Händelsehorsiont || Event Horizon. Distribuerad fotografi
Cecilia Grönberg
OEI BOOKS #1, OEI editör 2016
isbn: 9789185905850

Photography as a technology has in recent decades undergone a series of transformative changes, which have entailed different renegotiations of the functions of photography – as image or information, as inscription or transmission. Within the framework of such a radical shift this dissertation in photography, Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon. Distribuerad fotografi, insists on sounding the persisting effects of analogue photographs within digital ecologies. The ”Event Horizon” is here employed as an image and a concept, as a space for projection, and as an interface that enables reflections on the different ways in which we meet and associate with photographic images in a context of digital production, publishing and circulation.

Digital photography is distributed. In its exploration of different visual and artistic implications of such a disseminated position, Händelsehorisont takes assistance from the octopus, this “soft intelligence” that is the starting point of an eight armed image- and text-based essay, which tentatively follows the tentacular forms of these complex molluscs through history and literature, as life forms and media systems.

Händelsehorisont is primarily a photographed book, but the photographic practice does not halt with the single image. It also takes place in montages between texts, documents and contexts. In that regard Händelsehorisont is also a book that generates different constellations for reading, at the same time as it produces specific fields of gravity where images in circulation, or floating images, can be captured by other images and thereby create new densities and fields of energy. One of these gravitational fields is an essay that studies forms for montage-based ”visual historiography”.

Händelsehorisont is localized between different images and systems, technologies and ways of reading, humans, animals, and software, and within this movement it often dwells at surfaces and spaces that can offer openings for future, not yet defined shapes of photographic life forms.