Night Shift
An Essay by Orit Gat

 

1. A dance

There is a kind of image that only happens during the day, a different type at night.

These images I describe are created by two desktop scanners directed at each other, reading the way light hits the glass on their counterpart, the way light emanates from one to the other. The two scanners are fixed one in front of the other, but movement is built into them and reflected on them. They mirror the light conditions in the room where they are set: when you see an abstract pictogram, you could be looking at the moon. Or at the strip of light in one of the scanners. They make landscapes that meld the site and the tool.

A link: if you remove one scanner, the other won’t see. Like dance partners, they perform a selected sequence that makes art. In unison, they move, receive, register, create.

 

2. Speed

What if art looks like something you’ve already seen?

Realism, or naturalism, were meant to do that. A viewer was intended to recognize their world in the artworks they were looking at. From a kitchen still life to the awe of seeing light shining through stained stained-glass windows to a portrait, deciphering images was instinctive: identifiable objects, emotions, people.

With abstraction comes a different form of recognition. Abstract paintings reflect a search—for new forms of expression, for invention, for reduction or a step away from what was known and done. The emotional charge we recognize in abstraction, especially of the New York School in the 1950s, is a result of an art history of storytelling: the hero-figure of the artist in his studio coming up with a new image of the world.

 

3. A pause

Roland Barthes quotes from Franz Kafka’s conversations with Gustav Janouch: “‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.’”

Barthes quotes this in Camera Lucida, his book about photography written in 1980. It’s a beautiful essay on what was the power of images. In an often-quoted passage, Barthes writes about looking at a photograph of soldiers in World War I that it is “nothing extraordinary, except this, which no realist painting would give me, that they were there … reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.” I think of his focus, of his sight. Barthes looks at what others have driven out of their mind. I think of the things we look at now, now that more images are uploaded to the internet in a day than existed just a hundred years ago. I think of the screens that surround us. How there is no looking away, so much so that we need to use “night shift,” a warm hue covering the bright light that may interrupt the surge of melatonin we should experience at night. A quick fix for the problem of exposure.

 

4. Movement

What if art looks like something you’ve already seen?

Like déjà vu, but not that: What if vision fails you? Déjà vu (literally, in French, “already seen”) is a feeling of inexplicable familiarity. The images Basanta’s scanners produce seem familiar for a reason. They are familiar: a combination of algorithms reads the images produced by the scanners and compares them to a trove of recognizable images—artworks from the databases of several museums and art-related websites. The algorithms register similarities between the scanners’ and the artists’ impressions of the world.

 

5. Choreography

The mind, like the algorithm, makes connections with what it already knows. We look at an image two scanners made by looking at each other and see a Mark Rothko, a Barnett Newman, an Yves Klein. Only they are made by tools arranged in a way that cuts us out.

 

6. An unmanned factory

Or a gallery. A space where the walls are painted every few weeks, a fresh start (I always wonder whether a gallery could lose an inch or two after a long run of exhibitions because of the new coats of bright, white paint). At the gallery are three computers, the two scanners, a large-format printer, and the finished works—the images determined by the algorithms—hanging on the wall. It’s arranged like “something between an unmanned factory and a creative-class office,” Basanta describes. It looks like a known structure, making known images—only it explores something unknown: a viewer’s expectation and idea of production. A reflection on how images shift—if we photograph things in order to forget them, if we see so many images, our relationship to them is constantly reshaped in a matter of seconds. We look and then we look away. We register a form of recognition.

 

7. Unmanned

The recognition I mention above is one of visual similarity. But there is another similarity at play here. Looking at the scanners, we see their anthropomorphic qualities. Erect, they stand in front of each other, they look at one another.

These are technological tools that humans use to look at other humans. To scan: to survey, to inspect, to study and examine. In the age of facial recognition, scanning is an act of matching. And here, we see these devices not in relation to us but to each other. We should have expected this: we call them a network, we talk about devices locating and connecting to one another (via Bluetooth, via invisible threads of recognition), we give them the language of act and emotion: find, connect. We project ourselves—our idea of ourselves—onto them.

 

8. The things around us

The scanners project onto each other, they read one another, they share a language and a purpose. We look at them and try to find ourselves in them because we can’t experience the world without seeing ourselves reflected in it. But, like two states collapsing into one, we end up seeing a separate relationship. We are onlookers of what the title of the work tells us: “All we’d ever need is one another.” What we’re looking at are two things that don’t require us, they’re already creating all possible end results.

 

9. At night

The two scanners work 24/7. Alone at night in an empty gallery, they face each other. Strips of light emanate from one, are received by the other. These are two things looking at each other and finding something there.

How lucky they are. How could we not empathize with them. If to anthropomorphize the things that surround us is an instinct that says more about us humans than about the world we’ve constructed around us, then there are moments when to look at that world allows us to imbue it with a precious tenderness: that light, gentle feeling of paying attention.

 

 

Orit Gat is a writer living in New York whose work on the meeting points of contemporary art and digital culture has appeared in a variety of magazines. She is a winner of the Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.