Esther Leslie & Rikke Luther

Kunsthal Charlottenborg proudly welcomes Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics.

Esther Leslie’s research include the poetics of science, the bleeding edge of technologies, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness, art philosophy and politics at Birkbeck Universitet, London.

The event is in English and is initiated by PhD Rikke Luther, Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Liquid and Crystal Intelligence in the Epoch of Turbidity
Photography shatters time and space, it has been said. It recombines too. As it shatters and recombines its procedures might be aligned to the states of liquidity and crystallinity. It snatches something from a flow – from a watery gush of life and holds it up – the crystal. But it could be said, just as much, that each image splashes into the world, is a drop in the ocean, is a liquid reflection of a fraction of a second, caught on a sheeny surface, now likely to be a smartphone, one of the latest stages of photography’s history which begun, in Walter Benjamin’s description, with the emergence from a droplet-laden mist, out of the aura that seeped into clothes, a dampness of imperial history that threatened ever to return. Jeff Wall wrote an essay on photography as liquid intelligence, again associating photography’s origins with wetness, with the sloshing chemicals, the water baths, and each photograph of liquid, arrested in its flow, like his explosive milk, evokes that ‘ancient memory’. The control of water, held back by glass is photography’s battle, but the intelligence, the materiality, the sensitivity and the desire seems to lie with the liquid alone. Writing in 1989, Wall observes a shift from analogue, chemical photography to digital photography, which, he notes, aims to keep the camera and its processes dry, to hold water far from the production process, far away powering electricity plants that the cameras rely on, to hold it all behind glass, which is hard, crystalline, a barrier, a dry product of technology. Later liquid and crystal will merge together as state of matter in the ubiquitous smartphone, unforeseeable in 1989.

What liquid and crystal intelligences are evinced in it, in its relation to seeing, and how, in the light of these, does the history of its seeing, technical seeing, which is not ours, come to appear? It comes as turbid media. This media seeing – to be pursued here as both technical and human – is dependent  variously on turbidity, on turbid media, and will be shown to be always emergent from or seeping into mists, fogs, clusters of dust, clouds and other turbid environs.

Text by Esther Leslie.