WAYS OF SEEING

"Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. The painter's way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper. Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing." 

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger.

🔗 : https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch1

LEARNING TO SEE

🖼️: Titled (Information as Property as Art) [Ethereum Null Address] (2022) by @rheaplex on Feral File

illiterate enjoyer of crypto and AI art | linktr.ee/buffets.eth

In this sense, Rhea's work here is akin to visualising a black hole, and it prompted me to wonder whether in our quests to do so more generally, we risk collapsing into the sheer gravity of our own reflexivity. After all, we have created the idea of nothing out of something, and turned that nothing back into something which is then supposed to represent nothing. 

I guess there has always been such a reflexive dynamic between the ideas of nothing and something. But by using Ethereum as a medium, this work has made me more mindful about how this dynamic can play out on the blockchain specifically, as we try to imbue more and more things—tokens!—with the properties of property.

👀: Nothing is ever truly, wholly nothing. From empty space to the null address on Ethereum, there seems to be always something within—and the quest to find and possess that something is a deeply seductive one. To render the ungraspable graspable, the unownable ownable, we thus invent representational strategies to concretise the conceptual and materialise the immaterial.