clouds. According to Davis, when
humans saw some random accumulation of marks as a representation of
something they realized that they
could make these representations. And
this was a huge epistemological leap,
because it introduced the duplicity of
the sign. And almost all human communication is based on this realization.
Of course, Daviss paper was widely
mocked in anthropological circles.

E (8)
The bamboo slips are considered the
first books in civilization. At first they
were difficult to recognize, since they
were blocks of organic strips found in
Chinese royal tombs . Each strip represented a page of a book that was bound
together like an accordion of bamboo
sticks. In the eighties archaeologists
came across the oldest copy of a Confucian book as a bamboo slip, but with a
problem: the original page order had
been lost. Confucius wrote in aphorisms, so the order of the appearance of
each line can create a new text. Since its
discovery the only fifteen people with
the knowledge necessary to access this
text have been discussing and fighting
over which order is the original one.
Which is the real Confucius?
B
I guess you can call it a game of
bamboo sticks.
E
Remember Pentothal, considered the
most humane way of inflicting the
death penalty, since the patient gets
dizzy, numb and relaxed. Pentothal is
also famous as a truth serum. Once it
hits you, it is only a matter of letting
yourself go.
B
I think Im calling the whole thing off.
Im completely exhausted by stories.
Game Piece was presented at The Wittgenstein
Archives in Bergen 8 April 2013. Game Piece was
commisioned by Volt. Later new versions have been
presented in Vienna and Los Angeles.

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107