Material Others and Other Materialities Symposium
Based on: vilem-flusser-vampyroteuthis-infernalis-3
Organised by the Informed Matters Research Community, University of the Arts London
Venue and Date: Friday 30 September 2016, 12:45pm-6.00pm
Iklectik Art Lab 20 Carlisle Lane London SE1 7LG
Summary In their short philosophical fable ‘Vampyroteuthis Infernalis’, Vilem Flusser and Louis Bec compare
human existence to that of a deep-sea squid, the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. In the process they raise
questions about the relation of cognition, culture and sociality to corporeal anatomy and environment. Flusser
and Bec’s ruminations form the background context and connecting thread for this symposium, which aims to
bring together 10 papers to explore questions of materiality and otherness specifically, in relation to art and
design and media. All presentations take a point of departure from Flusser and Bec’s text to discuss an
artefact in relation to the symposium’s themes.
Schedule
12:45-13:00 Registration followed by Introduction
13:00-14:20 Panel 1. Phenomenological Materialities
The Immateriality of Titian’s Pesaro Altarpiece | Ken Wilder, Chelsea College of Arts
Circle or Oval?: Concepts, Non-identity and the Lifeworld | Johanna Bolton, Royal College of Art
Things that Happen Again: Roni Horn and the Phenomenology of the Other | Andrew Chesher, Chelsea
College of Arts
Chair: Dan Smith; Discussant: Allan Parsons
14:20-14:40 Tea Break
14:40-16:00 Panel 2. My Body and the Body: The Other and the Alien
My Neighbour, That Thing | Werner Prall, Middlesex University
The Corporeal Witness in Katie Green’s Lighter than my Shadow | Dan Smith, Chelsea College of Arts
Fishing for Zebedee | Mark Ingham, London College of Communication
Chair: Amanda Windle; Discussant: Maria Walsh
16:00-16:30 Wine
16:30-17:30 Panel 3. Digital Materialities
Emergent Materiality: The Self and the Other in Material Dialogues | Virna Koutla, Royal College of Art
Robotum Anthromorphum: of Virtual Assistants and their Networked Materialities | Michel Erler, London
College of Communication
Chair: Allan Parsons; Discussant: Amanda Windle
17:30-18:00 Discussant roundtable
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Abstracts
Panel 1. Phenomenological Materialities
The Immateriality of Titian’s Pesaro Altarpiece | Ken Wilder
With the symbolic immateriality of artificial intelligence, Flusser and Bec argue that ‘[h]uman selfactualization
is no longer the struggle against the insidious resistance of inert objects’. Yet this
negates the fact that objects – as information carriers – have always concealed as much as they
have revealed. Drawing upon Michael Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention, I will argue that the
historically embodied viewer is forced to employ acts of ideation that are as much prompted by
what the object negates (immaterial information) as what it explicitly reveals through its
engagement of a medium. The paper applies this to a Titian’s immensely complex Pesaro
Altarpiece (1519-26), an object that, in blurring the boundaries between architecture and
painting, is at the cusp of the work as self-contained entity while still very much addressing the
spectator’s point of entry. Here, information is both embedded within the painting’s objectness
and materiality, while simultaneously engaging symbolically our very conditions of access.
Ken Wilder is a Reader in Spatial Design at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL
Circle or Oval?: Concepts, Non-identity and the Lifeworld | Johanna Bolton
At the starting point, when investigating matter, one has the (subjective) power to choose which
concepts and definitions to use. But once a concept is formed, we also seem to become
restricted by it. Flusser and Bec suggest that we can no longer discern phenomena that we have
no concept for and our models then obscure reality.
Edmund Husserl, in the critique of the Western scientific tradition he presented in his Crisis of the
European Sciences, pointed out how the gap between idealised geometric shapes and the
experienced Lifeworld creates a situation where mathematical models become autonomous
constructs divorced from the real and perceived reality.
In this paper I explore how changing the concept, using it as a form of viewpoint, allows one to
move around an object looking at it from different angles. The aim of such a process would be to
glimpse other, formerly hidden aspects. The ‘other’ here is something akin to the ‘Nonidentity’
Adorno writes of, the part of any object that “eludes capture by the concept.”
The object my discussion is based around is an elastic band, an object which is roughly and
variably round without ever being perfectly circular. If the definition of a circle is an idealised
construct that does not exist in the material world, then the maybe round shapes formed by
elastic bands should all be described as oval. However, in actual everyday language, we all
apply different concepts of what counts as a circle or an oval. My discussion of the elastic band’s
roundness is motivated by the desire to investigate this particular uncertain state by creating a
new (subjective) definition of circle- or oval-ness based on Lifeworld experience.
Johanna Bolton is a Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art
Things that Happen Again: Roni Horn and the Phenomenology of the Other | Andrew Chesher
Flusser and Bec’s exploration of otherness in Vampyroteuthis Infernalis owes a not inconsiderable
debt to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Having established in his Cartesian Meditations
the primacy of the ego’s ‘sphere of ownness’, Husserl includes within it the other as merely
intended. For Husserl, despite recognising that the otherness of the other should not by rights
originate in the subject, the appearance of the other as other depends on this sense constituted
by the ego, just as the vampyroteuthic other is said to exist ‘only in relation to me’ (Flusser & Bec
2012, 38). On the other hand, Husserl also posits my flesh, my lived body, as coextensive with the
proper sphere of my ego. However, although only I experience my body immediately as my flesh,
it is inherently reversible: what is flesh for me at one moment can become mere body at another.
In other words, the flesh and hence the ego’s proper sphere cannot ultimately be closed off, as
Husserl wished, but is rather continuous with the field of what is apparently outside and other.
Where Flusser and Bec transcend the limitations of the Husserlian foundation is by going on to
dwell in their text on the ramifications of this flesh/body pivot, which challenges any such
seclusion of the ego from the world and the other.
This paper will return to the Husserlian account of the other and explore it in relation to Roni
Horn’s sculpture ‘Things That Happen Again: For Two Rooms’ (1986). What could be identified as
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more or less explicit posthuman and materialist themes thread through the exploration of animal
and physical forms in Horn’s work. Beyond these themes, however, Horn also often explores
identity and difference in an almost phenomenological manner. ‘Things That Happen Again’ is a
case in point. The sculpture consists of two truncated cones of milled metal to be located in
different rooms within an exhibition. In making us aware that we see the one cone in relation to
our memory or anticipation of the other, the work focuses us on the fact that that every ‘here’
implies a ‘there’ or an ‘elsewhere’, and that implicit within the perception of any present object is a
sense itself not present. So, Horn’s sculpture, I will argue, returns us to the theme of the flesh and
its reversibility, which communicates with the more explicit imagery and tropes within the larger
ambit of her practice.
Andrew Chesher is Year 1 Leader, BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL
Panel 2. My Body and the Body: the Other and the Alien
My Neighbour, That Thing | Werner Prall
Freud was famously critical of the biblical command ‘love thy neighbour as you love thyself’, a
central pillar of Judeo-Christian ethics. Undermining this injunction from various angles he
concludes, with Hobbes, homo homini lupus. Our neighbour does not reliably comply with our
wishes for harmonious exchanges conducted in the spirit of the mirror image. The danger is
always that we might fall prey to the excessive desires of our fellow human being. But if our
neighbour’s jouissance constitutes a threat for us, we must not forget that we are our neighbour’s
neighbour. When Freud first tackled the problem of the other person he did so in terms of the
Nebenmensch (the proximate human-being) as Ding (thing). It is the incommensurability of this
thingness of the other which for Lacan places the neighbour – always potentially at least – in the
register of the Real; and an encounter with the Real threatens us with trauma. Flusser’s work
bears witness to his attempts to recognise himself in that which appears to lie furthest from the
human, ‘monsters who dream of Nothing in their own interiority.’ Another glimpse across this
abyss is afforded us by the 1926 expressionist silent film ‘The Student of Prague’, a still from
which constitutes the visual object for this exploration.
Werner Prall is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University
The Corporeal Witness in Katie Green’s Lighter than my Shadow | Dan Smith
Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow (2013), a 500 page graphic autobiography, offers an
account of anorexia that indirectly evokes the zombie as a model for alienation, suffering,
recovery and witnessing. The figure of the zombie evoked here is not a monster in the
conventional sense, but a corporeal protagonist pushed to the limits of cognition, an embodied
subject that can no longer make claims to agency or representation. Green makes use of her
medium to allow us to see how, as a girl with an eating disorder, she saw herself. The narrative
images also allow us to see what young Katie cannot. As her weight loss accelerates, the
narrative reveals how close the author/protagonist came to a barely human condition, the body as
closer to death than life. This is the zombie as a physical and psychic condition of bodily
emaciation and the loss of agency, not as a trope of horror genres, but as a transformation of the
human body, brought about through distorted relations between cognition and corporeal
anatomy. The concepts of distorting mirrors and hierarchies of disgust that Flusser playfully
employs find disturbing correlations in Green’s narrative.
Dan Smith is a Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL
Fishing for Zebedee | Mark Ingham
I am becoming animal, a rocking horse, a ventriloquist’s emu, a felt frog who will never be a
prince. The labyrinth I inhabit has multiple exits but only one entrance. How you come out of my
maze does not depend on how you enter, you will be morphed. Charged by the planes of
immanence your lines of flight will electrify and animate you. Suckling and entangling you
become; bag puss, zippy, muffin the mule, bill and ben, lady penelope, lady lovelace and finally
zebedee, boing! You fight the forces of abstraction to distraction and it is a draw. You perform,
you happen, you dematerialise, you objectify, you are the subject, you are not. You will evolve,
revolve, and dissolve some of those images of thought you have explored by constructing fleeting
imaginary worlds. What will pull you back to the memory of crossing the singular threshold? Will it
be through rosebudishness, madeleineness, or by the encounter with the idea that forces you to
think differently? I will bring a spring, a wooden ball, a moustache, red, blue, yellow and black.
Taking in Vilem Flusser and Louis Bec’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis as a ‘line of flight’ this paper
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uses the characters from the Magic Roundabout as luminaires in, ‘The eternal night of the
vampyroteuthis [which] is filled with colours and sounds that are emitted by living beings-an
eternal festival of colours and sounds, a son et lumiere of extraordinary opulence. The ocean floor
is carpeted with red, white, and violet stone; there are dunes of blue and yellow sand, sparkling
with pearls and fragments of molten meteorites. Forests, meadows, and plains of plant-like
animals, beaming with colours, sway in the current with fanned tentacles. Wandering in their
midst are giant iridescent snails, and whirring above them are swarms of crabs, flashing in silver,
red, and yellow. It is a luxuriant garden that the vampyroteuthis can illuminate, on a whim, to enjoy
its desserts in splendour.’ (Flusser & Bec 2000: 35)
Mark Ingham is the Acting Programme Director, Spatial Communication & CTS Coordinator, London
College of Communication, UAL
Panel 3. Digital Materialities
Emergent Materiality: The Self and the Other in Material Dialogues | Virna Koutla
The paper revolves around the notion of matter at the intersection of the physical and the digital
and investigates potential ways through which materiality can be enacted and performed. By
putting forward a speculative approach towards design, the essay explores the use of digital
media for the emergence of matter’s unexpected compositional capacities and focuses on the
degree of affect between subjects and objects as part of the process. As in the case of Flusser’s
and Bec’s vampyroteuthis infernalis fable, the paper provides the groundwork for a material
dialogue between the self and the other and serves as a framework for thinking about the
dialectics of the actual (real), the virtual (also real, but not necessarily actual), and the space of
possibilities that their interaction opens up. In the form of the ‘what if’ scenario of a conversation
with a giant terracotta vase, the paper addresses space as an expanded field of propagation and
effects in which materiality emerges as an assemblage of active forces. In particular, the scenario
proposes ‘Synthetic Materiality’ as a new way of understanding and, further, formulating the
hybrid relations between subjects and objects as well as the environments in which they reside.
Deriving from the greek word synthesis (which means bringing different parts together into a
composite whole), ‘synthetic materiality’ expresses the merging process that gives shape to the
interaction of the hybrid actants and advocates for an understanding of matter as a substance in
flux. If, then, materiality is always becoming, what are our potentialities in the inexhaustible “game
of life”?
Virna Koutla is a Post-graduate Student at the Royal College of Art
Robotum Anthromorphum: of Virtual Assistants and their Networked Materialities | Michel Erler,
London College of Communication
The development and design of artificial intelligence has predominately been an anthropocentric
endeavour. The sophisticated humanoid robot, indistinguishable from us human beings has been
the idealised image for the A.I. community to work towards to for decades. With the rise of
ubiquitous text bots and virtual assistant making use of speech recognition software such as
Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri (the particular ‘object’ discussed in this
paper), our conception of artificial characters changes. As Flusser presumably would have said,
these characters appear and disappear “like ghosts”, and we have not yet fully figured out how to
make sense of them.
The physical bodies of these assistants consist and rely as much on algorithmic processing as they do
on a planetary-scale network consisting of mobile phones, fibre cables, data centres, communication
satellites, etc. How do we as designers deal with their tangible and intangible materiality? How do we as
humans deal with this other, algorithmic form of intelligence? Where do we place them on the range
between animate and inanimate, human and inhuman? How can Flusser’s phenomenological work
provide an intellectual toolbox to address these questions?
Michel Erler is a Graduate of London College of Communications
Discussants
Allan Parsons is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins
Maria Walsh is a Reader in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts
Amanda Windle is DigiLab Fellow at London College of Communication
Mark Ingham 