The Inner Story of The Further Shores of Knowing (original) (raw)
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The making of a new body of photographic work involves far more than the act of taking pictures. It is likely to include stages of preparation and research before any photographs are taken (although this is not always the case) and a process of editing afterwards; but these are much deeper and more complex tasks than one might at first imagine. In creating a new body of work, photographers not only relate to elements of the outside world (the subject of the photographs, the camera, the prints and so on), but they also embark on a personal journey, which in turn will reflect some aspect of their inner world. In this essay, I explore the question of how a new photographic artwork comes into being. In my discussion, I draw from my own experience as a photographer, and from a series of 30 interviews with professional artists (conducted between 2011 and 2013), six of whom use photography as the central medium in their practice. The essay situates these personal accounts within a framework of psychoanalytical thinking. But to begin I will describe my own practice, and the making of Under the Skin 1 , a photographic artwork which is an animation of still photographs. The making of Under the Skin Some time before I began work on this particular project I was staying in the Lake District in the North West of England, in a valley halfway between the mountains and Morecambe Bay, a vast expanse of quicksands, channels and intertidal mudflats. After a while I noticed that I would rarely travel to the coastline. There was something troubling about this landscape for me. It seemed too open, too flat and too vast. Looking out over the great expanse of the Bay at low tide, I imagined myself walking out alone towards the horizon until I could see no land, and wondered what it might feel like to be out in this wet desert, alone and far from help. I knew that many lives have been lost there, sucked down by quicksand or swept away, engulfed by the incoming tide, which is said to be as fast as a galloping horse. But I sensed that there was more to my emotionally charged feelings about the Bay. It was as if my responses were the tip of an iceberg and that below the surface were unconscious echoes resonating within me, which I could not yet understand. It was this feeling that propelled me to make a series of artworks related to the Bay. Through
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Scholars in the last few decades have pointed out the manifold relations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the increasingly sceptical frame of mind of early modern English culture. As Robert Peirce argued in 1985, different forms of sceptical thought may be identified in the play. Along with the philosophical background which saw the revival of Pyrrhonism and of Sextus Empiricus’ thought, the article examines The Tempest in the light of recent investigations of early modern visual culture, a period in which the reliability of human vision was deeply undermined by the new discoveries in the fields of medicine, science, technology and art theory, as well as by the controversial debates on the illusions of magic, demonic deceptions and witchcraft. Different forms of ethical and epistemological scepticism in The Tempest are explored, taking into account a variety of structural features which include the weaving of multiple ‘narrative’ voices in the opening act; the condition of the ship...
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Let me suggest provisionally that fiction (or at least literary fiction), in its traditional (philosophical) determination, always has to do with a certain beyond. 1 That it puts us in adventurous touch with something over the frontier, with other worlds, with ghosts (perhaps, as we shall see, with ghost ships). And that, reciprocally, any beyond always runs the risk of falling prey to fiction, so that as soon as philosophy ventures into it, it runs the risk of finding itself somewhere it never should be. Jacques Derrida claims in Parages that it is on the frontier of philosophy and literature-or rather, where this frontier trembles-that philosophy is most called to thought (10). One imagines that such a frontier (especially if it were to turn out to be essentially unstable), has a complex structure that is difficult to pin down. My working hypothesis here, in what will be both rather elementary and rather dry (for which I apologize), is that this structure must have an at least analogical relation with the structure of the frontier as Kant presents it, and especially in the famous and obscure discussion in the Prolegomena of the distinction between limit and bound, bound and limit, border and boundary, perimeter and periphery, barrier and gate, Grenze and Schranke. Moreover, we shall see that analogy is also part of our problem and, as such, cannot solve the question of the frontier. 2 I shall be trying to show, not that philosophy and literature are two domains with a frontier (even a vague or uncertain frontier) that separates them more or less successfully, but that where there
Advances in the Hamlet Cosmic Allegory
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