Ask your hands to know the things they hold
Dries SegersObservation is not the same as objectivity, you cannot have science or art without observation, but to observe the world doesn’t mean you objectify that world. To observe it is to correspond, to watch, to listen, and to respond in kind. To respond through participation, not by separating ourselves from it. That's why there is no contradiction towards observation and participation. Defining it as a contradiction lies at the heart of our sense of our own humanity, built in the notion of humans as homo sapiens, namely that we can only know the world by a kind of emancipation, that leaves us strangers to ourselves. That divides us from ourselves so we can see ourselves almost as objects, an anthropological machine. Being is not the same as knowing. 1.
(...)“to survive, we need to relearn multiple forms of curiosity. Curiosity is an attunement to multispecies entanglement, complexity, and the shimmer all around us" 2.
Instead of seeing the world as a passive subject to be captured and dominated by the camera lens, I see it as an active material participant. I develop ways to materialize and co-create with (a)biotic matters. This evolves into self-imagined technologies, generative co-creation and practicing new materialism in the photographic. Observation not with the eye but through correspondences with our surrounding natural and physical worlds. What can we learn from seeing with matter? And what is the position of the photographer in processes of co-creating? Which responsibility do you have during acts of correspondence? And how to read an image that you have never seen before?
One of the powers of generative and responsive photographic imagery is that they are not build on knowledge but come out of interaction, responses. They are an opening to new imaginations, symbols and ways of seeing. Donna Haraway uses the term response-ability 3., which is both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying.
As a viewer, you must actively engage with them to decipher their components. These images are not just an act of painterly gestures, they are build out of matter, transformative matter. When you concentrate on the (al)chemical and physical reactions that occur during the contact of the chosen matter, its response is more a form of reality, like the weather, or like cooking, or like gardening. This leaves the act of poetic image building not in the control of the human, but creates a situation for gathering and corresponding.
While I was exploring the qualities of soil chromatography 4., I figured out new ways to photographically generate images with soil matter. Most of the soil’s material body remains invisible to humans. Soil is the foundation on which the house of terrestrial biodiversity is built. Out of curiosity to learn whether -contaminated- soil could grow an image, I started processes that led to artistic (and technical) programs. A mudgram is produced together with soil samples from specific actively and historically exploited and contaminated lands. Assuming soils contain phenol acid (an aromatic organic compound also found in plants, therefore present in the soil), the combination with sodium carbonate and vitamin c made it into an ecological developer mud. This mud was poured on top of unexposed 4x5” monochrome silver halide film, using it as a potential responsive surface. When the exposure process was completed it did not only visualise the grains of sand or other dust material, but also interacted with the individual pollutants and the material composition of the soil, creating multiple ranges of color, pattern, depth and structure into the film. This image of pollution makes it possible to fabulate on its poetics, its material body, and to think about the generative abilities between photography, the contamination, the soil and the human viewer. The pollutants, photographic surface, silvers, soda, vitamin C, light particles, the (abiotic) environment and other forces behave in intra-action and co-create these images.
In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming — not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of recurring intra-activity. 5.
The curiosity is a force to question the dominant modes of looking and image making, and to relearn other ways of perceiving. It brings to the surface the presence and agency of elements we cannot see. In the spirit of John Cage, the maker is necessary, both in control and out of control. The artistic process starts with an intention (sometimes unknown/unseen) but all forces outside of the artist use their own systems of response to co-exist in this program. These uncertainties destabilise the initial controllability of the photographic program and activate all the matter it intra-acts with. It takes curiosity to embrace unpredictable outcome and to be humble and respectful in co-creation with others.
If you encounter an image that you never seen before, built out of agential matter, then what are your tools to correspond with it? Curiosity is one aspect of starting to expand these ways of seeing. A science of correspondence is created by learning from them, not learning about them. These ways of working do not want to objectify the worlds they interact with. They want to do the opposite, to intertwine and to be stronger together, to reveal the intra-active nature of our being and help us live together and generate kinship. Here, curiosity lies also in the heart of the question. It's our responsibility to observe, to learn, to watch, to listen and to respond in kind. The response is an (artistic) interaction between the human intention and its unknown process, creating a space for being together in this poetic operation. The responsibility of the photographer lies in the act and the awareness of making. While creating we should always ask our hands to know the things they hold 6., because something will respond.
1. Tim Ingold, Seminar Thinking Through Making at UiO: Kulturhistorisk museum, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZXIP73uVJk&t
2. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, (ed.) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, University of Minnesota Press, 2017 p (G11).
Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, Durham/London, Duke University Press, 2016, p 28.
4. Soil chromatography is an agricultural (camera less) technique (0,5% silver nitrate + soil), it is a scientific and open sourced photographic technique to get to know more about the vitality of a soil sample. Farmers use these photographic images to know where the soil is best usable for starting new plantings. The soil will show split up and show on the circle which minerals, metals, organic matter and nutrients it it consist of. It shows us not a lab result out of digital and numeric data but an image of the physical material references and composition of the soil.
5. Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad, 2007, Duke University Press, p 151.
6. Ask your hands to know the things they hold, is part of the lyrics of Hold On, by Kae Tempest. It was also the title of Dries Segers' research conducted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp with the Thinking Tools research group.
This text is part of the publication Decentering Design — Practice in a More-than- human World, 2025, 296 p, ills colour, paperback
ISBN 9789464775853
Decentering Design – Practice in a More-than-human World is an artistic research project by Bert De Roo, Giliam Ganzevles, Mirte van Aalst and Glenn Deliège at the ‘Futures through Design’ research centre of Kask, School of Arts in Ghent.