« Bombing... | Main | Constitution of reality »

Techniques of the Observer

0262531070.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg

Yesterday I had an interesting talk with my teacher (and artist) Nahum Tevet.
I am working on my camera obscura for the final exhibition in May.
The reason I am building it is quite complex but can be summarized as: "the relation between image and reality"

Nahum advised me to read a book of Crary.

I googled it:

CRARY ARGUES that what principally matters regarding vision is not its biological or physiological truth but the degree to which and ways that vision is located in history and historical processes. Of central importance is the relation between vision and the formation of the modern human subject. Crary links vision and visuality to the changing perceptions of human subjectivity and identity. He would seem to agree with Nelson Goodman's argument that the advent of photography was one technological development that altered the entire episteme for viewing art and images. It commensurately altered human consciousness. Like Nelson Goodman (The Languages of Art), Crary finds that the observer is changed by such developments, becoming "the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification" (5). Crary looks at the historical development of certain optical devices like the camera obscura and the stereoscope not just as instruments of visuality, but as larger rationalizations for reshaping the human faculty of sight. These instrumentsóon the face of it mundane, domestic itemsóreorient the organization of vision and positive observation in terms of their mechanical operation, effectively changing the visual perceptions of their human operators. This book provides a thought-provoking response to Goodman's basic question of how photography changed the way that we view art and the world that surrounds it. (Brent Whitmore.)

To read: Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

I hope Amazon let's the book arrives before the exhibition ends...

Posted on March 15, 2004
in Linking context

Digg this | Add to Delicious | Technorati reactions | Permalink | Comments (0)