The Bounded and the Synoptic: the archive and photographic appropriation

Since 2014, my studio practice has used all the images contained in The Book of Knowledge (BOK), an 8 volume set of encyclopedias that date from the late 1950s. I scanned at high resolution all of the volume’s images, some 3000 in total, creating a secondary archive from which I worked with its images. The broad aim of this was to explore, both my own early visual encounter with this material and more importantly to explore it as a complex cultural, ideological and epistemological moment and artefact. The studio output of this series is so far some 190 prints that combine images from the archive using different strategies of making, recombination, schemata and composition.

Alongside making the BOK series I have been researching into the art historian Aby Warburg’s transdisciplinary practice, which he described as Kulturwissenschaftlich (cultural science or cultural studies). His aim was to track the afterlife of pagan culture, especially in the renaissance but also its persistence into the present. His engagement with this afterlife or Nachleben entailed tracking successive images of gestures of self-defense that represent a vast pictorial manifestation of social memory. His research required a broad iconological foundation and the means to capture the flows and superimpositions of pictorial migration. For this purpose, he assembled a complex photographic apparatus to compile an exhaustive collection of images that he montaged onto a series of wooden panels in a photographic work known as the Mnemosyne Atlas. The Atlas represents an optical means of putting his archive to work within the panoramic timeframes that are at the heart of his research. This can be thought of as a synoptic system; being able to see a set of data or material together, in one space.

The paper will discuss this background to my studio practice and how digitally intervening with the analogue material through scanning creates a bounded archive that is mobile and akin to the images as being data, being brought into vision through synoptic dispositifs.

The paper will also discuss the relationship of images to archives and synoptic systems in relationship to Bruno Latour’s Visualistaion and Cognition: Drawing Things Together (Latour: 1985) in terms of the emergence of inscriptions as ‘immutable objects’ that mark the divide between prescientific and scientific culture. I will also relate this to Leo Steinberg’s The Flatbed Picture plane (Steinberg: 1972) as a precursor to the organizational relationship of images to the computer and especially, synoptically, in relationship to the space of the desktop.

This discussion points toward a specific ontology of the digital archive as being at the heart of digital visual mediums and especially with regard to photographic appropriative practices.