Le Corbusier's Seeing Things: La Vision de l'Objectif and l'Espace Indicible (original) (raw)

Seeing what is not there yet: Le Corbusier and the architectural space of photographs

2016

ed photography might reveal the virtual life of the object as with Le Corbusier’s technically flawed photograph of the Üçserefeli Camii in Edirne [20]. A high-contrast image, it resists the standard depth rendering of the camera. The mosque it pictures appears to be flattened, pushing against the picture plane. Something strange is revealed. Uncannily, the image looks back at us. Two black eyes, a snub nose, a slightly rounded top to an otherwise blockhead: the portrait is unmistakable. Üçserefeli is alive. Flawed photography has shown us his face.

Re-envisioning vision: artistic explorations in the territories of perception

Vision, in its many forms, can be categorized into territories over which perception of the physical world reigns. However, as this vision is constituted through fallible senses, ideologies, and judgements, it can be as mediated as its counterparts. This photo-essay discusses an ongoing body of work re-envisioning visual perception within this context. Visual encounters, from physical, to simulated, to imagined are positioned as territories which are made to overlap through the outlined works. These range from moving image, to photography and installation. The thematic motor for these works is the idea of an ever-mediated reality, positioned here in the context of media studies. A brief overview of some fallacies of vision is laid out and linked to the artist's approach to research-based art production, of which three works are described. The first, " Landscape, Cutout " , deals with vision only ever revealing the past. The second, " Constructions " , consists of stereographic images proposing concurrent zones of incongruous sight. The third work, " Le marronnier " , manifests a pivotal image in existentialism depicted in Sartre's " Nausea ". Throughout, this text, the artist underlines the importance of questioning how our sight compares to one another's, and why only some visions are regarded as true.

The Living Space of the Image

There is no image of space, nor space of images, except the living space which subverts the very division on which space depends for its human comprehension, settlement, and exploration. The space co-substantial with the life of images is neither that of the interiority explored by Bachelard and still eulogized by his disciples including Sloterdijk, nor that of the exterior championed by Foucault. It is the inside-outside which theorists of space and images come close to, now and then, without being able to either penetrate or escape from. It is an imageless space, or at least a space for which no human image suffices. It is a space which reveals the impossibility of reconciling relations between human life and imaginal life. The space of the image attracts but it is a space which human cannot hold. It is a space of illness, and yet, also, of felicitous affect, allowing a glimpse of the forever out of time and space which particular images, and what Deleuze described especially as time-images, reveal; the space, that is, where subjectivity is made, as much as human life is lost; the living space of the image.