The 2024 student-led commission, Reimagining the Monument, will see artist Clare Strand exploring the photographic medium by posing new questions about our relationships with both analogue and AI image-making.
A Butterfly and a Horse by Clare Strand is a participatory monument to the complex relationship between analogue photography and the networked image. Inspired by the early image transfer experiments by Shelford Bidwell, a pioneer of modern digital technology, this monument explores how the creation, profusion, and circulation of images has a significant impact on our experience of time, memory, and identity.
It is the result of a collaboration and was commissioned by the Reimagining the Monument team, led by Sotheby’s Institute of Art MA students focused on debating and discussing the significance of monuments in the modern world. The monument will be installed at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), as part of their Digital Design Weekend (September 20 - 22, 2024).
The work will consist of a recreated darkroom, incorporating Strand’s own (and longtime unused) enlarger, which visitors will be invited to use to manually expose a photograph of either a horse or a butterfly, making reference to the first two images which Bidwell attempted to digitally transfer in 1880.
Although photography was originally considered the most scientifically accurate instrument capable of capturing reality, even the earliest pioneers recognized its potential for misinformation and the ‘hoax.’ It is now clear that photographic images can also pervert reality, especially considering recent developments in digital technology such as generative AI software. Far from Roland Barthes’ idea of the photographic image as an index of the ‘having-been-there’ of a precise moment in the past, digital technology has completely changed the prospects of the medium, manifesting in several respects as an oversaturation and deluge of images. It is precisely the phenomenon of the constant presence and rapid exchange of images in our daily lives, particularly through social media, that causes fundamental confusion and disorientation. This potentially leads to the draining of value from images themselves and even a distortion of the memory they carry. Paradoxically, the mere act of capturing what stands before us through the lenses of a smartphone or a digital camera to preserve a memory can lead to the oblivion of that very memory. It is as if digitising memory can somehow eradicate actual memory. Instead, we insist on the implicit mediating effect that photography has, as it is not a neutral instrument, but tends to frame reality through the photographer’s eye. Photographs epitomise the irreversible passage of time, inevitably interposing a distance between what has been captured by the camera and its viewers, like monuments which frequently claim to bear remembrance of the past but are necessarily detached from the present.
While monuments traditionally occupy public space and typically glorify certain individuals or values belonging to the past, the Reimagining the Monument team proposes a different concept of what monuments can be. Contrary to the traditional view, we emphasize that memory is inherently subjective, shaped by each person's unique experiences, personality, and identity. Rather than considering the function of memory as exercised simply through the visualisation of images, we must also consider that often identities are expressed through images, particularly via social media, as they are able to stage certain scenarios, which further suggests that memory is inherently subjective.
Erving Goffman in his seminal text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), theorised the so-called “dramaturgical analysis” of social interaction, arguing that individuals behave like actors on a stage, perform their own identity to a public of social peers, and present themselves as they want to be perceived. In the context of social media, we could talk about a digital presentation of the self, in which individuals present or post their identity mainly through image sharing, contributing to the empowering of digital memory and building a data set that will be kept as reference by platforms operated by algorithms. The digital self would only function as a mere simulacrum of the real individual, inevitably blurring the boundaries between the virtual and real, creating a hybrid reality.
In this context, we might ask ourselves what the role of a monument is in our current society. Is it still a useful instrument to crystallise the past and preserve its memory, or does it risk standing as a mute symbol of something irremediably forgotten in our epoch, exclusively oriented to the hic et nunc dimension?
Strand’s work responds to these questions by conceiving a type of non-monument to the very idea of image creation and transference, focusing on the analogue photographic process and rejecting the modern thirst for immediate satisfaction by delaying the completion of the developing process of the photographs. People engaging with the monument will indeed receive their final photographs in the post weeks after exposing the negatives at the V&A.
In this sense, Strand’s own approach to the photographic medium, which she deliberately affirms to work ‘against’, is emblematic of the issues raised by digitalization. Shifting away from an essentially analogue practice, the artist has focused her approach on the intersection between the electronic and digital world, with its algorithms and generative tools as photographic lenses, resulting in an interesting exploration of the role of chance in the disoriented world we live in.
It is crucial to note that Strand’s monument also directly addresses the perennial issue of photography’s veridicity, as the images of a butterfly and a horse used for creating the negatives will be generated by an AI program trained on her own back catalogue of work. The two images offered are ‘memories’ of images, delivered in Strand’s own personal style, even though the animals depicted never existed and the photographs were never physically taken.
Finally, the very images produced by the people visiting the monument will be posted on a Butterfly and a Horse Instagram page, also showing the context in which every visitor framed them, and highlighting how digital image-sharing has become an important instrument to express identity. Thus, the participatory element of the installation will encourage visitors to focus on their own personal experience of images, shifting the paradigm of the monument from the public sphere to a more intimate and personal one, addressing the fragmentation present in modern society and the inescapable subjectivity of memory.
Alessandro Manetti, MA Contemporary Art '24
Sandra Nikusev, MA Art Business '24