Salutary alienation
by Bas Blaasse (february 2023)published in Trigger #4 Together, Fw:Books & FOMU Antwerp
A double orientation
Fungi are the oldest and among the largest living organisms on the planet. Mycelium networks are found everywhere; every autumn, they make their existence known by shooting up mushrooms. For the vast majority of the time, however, they remain virtually invisible to us. Many fungi develop a relationship of ‘mutualistic symbiosis’ with plants or trees, in a formation known as a ‘mycorrhiza’ (from the Latin myco, meaning ‘of fungi’, and the Greek rhiza, meaning ‘root’). The two (or more) organisms are connected to each other via underground root networks, making them dependent on one another. Fungi extract minerals from the soil that plants and trees can absorb through their roots; in return, the latter provide the fungi with carbohydrates. It’s the most common form of collaboration between plants and fungi – which, however, is not always harmonious. A fungus can also begin parasitising the root of a plant, for example. A perpetually unstable alliance, nonetheless of great significance for the creation and preservation of biodiversity, as it enables plants to survive in more challenging circumstances.In the autumn of 2018, Segers headed into Duden Park in Brussels to photograph fungi and mushrooms. I picture him wriggling through wet bushes, looking around, stooping to avoid low-hanging branches, before finally kneeling down in the soggy, multi-coloured litter of dead leaves, moss, and acorns, camera poised, because his eye has been drawn to an unusual fungus or mould formation at the root of a nearby tree. It’s a stereotypical image of the solitary photographer, traversing the world with patient observation and extracting visual ‘quotes’ from his surroundings, to borrow a phrase from John Berger.
Segers’ work has a strong material orientation and is characterised by an interplay of at least two movements or motifs. The gaze is directed both inward and outward. Even when no camera is involved, his work often focuses on the technical potential of uncontrollable biological worlds that lie beyond the veil of our everyday perception. By experimenting with natural fixation and exposure techniques, self-developed camera systems, and vegetable inks, Segers’ projects bear the literal traces of the more-than-human world they both interact with and depend on. The result is an elementary and experimental photographic self-examination, which at the same time evokes the presence of an environment we scarcely notice otherwise, leading to the realization that the technological and the biological form no contradiction, but rather a continuum.
FUNGI (2019) is the result of Segers’ investigations in Duden Park and consists of several prints installed above a pair of heating devices. A timing system controls the heaters, which turn on and off at regulated intervals. The images – enlarged macro shots of all kinds of fungi – react to the climate of the room, only becoming visible at certain temperatures. If the room is too cold, their surface will remain matte black. This effect is achieved by overlaying the inkjet prints with thermochromic ink, which becomes transparent when exposed to heat. Since the chemical composition of the prints ‘reacts’ to the surrounding environment, one could say they come to life, attaining a status that exceeds mere indexicality. One finds oneself at the mercy of the tantalizingly inscrutable, ‘sentient’ oscillations of the installation as a whole, a situation that allows the viewing conditions to suddenly emerge and claim existence.
The photos in FUNGI are more straightforward and conventional than much of Segers’ earlier work, which often revolves around abstracted imagery meant to challenge the viewer’s visual literacy. In works such as a circle, a line, a cross (2019), Black Body (2018), or Hits of Sunshine (2017), the artist explored generative processes of photographic image production by means of relinquishing control. By tampering with film rolls or camera mechanisms, for example, he developed exposure techniques in which the photographer retains only partial authorship, guiding the process while remaining blind to the result. The three non-figurative works mentioned above – whose conditions of creation are deliberately nonreproducible – are essentially a record of basic photochemical reactions involving emulsion and light; yet they bear the mark of the specific parameters devised for them. They testify to the presence of both light and manipulation.
Segers ‘wants to challenge the medium of photography’. He focuses on certain aspects of the medium that often go unquestioned, such as control, transparency, and the automatic operation of taking a picture, while deliberately circumventing what is perhaps photography’s most salient feature – its reproducibility. In works such as Blue Waters (2018–2019) or To Take Leave (2020), he brings his interest in the material basis of photography further toward natural properties and processes that resemble the essential characteristics of the photographic process.
The photos in FUNGI are more straightforward and conventional than much of Segers’ earlier work, which often revolves around abstracted imagery meant to challenge the viewer’s visual literacy. In works such as a circle, a line, a cross (2019), Black Body (2018), or Hits of Sunshine (2017), the artist explored generative processes of photographic image production by means of relinquishing control. By tampering with film rolls or camera mechanisms, for example, he developed exposure techniques in which the photographer retains only partial authorship, guiding the process while remaining blind to the result. The three non-figurative works mentioned above – whose conditions of creation are deliberately nonreproducible – are essentially a record of basic photochemical reactions involving emulsion and light; yet they bear the mark of the specific parameters devised for them. They testify to the presence of both light and manipulation.
Segers ‘wants to challenge the medium of photography’. He focuses on certain aspects of the medium that often go unquestioned, such as control, transparency, and the automatic operation of taking a picture, while deliberately circumventing what is perhaps photography’s most salient feature – its reproducibility. In works such as Blue Waters (2018–2019) or To Take Leave (2020), he brings his interest in the material basis of photography further toward natural properties and processes that resemble the essential characteristics of the photographic process.
While FUNGI’s primarily pictorial imagery differs somewhat from Segers’ more abstract material photography, the installation acts as a reminder to the viewer to remain attentive, whereas the ‘modesty’ of the photographic gaze in FUNGI lies precisely in Segers’ ability to visually capture ecosystems without impinging on them, let alone disrupting them. Indeed, the fungi remain undisturbed in their function of linking all kinds of trees and plants in a park where hundreds of people walk or run every day. Moreover, by disrupting the climatic stability of the room via its programmed heating elements, the installation exerts an active influence on the ecosystem of the space in which it is exhibited, affecting both the display conditions of the installation itself as well as those of the other artworks.
Invisible networks
Given the crucial role they play in all kinds of ecosystems, it’s not surprising that fungi have attracted so much attention of late in academic and artistic circles. (Segers is far from the only artist to thematise them in his work.) According to Bruno Latour, the current preoccupation with fungi, moulds, and mushrooms probably has to do with a growing realisation that the world we live in can no longer be explained by traditional metaphysical schemes that regard humans and the rest of the world as two separate phenomena.
One of the best-known and most widely distributed books on fungi is probably Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015). The book tells of Tsing’s ‘travels with mushrooms to explore indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity’.
xLike Latour and many others, Tsing argues that the interwoven histories of modern science, industrialisation, and the rise of global capitalism have not only thrust life’s continued survival into a state of uncertainty but also produced a highly selective worldview that fails to do justice to the multispecies and multi-voiced worlds on which all planetary life depends.
Drawing on an in-depth anthropological study of the international matsutake trade, Tsing sketches a picture of intertwined lifeworlds, contrasting it with that of an industrial world rife with alienation among both humans and nonhumans. In a Marxist-inflected analysis, Tsing singles out the logic of global capitalism, which relies on widespread alienation in order to function. ‘To become fully private assets,’ she writes, ‘matsutake mushrooms must be torn not only from their lifeworlds but also from the relations involved in their procurement.’
The result, according to thinkers like Latour and Tsing, is an image of a controllable (because passive) world that is separate from natural systems, and the illusion that everything, human and nonhuman, is self-contained. Segers is an observer, but not in the mould of the traditional photographer. He brings to bear in his work an attentiveness that Isabelle Stengers recognises in the artisanal working methods of chemists, before chemistry became a highly computerised and abstract science.
The activating element in FUNGI is reminiscent of another work by Segers. Handsculptures (2020) is a series of blue photochromic silkscreen prints of trees and nonhuman environments. The prints are mobile: they can be picked up or taken from a wall and carried around. The images are only visible under the right lighting, UV light being needed to activate the ink. Without the sun or another UV light source, nothing can be seen; the works remain white. But, unlike in FUNGI, here nothing is fixed. Just as with To Take Leave, light forms both the precondition for the work’s visibility and its greatest destructive threat.
Just as early photographic experiments sought ways to prevent light-sensitive impressions from going completely dark when exposed to daylight, the Handsculptures prints seem to be stuck in a precarious interstice, at the mercy of the user’s vigilance, attention, and care. By giving the user a minimal yet meaningful degree of agency, Segers leaves open the possibility that the process of ‘unlocking’ the images will go too far, without assuming in advance that their fate will be the same as the prints in To Take Leave. This modest gesture is, in a different way than in the temperature swings in FUNGI, above all an active reminder to the viewer to pay attention to what is being consumed. Patience is demanded, but wait too long and the effort will be in vain. In this sense, Handsculptures calls for a similar sensibility to mushroom foraging, where patience and self-control pay off because mushrooms can grow into even bigger and tastier versions of themselves within days, but will dry out if you wait too long.
Segers’ practice is characterised by a continual tension between fixation and dissolution, display and destruction, preservation and decay. Every one of his works carries the reminder of a certain form of uncontrollability that affects both production and consumption, maker and viewer; as such, they gesture toward a world no longer exclusively defined by humans, but as the place where everything happens, bound by an internal coherence in which we have but a limited degree of influence.
Just as early photographic experiments sought ways to prevent light-sensitive impressions from going completely dark when exposed to daylight, the Handsculptures prints seem to be stuck in a precarious interstice, at the mercy of the user’s vigilance, attention, and care. By giving the user a minimal yet meaningful degree of agency, Segers leaves open the possibility that the process of ‘unlocking’ the images will go too far, without assuming in advance that their fate will be the same as the prints in To Take Leave. This modest gesture is, in a different way than in the temperature swings in FUNGI, above all an active reminder to the viewer to pay attention to what is being consumed. Patience is demanded, but wait too long and the effort will be in vain. In this sense, Handsculptures calls for a similar sensibility to mushroom foraging, where patience and self-control pay off because mushrooms can grow into even bigger and tastier versions of themselves within days, but will dry out if you wait too long.
Segers’ practice is characterised by a continual tension between fixation and dissolution, display and destruction, preservation and decay. Every one of his works carries the reminder of a certain form of uncontrollability that affects both production and consumption, maker and viewer; as such, they gesture toward a world no longer exclusively defined by humans, but as the place where everything happens, bound by an internal coherence in which we have but a limited degree of influence.
Salutary alienation
Segers’ work fits into a broader trend among contemporary photographers who share an interest in the material residue of a world inhabited by creatures and things other than humans. These include Meghann Riepenhoff, Susanne Kriemann, and Liesbet Grupping, as well as some works by Matthew Brandt and Lucy Raven. This fascination is telling, since camera technologies and photographic images, being one of the primary media through which we interact with our environment, have a special relationship to alienation. To begin with, they are themselves mechanisms of alienation. Our knowledge of the world derives largely from visual abstractions, such as micro- and macroscopic images, drone and satellite recordings, remote sensing imagery, infrared technologies, and so on. It’s a role photography has played since its inception. Photography’s role in shaping our worldview is, of course, not limited to scientific enterprise. It plays a crucial role in our identity formation, how we interact with each other, tourist experiences, contemporary forms of warfare and so on.
Walter Benjamin pointed early on to the technical potential of photography. He believed photographs could provide a window to the ‘optical unconscious’, revealing aspects of reality that could not otherwise penetrate our field of consciousness. ‘It is indeed a different nature that speaks to the camera’, Benjamin observed, ‘than that which speaks to the eye.’
At the same time, the ways in which we increasingly visualise the world through photography often remain opaque. Vilém Flusser reminded us that the workings behind even the simplest forms of photographic image production generally elude us. Just as we rarely pay attention to the abstracting tools with which scientists literally and figuratively map the world, or the way the origins of most of the objects around us retreat, as it were, behind their own appearances, the technological nature of the visual channels through which the world appears to us has become so banal that we often fail to notice the abstraction that takes place there.
While this opacity seems logical, it becomes alarming if we take seriously Flusser’s argument, advanced almost half a century ago, that it is transforming the ‘basic structures of our existence’. According to Flusser, the development of photography fits into a broader history of automation and technological control, producing new forms of alienation and ‘programming’ us to think in a technological and post-historical way. And post-historicity, one might add with thinkers like Tsing, implies the passive belief that things are simply given to us and have always been and ever will be the way they are. Thus is the illusion maintained that our world is controllable and functions independently of nonhuman lifeworlds, helped in part by the selective technological parameters we use to represent it.For Flusser, nothing less than human freedom is at stake in a world ruled by automation that goes unnoticed, and he envisioned an important role for the self-aware photographer. With some interpretive liberty, Segers could fit Flusser’s description of the experimental photographer who can ‘outwit the camera’s rigidity’ and ‘smuggle human intentions into its program’ to ‘create unpredictable information’. This notion of experimental photography offers a productive lens through which to evaluate works like a circle, a line, a cross or Black Body. Moreover, Segers’ materially based ‘collaborative projects’ constantly remind us of the uncontrollability of both the photographic apparatus and the environments in which we move. In works such as FUNGI, Blue Waters, or Responding Rain, elements such as heat, sunlight, and wind plus water, air, and rain are companions in the photographic process.
This ambiguous, alienating quality inherent to photography can be linked to the movement toward ‘de-localisation’ that thinkers such as Latour and Tsing say is characteristic of life in the twenty-first century and has played a role in the development and maintenance of something like technical or instrumental reason.
Segers’ projects are constantly an attempt to materialise multi-voiced encounters in photographic processes. For Segers, they are also a way of ‘localising’ photography itself. This kind of photography is not a nostalgic, tendentious, or retroactive flight to a pre-digital era, but the formulation of a new photographic sensibility that is receptive to the contaminated diversity that has always already surrounded us. Segers’ photographs are quotations with source references. They bear the marks of their genesis, are both the result of an attentiveness and an exhortation to practise it, giving a place to both the invisible world and the viewer, connecting them in meaningful ways.
If we allow ourselves today to believe in the potential of a salutary photographic alienation, the kind of force capable of focusing our attention on the largely invisible or unnoticed collaborations and entangled worlds that are fundamental to the precarious survival of all life, without reproducing the systematic ideologies that seem to lie at the root of a world permeated with alienation, then Segers’ ‘materialism’ is a good place to start.
This article was commissioned by Trigger in the context of its upcoming printed issue Trigger #4: Together – to be published in February 2023. This issue is guest-edited by Susan Meiselas and explores collaborative practices in photography and beyond. Sixteen contributions engage with strategies of co-creation that stretch notions of authorship and ownership, breaking through existing heteronormative, state-owned, or hyper-individual categories.
Bas Blaasse writes about art and culture, focusing on camera-based media and performing arts. Occasionally, he works with video and sound. He studied photography and philosophy in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, and worked for HART Magazine, GLEAN, C/O Berlin, Spector Books and de Witte Raaf among others. Bas Blaasse in based between The Netherlands and Belgium.