About the Surviving Object
Prospectus
The Surviving Object is an investigation on the boundary between the digital and physical presences of a group of historical etchings. The work explores the capacities of mirrored digital and material artifacts to project their forces into each other’s space affectively.
To undertake this investigation, I adopt multiple positions on the spectrum of maker, collector, curator, historian and cultural theorist. I am interested in how artworks condense as physical symptoms the under the blows and counter-blows of the digital hegemony.
From Georges Didi-Hubermann, I propose that the etchings act counter to our time and therefore act on our time; their survival and display models the eruption of the past from within the present. The recursion of these phantoms subverts the confident trajectories of artistic and moral progress. Their unexpected materialisation is a symptom of a frightening depth that has been incompletely repressed.
This is not their first appearance; their digital-material pasts, presents and futures co-act or coexist – at each re-appearance they are joined to a new proliferation of proximate resemblances, until a renewed Surviving Object submerges into latency once more.
Sigmund Freud wrote that the symptom is “a chosen piece of ambiguity with two meanings in complete mutual contradiction.”1 Symptoms are ‘both/and’ not ‘either/or’. The Surviving Object's Atlas is an endeavour that attends closely to the example of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927 - present). It is a hypothetical, provisional, digital-material tool for generating perceptible and affective ‘both/and’ symptoms.
The Surviving Object Atlas is therefore:
- a montage
- a deck of cards
- an accumulation of images
- a formal grouping
- a rhetorical grouping
- a report on single locations apprehended from multiple viewpoints
- a concentration of mise en abyme
- a table of repetitions
- a table of comparisons
- a table of anachronisms
- a space of combinatory displacements and the splitting of apparent orthodoxies
- a sequence of sequences
- an unfolding and re-folding of discontinuities and disparities
- a photogram of survivals
1. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey, London, Allen & Unwin, 1964. p.446
Objectives
The Surviving Object has five initial objectives:
To construct a space in which relationships between the material and digital presence of artworks might be intensified and experienced.
To present a digital-material array of survivals from the past that might constitute a symptom in the present.
To demonstrate the forces of the digital realm re-animating a historical configuration ‘against’ the ambient historical assumptions of the moment.
To make visible repressed material, especially the containment or erasure of the roles of Elizabeth Ruth Escombe/Ruth Edwards, (1832–1907) and Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming/Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden, (1822 -1865) whose thought can be traced as shaping presences within the collection much as, in scientific research, the characteristics of apparently absent particles can be traced from their interactions with observable materials.
To encourage the identification of new, anachronistic, relationships within multiple constellations of images from the collection, being especially attentive to those that have previously been foreclosed as ‘unthinkable’.