After Image

AfterImage developed from a series of experiments making automated drawings using light. I had started by making ‘photograms’, a process popularised from 1922 by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, where objects are exposed to light to make an image on light sensitive paper. As these images materialised in the dark room chemicals, I thought about how in their abstractness they could only be understood through subjective interpretation, as a sort of gestalt image.The image, and also the processes that made it, seemed to stand for something other than what they were, forming connections to other practices and processes.

Hundreds of tiny lights suspended on filament over a glass table then filmed form below and projected on the wall in front created a loop where light was set in motion by the viewer. The apparatus functioned to make physically apparent the loop that is formed between our interactions and an art work, closed by subjective interpretation by the precipitant. Rancière’s call for ‘spectators who are active interpreters’ had long influenced the way I understood participatory engagement as an open system, able to unfold in ways not yet conceived, for the audience and also because of them. AfterImage became a way of understanding the interrelation of the observer with creative work, and the formation of meaning that makes the observer a participant in the apprehension of creative work.