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Rahaim, Meg (2015) Re-presentation: A Tactical Approach to 21st Century Visibility. Re:Print/Re:Present Conference, Anglia Ruskin University
No full textThis paper was presented at Re:Print/Re:Present, a conference on contemporary printmaking at Anglia Ruskin University.In the networked condition of the 21st century, everyday life takes on a radical visibility, putting serious limitations on old forms of tactical creativity, and perhaps necessitating a new understanding of tactics, themselves. By aligning aspects of Michel de Certeau’s strategies and tactics with Vilém Flusser’s functionalism and ‘playing against the camera’, I search for contemporary examples of creative resistance that manage to operate in the heavily surveilled present.
Re-presentation is a method by which the re-contextualisation of strategically produced image technology reveals some hidden, ignored or ‘depresented’, i.e. hidden by design, aspect of its origin. It is a gesture of non-oppositional resistance, seeking to produce knowledge in image form rather than to destroy the strategically produced original. Using examples from my own studio practice and others’, I argue that an engagement with digital images involving their re-presentation can constitute a tactical approach to image use and production not merely in spite of, but also enabled by, 21st century visibility
Reciprocal Space
No full textReciprocal Space is a series of 15 blind-embossed prints of crocheted textiles produced in residency at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics (WHG), University of Oxford. This body of work explores an epistemological affinity in art and scientific imaging through the construction of printed images. In blind embossing, I explore indexical impression in paper in relation to the “reciprocal” space of diffraction images in x-ray crystallography—in structural biology, an intermediary, inverse representation used to derive molecular shape. This work transposes material or scientific processes as conceptual frameworks that structure making as thinking. Crocheting embodies multidimensional complexity in strand, surface, fold, time. Embossing, as reciprocal inversion of its referent, transposes an aspect of a scientific imaging process onto an artistic one, revealing an affinity in printed artwork and scientific imaging toward the anticipation of knowledge. The work was exhibited at University Church of St Mary’s for Oxford Festival of Science and Ideas, at St Ann’s College, Oxford, and in the 2018 Douro Print Biennial, and led to public workshops on Genes and Crochet at Science Gallery London
Artefact of Vision
No full textThis portfolio has since been entered into the V&A print archive.
Contributing artists' works can be seen by following the URIThe theme “Distortion” celebrates our subjective view of the world and calls for prints which require a unique vantage point, both physically as well as conceptually, in order to be read. This topic draws upon the tricks of perspective in Italian Renaissance ceilings and Dutch interiors, to the anamorphic work of Holbein and Escher, and 19C optical toys such as the magic mirror and praxinoscope. The act of human perception filters and alters vision though processes of synesthesia, color blindness, and hallucination. Technology both extends and distorts what we can see, through the use of infrared film and heat sensitive recording devices, X-Rays and other medical instrumentation, holograms, wide-angle lenses and prisms.
My print in the portfolio is, 'Artefact of Vision', a digital inkjet print
Notes on the Inversion of Photographic Transparency: Excerpts from Waking Ouroboros
No full textThe Publisher's final version can be found by following the URI link.This writing is excerpted from 'Waking Ouroboros', an essay that interweaves a near-future, magical realist, short fiction with speculative musings on the notions of transparency, visibility, surveillance and self-consumption. The capacity of communication technology to align all spaces across the globe has developed gradually since the invention of telegraph, telephone, airplane, Internet, and so on. Thanks to satellites that hover beyond the sky at present, surveillance is a reality in all places. By the CCTV cameras and smartphones of western democracies and the weaponized drones that survey the desert, the collection of cookies by Internet shopping sites and the Google Street View car, individuals are made into images for the future. This writing speculates that such visual synchronisation, in addition to collapsing space, collapses time in a profound way
Discrete accidents of photogrammetry: Re-presenting pure surface in Google Earth
No full textRe-presentation is a critical artistic method for revealing the depresented, i.e. deliberately hidden, strategic origins of a designed visual object. I developed this as a method for tactically resistant visual arts practice, inspired by Vilem Flusser’s methodology for ‘playing against the camera’, itself a set of suggestions for using image technology in resistance to its compromised origins. Shifting between two voices, one critical and contextualising, the other speculative, this work attempts to perform a re-presentation of the Google Earth (GE) virtual model of a public park in Greater London. The writing uses Shoshana Zuboff’s dispossession cycle as a framework for understanding the role of networked, surveillant, robotic images in the corporate acquisition and control of human behaviour. I present traces found within GE, a familiar robotic vision of everyday life, that point to the depresentation, or deliberate obfuscation, of their role as algorithmically composed aesthetic objects in the project of sustaining and extending the power of surveillance capitalists. Given the composite nature of the robotic vision that is GE, the inclusion or exclusion of particular forms of anecdotal visual information in the representation, e.g. picnickers, are at first puzzling, later suspicious. The closely observed comparison of virtual and physical navigations raises questions around surface, friction, and embodiment that point to the disembodied flows of personal information back to the surveillance capitalism giant Google
Global Print 2017
No full textGlobal Print 2017 was an international exhibition of prints in Douro, Portugal curated by Nuno Canelas.
'Gods Eye IV', a digital inkjet print, was my work in the exhibition. The following is a description of the body of work to which it belongs:
At any designated location in Google Street View, many images taken simultaneously by vehicle-mounted cameras are algorithmically stitched together into a hemispherical dome in order to create the eventual onscreen illusion of continuous 720 degrees of space. At ‘eye level’, the transition from one source image to the next is often undetectable, but by clicking and dragging that image downward, a look at the sky in GSV reveals a small something else. Reminiscent of the meeting of the paper strips that compose the surface of a globe, the source images at the apex of the sky come together noticeably. They stretch, squeeze and compress the material of the discreet digital images, making a spectacular little pattern.
In a series of digital prints entitled God’s Eyes, I use images of sky as seen through the filter of this algorithmically generated composite in order to examine the relationship between the particulate nature of a subject matter (clouds in sky) and a pixelated distortion which disrupts the illusionistic space within the image. In making them into prints, I am interested in the way a heavily mediated envisioning might unintentionally interact with the world outside Google. Torn from context, their striations evoke a constricted iris and a closed aperture, a disembodied eye that cannot see
Douro Print Biennial 2018
No full textThe works I submitted for exhibition were created during an ongoing artist residency (2017-2018) at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University.Douro Print Biennial 2018 is an international exhibition in Douro, Portugal, curated by Nuno Canelas.
My works in this exhibition are 'Reciprocal Space (3 Stitch Filet, 20mm Hook)' and 'Reciprocal Space (Double-stranded 3 Stitch Filet, 15mm Hook)', both blind embossing on paper
Intersecting Practices of Contemporary Printmaking in the UK
Get PDF'Intersecting Practices of Contemporary Printmaking in the UK' was an international exhibition taking place at the China Academy of Art during IMPACT 2015, a biennial international conference on print. This exhibition of current printmaking and print-related practices was curated by Jian Zhou in response to the conference theme of 'Printmaking in the Post-print Age'.
Contributing artists: Ann-Marie Lequesnes, Bob Matthews, Brian D Hodgon, Charlie Masson, Echo Morgan, Emma Stibbon RA, Finlay Taylor, Hadas Auerbach, Hal Stennett, Heather Gray Meyerratjen, Ian Brown, Jane Bustin, Jane Joseph, Jian Zhou, Jo Stockham, Joby Williamson, Julia Farrer, Lisa Lee, Meg Rahaim, Nicky Coutts, Oona Grimes, Paul Coldwell, PRISM Printmaking (Claudia De Grandi, Dolores De Sade, John Read, Nigel Oxley, Pauline Aitken, Rebecca Jewell, Sophie Layton, Susan Aldworth), Stephen Chambers RA, Trevor Banthorpe, Victoria Ahren
Waking Ouroboros
No full textThe Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This was a performed reading of ‘Waking Ouroboros’, an illustrated essay that interweaves a near-future, magical realist, short fiction with speculative musings on the notions of transparency, visibility, surveillance and self-consumption. The capacity of communication technology to align all spaces across the globe has developed gradually since the invention of telegraph, telephone, airplane, Internet, and so on. Thanks to satellites that hover beyond the sky at present, surveillance is a reality in all places. By the CCTV cameras and smartphones of western democracies and the weaponized drones that survey the desert, the collection of cookies by Internet shopping sites and the Google Street View car, individuals are made into images for the future. This writing proposes an immediate and jolting advance in such visual synchronization that, in addition to collapsing space, collapses time in a profound way. In the instant that a photograph is taken, the subject is confronted with the faces of each and every person who will ever view it, a terrifying prospect that fundamentally changes the human relationship to the image, its production, and its consumption. Photography becomes a literal violence.
This presentation was a performed reading as part of the symposium, Speculations: The Technological Gaze at the Royal College of Art. My presentation included live interaction with Google Earth as well as a PowerPoint of images which I cannot include here for the sake of copyrighted images. Other presenters included James Bridle, Rebecca Bligh, and James W. Hedges
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