Mimesis and Photography

A prisoner in Plato’s cave, man sat by the fire watching the shadowplay of distant objects on the wall, while listening to the echo of the world passing by.

According to the Greek philosopher Plato (424-348 BC), only the philosopher was able to see through the false layer of the particular to grasp the idea behind; the truth, which reality could only imitate. In other words, even in ancient Greece, there was an idea that human beings did not know reality, understood as the the truth about the world. This train of thought can be compared with the more contemporary idea that we live in a kind of matrix of simulated reality.

Plato’s philosophical method had abstract, universal forms as ideal. Plato’s student Aristotle also aimed at the universal, but believed that a greater understanding of universals had to come through particular phenomena. According to Aristotle all art was mimetic, and the urge to imitate was an essential human quality. The base of art was the joy of recognition one felt upon seeing a clever imitation:

“To imitate is instinctive in man from his infancy. By this he is distinguished from other animals, that he is, of all, the most imitative, and through this instinct receives his earliest education. All men, likewise, naturally receive pleasure from imitation. (…) Hence the pleasure they receive from a picture: in viewing it they learn, that they infer, they discover, what every object is.”

Imitation could improve, worsen or be accurate. Imitation did not necessarily have to be through image or poetry; it could be trough rhythm, melody, word, colour, shape, action and dance:

“with respect to the arts above mentioned, rhythm, words and melody, are the different means by which, either single, or variously combined, they all produce their imitation. (…) In those of dance, rhythm alone, without melody; for there are dancers who, by rhythm applied to gesture, express manners, passions, and actions.”

According to Aristotle, the poet could imitate the same objects either by narrating through a different character or using his own voice, or he could imitate by dramatizing, using actors who stood forth in his place. Performing mimetically meant placing action in a narrative. A narrator (using both speech and gesture) could have an audience of both listeners and viewers, and preferably a combination. Aristotle’s mimesis was not a realist imitation as later times came to understand it, but rather an interpretation of the world – the outer world as well as the inner world – feelings, actions, ideas, religion etc, expressed and enjoyed by humans.

To these ancient Greek philosophers, art was an imitation of the human experience, and an interpretation of divine ideas. Since reality was considered a kind of flawed reflexion of divine ideas, it follows that art would be as true and real as reality, if not more so.

During the Renaissance the Greek art ideals were readdressed in Europe, albeit in a Christian version as a realism full of signs and symbols. Mimesis was now understood as an artistic copy of nature. Perspective was rediscovered as a scientific method, where the eye was thought of as the receiver of light waves, and the artists canvas was compared to a window. The first description of a camera obscura (literally “dark room,”) as an aid to a draftsman was made in the book Natural Magic from 1553. In the camera obscura light travels through a hole and onto the back wall, appearing as a moving image, a reflection of the scenery outside, but up-side-down and mirror reversed. By the 17th-century the camera obscura system had become advanced enough to be a common piece of equipment amongst painters.

Albeit a century before the industrial revolution, it was the time of the invention of the first robots (automatons) like Vaucanson’s Canard Digérateur, from 1738. The bourgeoisie had a strong wish for a device which could help them create good portraits, and several of this type of devices saw the light of day. One of them was the Camera Lucida invented in 1807 by W.H. Wollaston. Placed above a piece of paper the Camera Lucida made it possible to see both the paper and the thing you were drawing simultaneously.

In the beginning of the 18th century the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) was experimenting with fixing the image of a camera obscura, using different combinations of substances and mechanical techniques. In 1827, Niépce met the painter Louis-Jacques- Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), who specialized in scenic paintings for theatre sets, and who also experimented with capturing the camera image. Niépce and Daguerre formed a partnership and received financial support from the French government. The earliest surviving photograph (daguerreotype) is from 1837.

If Aristotle was right in claiming that humans are mimetic beings and that our noblest sense is sight, then the camera and the photograph had to be the fulfillment of a highly important ideal. However, the official reason for the investment in photography by the French government was for copying ancient inscriptions. The first use of photography was thus officially for print-making and copying: not for the production of images, but for the spreading of words. It seems there was a conflict between the official wish for copying and spreading books and information and the unofficial public desire for mimesis and magic. This conflict is echoed today in much of the literary criticism of photography.

The invention of photography was a result of the search of an accurate mimicking of nature, as well as the result of a mixture of scientific and artistic endeavors, which was part of the age of mechanical reproduction and the industrial revolution. Right from the beginning, the photographic process was used for artistic means, which to a varying of degrees showed something very far removed from reality; for instance painterly staged situations featuring transparent, ghostlike characters, as seen in the photograph below.

In spite of much post-digital photography theory claiming so, the relationship between photography and the real was never a simple, innocent one. Photography was invented because of an unofficial desire for mimesis, magic and pictures, as much as for a scientific search for truth, or spreading of information. In my opinion this shows how, from the very beginning, photography managed to combine reality and imagination.

First Impressions

Let me begin by explaining what the term ‘photography’ means to me.

The word ‘photography’ was coined by the inventor John Herscel in 1839 and means light-writing. But in my mind, it is not photography, unless the process involves a camera.

The defining aspect of photography is thus the apparatus, the camera, and not the light (or light sensitive material) alone. If I scan something on a scanner, it may use light, but the resulting image is not a photograph, it is a scan. In the same way, the effects you can create on photographic paper or negative using object-shading etc., are maybe photographic in quality, but by my definition, those images are not really photographs.

This definition of photography excludes many artistic endeavors seeking to experiment with photography, while including what art historian John Tagg calls “mindless photography” – such as the computerized London traffic cameras. Mindless or not, in my opinion there are always human ideas behind the apparatus: not only because cameras are created by humans, but because any use of the camera is the result of human projects, driven by human desires.

Although I question the relation of photographs to reality, I do not doubt our emotional understanding of them as true to some extent. I am convinced that any interest in photography is emotional, and that the most fascinating thing about photography is its potential to both inform and mislead, since to some extent photography exists in a grey zone between reality and imagination.

Photographs have had a huge influence on how we see the world, how we remember and how we think. This is why the defining aspect of photography – the camera – has to be combined with a more general understanding of what pictures are and how they work, to be described later in the blogposts Photographic Image Formation and Embodied Vision.

According to Jan Baetens the theorizing on photography has been led by writers and academics, first and foremost from a literary point of view:

“Step by step, literary-minded scholarship has brought in an analysis that stresses the photograph’s vulnerability to the characteristics of its seemingly opposite pole: the text and, more broadly speaking, the time-based arts. This larger scope can be described in three phases: first, a picture is seen as situated in time; then, a picture is seen as telling a story; and finally, a picture is seen as capable of narrating a fiction.”

Three elements which, according to Baetens, contradict the traditional vision of photography as a realist slice of space. The literary discourse has also insisted on photography as a meaning-producing device, shaped by the spectator, projecting their own stories into the image. While literary theory has generated many good points, according to Baetens, it does not solve current issues. The main problem is that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish photography from other types of visual knowledge production. Baetens sees the solution in a rediscovery and broadening of historicization, including the whole field of photography, a more interdisciplinary approach and a renewed interest in medium specificity.

In the next blogpost, Looking Back – History and Key Concepts, I will be placing the question of photography and the real within a decidedly Western tradition, beginning with notions of art and reality in ancient Greek philosophy, leading up to the invention of photography, and from there looking at the question of photography and reality as part of the development of a discourse around photography. My aim is to include the most relevant theory, without being unnecessarily detailed.

The Paradox of Photography (Introduction)

“It is precisely because there are ways in which photographs are not just representations that photography and the theory of photography have been so important. Indeed, we might say that it is precisely the photograph’s complicated status as a theoretical object that has made it so important in art. And it is precisely the efforts of photographers to establish them as pictures that have made photography so crucial.”

Walter Benn Michaels: Photographs and Fossils

Writing my thesis has allowed me to investigate some of the things which have fascinated me since I began studying Modern Culture back in 1996. For a long time I have suspected that the human experience of the world is linguistic in some sense, and that photography exists somewhere between language and reality. Photography has interested me for as long as I remember, and has been my full time occupation since 2002. Having read a great many photo-theoretical books since deciding to write my thesis on photography, I have discovered the following: There really is no academic consensus on the nature of photography, or even on photography’s relationship with reality.

Because we know that photographs are created in a specific way, by a camera which points and captures something, the way we look at photographs is different to how we look at other pictures. We take them to have a unique relation to reality. But the exact nature of this relation is unclear.

The photograph embodies a certain crisis in art: The question of what it takes for something to count as a work of art, the relation between the meaning of a work of art and how it was produced, the intention of the photographer as opposed to the mindless automation of the camera, and finally the question of representation. As put by literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels, photography

“marks the transformation of the natural object into the intentional one, of the trace into the representation, not exactly a representation, not exactly a representation of the referent but rather of the making of the photograph.”

Reading Photography Theory – The Art Seminar (2007) I was surprised to discover that my background as a photographer has given me an understanding of photography, which seems to be missing in many of the texts supplied by the 40 academic contributors. In his
recently published book What Photography Is (2011) the editor of Photography Theory, art historian James Elkins, wonders how it is possible that so few academics worry about photography’s realism. One of the most interesting aspects of Photography Theory is a
heated discussion which takes place amongst several of the participants about the use of the index within photography theory. The concept of the index originates from the scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), and was introduced into photography theory by the art critic Rosalind Krauss in 1977.

Peirce developed semiotics as a discipline to study signs – the symbol/index/icon triad was one of his many ways of distinguishing between signs, focusing on the relationship between sign and object. According to Peirce, indexes/indices are directly influenced by their objects, like for instance footprints and weathercocks, while symbols have convention based relationships, and icons have specific properties in common with their objects. Krauss used the index to explain photography’s relationship to the real, as a trace made by light (photons) on the negative. In What Photography Is Elkins explains that he was surprised to find that so few of the contributors of Photography Theory seemed to care about the subject of the index. As Elkins’ points out, the notion that photographs are the result of a mechanical interaction with the world coexists with the notion that photography’s realism is a matter of reading, and so photography is seen as simultaneously a projection of our desires about the world and an accurate record of the world. Like Elkins, I am interested in looking closer at how photography represents the world, and in this way discover if – and how – photography is able to be both a trace of reality and a projection of our desires.

Problem statement: What is the relationship between photography and reality, and is the concept of the index helpful in illuminating this relationship?

My hypothesis is, that albeit in many ways the relationship between photography and reality is a complex problem, it can be answered by rejecting the idea of the index in favor of a fresh look at the invention of photography as a result of mimetic ideals, examining how photographs are actually created as a combination of apparatus and human imagination,  and how our relationship with reality is based in our embodied visuality, as described by film theorist Torben Grodal.

According to the poet and professor of cultural studies Jan Baetens, photography is first and foremost communication – and not in the simple form of showing through a window, nor in the sense of a ‘putting together’. The way toward a better understanding of photography is an intermingling of word and image, scholarship and creation, that leaves room for contradiction:

“Artists and scholars, to use the traditional vocabulary, should have the opportunity to work, think, and write together, and to do so in such a way that new, interdisciplinary forms of producing knowledge may become possible. (…) Visual artists not only ‘think’, but their work often proposes illustrations of thought- provoking devices, who’s structure and content have effects that can be compared to that of language.”

Baetens asks for a widening of the concept of “professionalization” to include people with a different knowledge of photography. In my thesis I tried to follow Baetens advice, combining words and images, art and theory, amateur and professional. I begin by defining what I mean by the term photography, in the brief section First Impressions. The next part of the thesis, Looking Back – History and Key Concepts, outlines a general background for the subject of photography and reality, starting at the beginning of Western thought, in order to establish a connection between the ideal of mimesis and the invention of photography. I include the technical development of photography in order to demystify the relationship between photography and reality. In the chapters Mimesis and Photography and Baudelaire and Surrealism I look at early views of photography as part nature, part science. The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was concerned about the effect photography’s superficial truth values might have on art and culture, while surrealists such as the poet André Breton (1896-1966) used photography to question reality and explore the human mind. I see the main cause of their conflicting views on photography as based on a misunderstanding of the concept of mimesis, and so re-reading Aristotle‘s mimesis is my first answer to the question of reality and photography.

In the next part of the thesis, I provide a simple introduction to the best known photographic theory on the subject of photography and the real, in the sections Walter Benjamin, John Szarkowski, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss & the index, and briefly in the section Digital Photography. My aim is to demonstrate that none of these accounts manage to explain the relationship between photography and reality. The history of photography and the discourse surrounding it has been written and rewritten a number of times since its invention. My account is based mainly on the art historian Baumont Newhall‘s History of Photography (1982) and the art historian Sabine T. Kriebel’s chapter Theories of Photography – A short history from James Elkins’ Photography Theory (2007). I have also glanced at French lecturer Edward Welch & German professor J.J. Long’s introduction to Photography: Theoretical snapshots (2009). Finally, I will also be introducing Vilém Flusser, who believed that the human use of media (images, text and photographs) had a direct impact on our general thinking and understanding of the world. The following part of the thesis, The Art Seminar Discussion, is focused around the question of indexicality, based in large parts on the book Photography Theory. I begin with a discussion of Performative Photography. One of the starting points of the Photography Theory round table discussion is the art historian Margaret Iversen‘s essay on performative photography and the surrealist version of narration, which assumes that a subjective account of the experience of reality is more truthful than a supposedly objective realism. Performative photography demonstrates how photographs can act as documentary, realistic, staged, subjective, and narrative at the same time.

The next part of the thesis takes a critical look at how useful the concept of the index has been within photographic theory. The discussion is divided in two – the first part, The Photograph and the Index? Part I, is based on the Photography Theory discussion between art historian Joel Snyder and art theorist Rosalind Krauss. In the chapter Photographic Image Formation I then take a closer look at how image formation actually happens as the result of the camera and the photographer, demonstrating why the idea of the index is not very helpful in defining the photographic picture. The second part of the discussion, The Photograph and the Index? Part II, is based on texts by film theorist Martin Lefebre and art historian Geoffrey Batchen, who both argue that even for Charles Sanders Peirce, who originated the concept of the index, whatever is present to the mind can only be so as a representation.

In the chapter The Surround, I introduce James Elkins’ book What Photography Is (2011) where Elkins writes against Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). Elkins is in search of the essence of photography, rejecting the concept of the index, noting that what separates photography from painting is “the surround” – all the dull detail surrounding the object of interest. This fits in with the next point of the thesis, Embodied Visions, where I take a closer look at film theorist Torben Grodal’s description of the experience of audiovisual realism. Torben Grodal looks at film through the lens of bioculturalism, using modern brain science as a model for aesthetic experience. In his chapter on embodied vision and realism Grodal analyzes some of the ways in which realism is experienced by viewers as an evaluative feeling rooted in perception, cognition, and habituation. Grodal describes how the human mind understands the things we see and experience, first taking in details and secondly remembering things in more general terms, thus creating meaning. As it turns out, this concept of embodied vision fits very well with my reading of of mimesis, performative photography and even with Peirce, because all this points to how there is no human access to reality beyond embodiment and representation, and because it demonstrates how we are always driven by associations when we create meaning in our minds.

Having thus argued that photography’s realism is not a question of indexicality but rather of our embodied experience of the coincidental excess of detail in the pictures, and that photographs are always an interpreted version of reality, I will try and see how this fits in with a highly exemplary contemporary photography project – Carmen and Alec Soth’s photobook project Brighton Picture Hunt (2010).

When the American Magnum photographer Alec Soth was commissioned by Photoworks and British photographer and curator Martin Parr for the Brighton Photo Biennal 2010, Soth planned to follow a photographer from Brighton newspaper Argus around as he went about his work, but upon entering the UK, Soth was informed by a customs officer that he was not allowed to work while he was there. Instead Soth’s seven year old daughter Carmen took her father’s place as photographer and produced the exhibited work, which also resulted in the book Brighton Picture Hunt.

The Brighton Picture Hunt project points to the questions mentioned earlier – the intentions of the photographer (in this case both child and adult) and the question of the transformation of the natural thing into a representation. In my opinion, the photos come across as unintentional snapshots, and as such seem like fragments of reality. However, because they do not conform to classic ideas about composition, they actually point to themselves as pictures in a way that a more traditional photograph might not. The photographs have a fairly obscure subject matter, and consist almost solely of the excess of details, which create the reality-effect. In this way they are good examples for most of the theory presented in this thesis, illuminating how photographs are connected to reality through a combination of embodied vision, the camera and the photographer.

The Paradox of Photography?

August 31st 2011 I handed in my thesis on The Paradox of Photography. Since then I have been waiting impatiently to find out whether or not people like it (and what grade it got). It was very difficult to write. I guess I shouldn’t have started with such a grand title.

The first feedback I got from my advisor was that my writing style was too essayistic. That may be because I was writing it in a sort of blog-style, thinking I would publish it. I have since hesitated to do so, because I am not sure it fits the format anymore. After all I made a lot of changes to my writing while trying to turn it into a proper academic thesis, in stead of  my own odd philosophising.

I have now decided to give it a go, and turn the chapters into blog posts. I might change a few things along the way.

As always, I’d be glad to hear your thoughts and comments! And feel free to write me if you’d like a copy which includes footnotes!

In Search of Lost Time

Back in March I received an email from Rotem Rozental, content developer and researcher at The SIP, asking if I was interested in collaborating with their blog: “I would like to post one of your photographic projects, along with a short text by you, delineating your inspirations, motivations and aims.”

I received the mail while on charter holiday with my 3 year old. It was the kind of holiday where you walk around inside a cloud a lot of the time and feel exhausted even though you go to bed at 9 pm every day.

The SIP contacting me was a nice surprise. I never feel certain how people find me. More than once I have been so bad at writing about what I do, selecting the right work for the right forum, that nothing ever came of it. If you have ever spent time on my website, you may have noticed that editing is not what I am best at. I take a lot of photographs, I shoot mainly based on my intuition, and I do not really like talking about my photography.. It’s easier talking about other peoples work. I would say I relate very well to this and this – and off course, less surprisingly, this too.

With that in mind, I was a little uncertain of what the SIP wanted from me, and what I should show them. In the end Rotem suggested I show a project from 2008, In Search of Lost Time, and once I started writing about the images, it seemed to fit in well with my dissertation on The Paradox of Photography, which I am currently writing. The focus is on the relationship between photographs and reality.. I am trying to understand better what photography is and what it does for us on a basic level. I am not just interested in art photography, but also in vernacular, snapshot photography. So far the thesis begins with a quote from Walter Benn Michaels closing essay from James Elkins: Photography Theory, The Art Seminar (2007):

“It is precisely because there are ways in which photographs are not just representations that photography and the theory of photography have been so important. Indeed, we might say that it is precisely the photograph’s complicated status as a theoretical object that has made it so important in art. And it is precisely the efforts of photographers to establish them as pictures that have made photography so crucial.”

For me all this is related to how we experience the world, and thus it’s also connected to last years Flesh Machine project. Anyways, here is what I sent to The SIP. There is a slightly different version on their blog. I hope some of you find this interesting and can relate to it.. You are very welcome to add your thoughts and comments!

In Search of Lost Time

Rooms once decorated and occupied; albums and torn up photos found in a nursing home bin, an indication of a life documented.

Odette was born in the outskirts of Paris on the day The Great War broke out. Her mother died a few years later, and her father married his brother’s widow, as was customary in those days. As a young woman Odette moved to Copenhagen where she met and married a Jewish businessman from Poland. In 1942 they had a daughter, my mother. In 1944 they fled to Sweden, where they lived till the war was over. In 1960 Odette was widowed, and she spent the second half of her life living as a wealthy, independent woman, travelling the world.

In the final years of her life Odette lost her memory, leaving her oblivious to who the people around her were, but still remembering the time in the 1960s when she bought the fabric that decorated her room; curtains, pillows and bed cover. She died in a nursing home, July 2006, on my 30th birthday.

I am not sure exactly what story I am telling, except it is one of conflict and loss.

Once photographed by Man Ray, Odette’s hands, transformed by age, are now here.

The history of my involvement with photography starts with the family album. Many of the family photographs that fascinated me as a child show people I have never met in real life. Handwritten scribbles on the back reveal their identity. These images link me to the past, my roots, even if I only have my parents’ testimony to confirm this. There is something very haunting about old family photographs. I love the stories they imply. Somehow the stories are mine, because they are part of my family history, and I would not exist without these people. I have part of their DNA in me.

Perhaps I find these photographs haunting because so many of these people died so long ago – but somehow they remain present in the images, captured and immortalized, staring from the past into the present. The photograph holds a secret, and I hope that staring at it hard enough will reveal it.

A lot of the work I do is based on family snapshots, and it is often about narrating life and how our identity is partly shaped by images. When I was little, my father often photographed me. He let me try his SLR too. I got my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 77x, when I was 9. I think picking up that camera was my way of coming into existence, creating my own story, as well a continuing the one already being told.

I started pointing the camera at myself when I was very young. Partly because I was the subject closest at hand, but also because I wanted to see what I looked like from the point of view of others. I soon discovered that the camera’s point of view could be manipulated, and could help me represent the ideal me. It helped me see myself as beautiful. About the same time I also realized I did not like other people to photograph me anymore. I felt vulnerable in front of the camera, and preferred having control of it.

As I have grown older, I have continued to experiment with representing myself, recording physical and mental changes I have gone through. When I was pregnant I photographed myself and my growing belly every few weeks, and uploaded many of the images to my Flickr stream. I feel shy about putting myself out there, in cyberspace, but I also wanted to share the images. It is a game of hide and seek, playing with the boundaries of what can be shown.

The face of my grandmother, shot by Man Ray, blended with her curtains. I’m pregnant and wearing her night dress.

People take photos to remember. Something to look at and show, when they want to revisit the past, the time they were pregnant, the time their child was a baby, the first school day.

People take photos to remember. And to share. People imagine that what is in the image has some level of truth to it. They may even feel the images are more true than their memory. If a photo of them is attractive, they feel more attractive. If a photo makes them look fat, they think they must be fatter than they realized. If a photo shows them smiling during a rainy vacation, they think, after all, it was a good vacation.

The reality of images, is more real to us, than our memories. We trust the photos more. As we move away from past reality, images take over that reality and become more real. We base so much of our evaluation of reality on the images we see. It is how we learned how a horse moves when it gallops. It is how we discovered what facial expressions are really like. Sometimes, for some of us, it is easier to understand the reality of a moment, when we step away from it a little bit, by putting a camera between it and us. It becomes neatly organized within a frame. We gain some level of control over it.

When my grandmother became senile and lost much of her memory, she started tearing photos up. My mother discovered a wastebasket full of torn up photographs, some dating back to the 40s, some from more recent years, most of them portraits of family members, some old friends too. All these torn up pieces were mixed together, black and white and colour, all mixed up in the wastebasket. Mixed up and lost, like her memory.

Tearing up photographs is almost sacrilege. Imagine piercing the eyes of your mother in a photograph. Its just a piece of paper. Or is it a piece of her? You keep the photos of loved ones close to you. If they hurt you, you can take it out on the photo. It is an frightening act of destruction. The photograph represent the person. Thus it is apparent that my grandmother must have felt hateful and resentful towards all these faces staring at her from the old photos. She must have known they were related to her somehow – but she didn’t remember! The photos had lost their meaning, because they had lost their anchoring in reality, their grounding in her memory. Memory is also our grounding in reality. It is our horizon of experience and our understanding of our own bodies, which gives us our ability to interpret the world around us.

Photographs have a life of their own. When we look back at old photos, we may discover something new, based on things we have come to learn. We may realize a photo of our parents was taken when they were in fact breaking apart, and we may suddenly see some hint of sadness in the corner of an eye. Photos tell stories. Stories that only matter if we feel some connection to them, if we recognize something, if they make us think.

flesh machine III

Never did get round to posting the result of the flesh machine project from last year.. But here it is!

The idea behind the film was to show the connection between the mind/brain/thinking and the body/flesh/senses, the way we experience the world, feel and think.

Penny Police

I did my first photo shoot with Danish musician Marie Fjeldsted back in 2009, and another one in 2010, for the cover of her first EP, Thieves Like Us, which has been getting very good reviews. It’s not officially released until April 4th 2011.

Marie Fjeldsted told me that she often felt inspired while walking or bicycling around Copenhagen, so I thought it would be nice to shoot a video reflecting this, something which was on the move and in a format that changed, so it might be viewed oriented both landscape and portrait.

The video was shot on a mobile and is meant for viewing on a mobile device too. I have to admit, the technique might not be there completely, as most mobile phones will not let you tilt the video, but still – it was a nice experiment I think.

You can check out the result here:

Expose Yourself

A couple of years ago I participated a video collaboration between artists from all over the world, inspired by the Surrealist creation method, The Exquisite Corpse Video Project (ECVP). The best thing about it was the people I connected with. One of them was the talented Swedish artist Anders Weberg, who works with video, sound, new media and installations, primarily concerned with identity. In the beginning of 2011 Anders invited artists to interpret “Expose Yourself” in front of a mobile phone camera and send it to him. 18 people from 11 different countries answered him. I was one of them. My video was shot in front of a mirror, using a flash light and a mobile phone. Anders re-interpreted all the interpretations and added himself to the mixture. The result is very nice, I think. Check it out…

Artists: ANTTI SAVELA, AREA ERINA LÓPEZ PINO, BO G SVENSSON, CLINT ENNS, OSVALDO CIBILS, WILLIAM ESDALE, THORE SONESON, WOLF D. SCHREIBER, SHEER ZED, ALEX BUHL, CORINNE DE SAINT ANGEL, JOSE VIEIRA, EVA GRIP, NICLAS HALLBERG, ALISON WILLIAMS, STAFFAN LAGER, MOTOKO ISHII AND SHARON SEKHON.