Metrons and Logons brings together Matthew’s recent series of photographic works with display structures made by eva duerden. The images move between recognisable objects and architecturally processed surfaces, reminding us of objects we used to consider technical, while acknowledging their obsolescence. The longer one looks, the less clear that designation of time becomes. The result is a set of images that seem familiar but increasingly difficult to place, inviting the viewer to stare at pictures with an intrigued, yet suspicious eye. In this conversation, Matthew Johnstone and Morgane Billuart discuss what happens to an image when it unknowingly appears to be a testimony of a world that breaks down, and yet, perhaps, with another life force, an odd gaze, is starting anew.
Matthew Johnstone,  Repose_8176, 2025. Archival C-type print, PVC, Metrons & Logons, Turning Space, Berlin, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Turning Space
Morgane
Matthew, in the show Metrons and Logons, what am I seeing exactly?
Matthew
Good question.
I guess you are seeing a group of images, which I would say form a series of work that I’ve made recently, framed in many different armatures or display systems, produced by eva duerden, an artist with whom I’ve shared a studio for several years.
The images appear, I think, as photographic works. They’re printed. Some of them are printed as prints without any kind of substrate. It’s just the physical print. Some of them are produced on solid backings – aluminium. The papers they are printed onto have a very synthetic-looking surface. The paper is heavily coated, giving it the appearance of thin plastic. Some are coated with industrial matte lacquers, which give the surfaces a distinct sheen. These are each affixed to, or suspended within, the armatures using a variety of hanging methods.
One of the prints is being held directly against the wall with magnets, but it appears as though the framing system may be doing more to support it. Some of the frames are very elaborate in their layering of intricate details and individual components. Somebody described one of the frames at the opening as cosplaying itself  – it is entirely superfluous as a frame in a certain instance, but is dressed up to look exactly like one.
In the case that I’m talking about, the image that the frame is intended to be responsive to is a very close-up image of a motorbike engine, a superbike engine that I would describe as heavily processed. It also fills the frame (of the print) entirely; the frame crops the image so it starts to become kind of abstract, but it is still quite familiar and recognizable in certain ways, particularly in terms of some of the visual language that it’s recalling.
The display systems that eva has made involve a range of materials that appear to resemble familiar, mass-produced elements and processes that I would describe as carrying commercial, domestic or industrial associations with particular objects they connect to. There is a sense that these works model, replicate, or perform, rather than perfectly reproduce or synthesise. Their allusion to display and to something densely layered in detail and ornate also seems to be doing this.
Matthew Johnstone & eva duerden, T_W_I_D_I_Y_A_4200 (gasket), 2025/26. Archival C-type print, rubber, aluminium, perspex, Metrons & Logons, Turning Space, Berlin, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Turning Space    
Morgane
What interests me is the relationship you describe between “forming an image” and “narrativizing an internal architecture.” I’m referring to this alongside your editing process, and the recurring use of frames, patterns, and images within frames, which can create a kind of mise en abyme. Are you thinking of the image itself as a structure, something that can give form to or organise an internal architecture? And if so, what is the architecture or the infrastructure that you wish the audience dives into as they experience this singular image?
Matthew
I really like your reading of a mise en abyme happening in the image, a kind of regress, which I think relates in many ways to this narrativisation of an internal architecture, or the structure of an image
I think this is interesting. It’s very relatable, in one sense, in that the way I produce images makes it feel difficult to describe myself as a photographer, even though the images appear as photographic works. It also makes it complicated to describe these images as photographic.
Partly, my interest is in the way that I’m using a collection of media to make images, which involve photographic processes and a camera. The content of the images, I would say, is grounded in something like an observational logic. I’m representing, or seemingly representing, things that are out there in the world through what appear to be photographic images.
But their architecture, as you put it, when scrutinized, kind of unfolds into something that communicates not only the observational mode that photography can operate through representationally, but also describes the way that ideas around photographic representation have come into relation with a lot of other technologies and a lot of other ways in which images that appear similar to mine have been processed and constructed..
They are still behaving like this record of something. They resemble something familiar. They appear to be scenes or objects that are being presented. But as more time is spent with the image, it can begin to work against these aspects, and start speaking more to its own internal structure,  to its own material (or immaterial) reality, alluding to an infrastructure, as you said.
The image starts to kind of slip and break down in this way. Some of the more explicit details, such as the crushing resolution of some of the images, for instance, or their overtly slick, digital surfaces, problematize the way the objects in the images are appearing. This loops back to this idea of the mise en abyme you initially suggested – a space opening up within the image, or an endless regress.
Morgane
I think it’s valuable to return to this idea of an “internal architecture,” because the subjects of the images often appear remarkably neutral or incidental. You’re not straightforwardly photographing architecture, but neither are you necessarily photographing objects that come with an obvious symbolic charge. A motorcycle, a car, a fragment of a structure: these things can initially read almost like documentary material.
But through the editing, framing, repetition, and ornamental structures you introduce, they become something else. I’m interested in the tension between the apparent neutrality of the subject and the very constructed nature of the image. What happens when something that initially looks like documentary material is reorganised to the point where the image begins to produce its own internal logic?
To be perfectly honest, that was the question I asked myself when I first looked at the images you sent me. A sort of, “What exactly am I looking at?” Not because the subject was necessarily obscure, but because the images seemed to withhold a straightforward way of reading them. They felt as though they were pointing towards something beyond the object itself, without quite telling me what that something was. This made me think of Louise Lawler’s Why Pictures Now?, particularly the question contained in that title. Lawler’s work asks us to consider not only what an image depicts, but the conditions that make an image legible: where it appears, how it is framed, how it circulates, and what we are being asked to look at.
I had a similar intuition with your work. The images gave me the strange feeling of encountering a kind of visual material that I no longer quite know how to engage with. They felt familiar, but somehow displaced. I suppose this feeling is also a result of your use of ‘obsolete technology’ (using your own words) alongside current industry-standard tools. Do you see the ‘obsolete technology’ as referring only to the camera or the tools themselves, or is there also something about the way we look at images that has become obsolete?
Matthew
I would like to appropriate or translate certain types of language that have developed through photography.
I would say in some of my images, a kind of commercial or advertising language is quite explicit, but in other images, it’s less explicit. I’m interested in relying on fairly well-established associations that one could easily draw between the content of the image and something that it’s signifying – a meaning it solicits through having been repeated in the past- then thinking about how I can disrupt this.
I’m not sure, when I’m looking at an image, that anything presenting as documentary material is really that neutral – there is no access for me to that neutrality; there is always something I designate as an image operating on it.  I try to make that quite obvious as a way into my work. Further along,  some of the other processes happening in the image, I think, make it clearer that it is not straightforward in terms of the way the image is being constructed, despite its provocation to be identified with a photograph, or traditional photographic mode. I am trying to destabilise the clear depiction of identifiable objects and other immediately recognisable content in my images as a way to talk about what else is happening adjacently in terms of this content. I’m interested in the idea that now, it is really, really hard to define what is meant when we say that something is a photograph.
What I would call a regurgitative mode in my work – its reproduction of photographic mechanisms- I hope is moving towards this displacement, as you mentioned, in terms of uncoupling the familiar encounter with it.
I don’t think photography has ever existed in isolation from any other technology surrounding it.  The processing of my works uses generative AI models and also pattern prediction models that add in pixels that were not originally in the image. These are themselves features and tools within other image enhancement software that I’m using that is commercial and also industry standard. I often intentionally use this in combination with older cameras, equipment, and working processes (in terms of software), as you mentioned.
With the representational modes I have been referring to above, or pictorial aspects of an image, different characteristics ascribed to photographic images and so on, I am intentionally trying to identify aspects of a discourse that I wouldn’t necessarily call obsolete, as I think it is still very much operational; however, this is something I am trying to call into question.  Obsolescence is important for me. It’s this simultaneous looking backwards and forwards that complicates how images are categorized and categorizable. I feel very uncertain about this designation, which is why I’m not comfortable with being referred to as a photographer or as somebody who makes photographs.
Morgane
After first encountering the artworks, one of my second or third thoughts was: Are these images somehow dead?  And by that, I don’t simply mean that they feel antiquated, but that they made me think about what it means to encounter an image whose meaning, as a viewer, I feel I can no longer fully access. It made me reflect on what it means to grieve a world in which certain images once carried a very specific meaning or function, and to encounter them now, at a distance, producing a meaning that I’m no longer sure I can access or relate to. I’m curious whether this sense of the image being “dead” is something you are interested in, or whether you see the images as producing a different kind of meaning altogether, in the sense that they seem to flatten existing binaries between the obsolete and the futuristic, or between the inanimate and the animate.
Matthew Johnstone & eva duerden, Orchid_6629 (armature), 2025/26. Archival C-type print, PETG, cellophane, aluminium Metrons & Logons, Turning Space, Berlin, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Turning Space
Matthew
Yes. I think there are perhaps a few ways in which I could talk about that. It’s also a great question.
On the one hand, I feel as though there are many contemporary images that are still referred to in the same way as a photograph from the late 1800’s might have been. There are many other forms of image that seem to be proliferating that have perhaps transmuted yet still retain the fundamental characteristics of a photograph or retain characteristics usually attributable to a photographic process. This in spite of all the narration around the death of photography as a medium.
These images that are experienced – I think this is a thought borrowed from Joanna Zylinska, but is perhaps a thought that many of us have – imagery that could be described as photographic, is also experienced as a kind of flow, something that envelops us and is dominant in the visual landscape, experienced very fluidly or transiently, and seamlessly woven into various kinds of environments.
These images, whether in fact photographic or not, have always been informing how we frame ourselves, construct our own self-image, and identify with the world. Somewhere in this, I think there’s a movement that happens, in which the thing that the image seems to depict is somehow isolated or suspended and recapitulated as a discrete and autonomous thing over there, separate from us. Its unknowability is redoubled in the image. Accordingly,  I have the feeling that I am being constructed in this process, as an observer of a world of things, through the formation of a conscious image that happens ‘in here’, or more broadly, counts as my perception, and this being representative of the thing ‘out there’ to which my perception relates. This process situates me, or kind of mis-locates me, outside of any system of relations through which images and subjectivities are mutually formed or co-substantiated.
I think there is an example in some of the conversations around AI in light of the way that we can’t avoid a growing awareness of how integral this group of technologies is becoming to the processes through which we deal with and translate information that these same technologies produce. It can feel quite disorienting or decentering.  I have become increasingly interested in trying to address the ideological standpoint that attempts to maintain some construction of an autonomous selfhood in the midst of any interaction with technology. It feels more like we are becoming functions of the technologies we make – ‘Functionaries,’ as Vilém Flusser explicitly termed this condition in his 1983 essay ‘Towards a Philosophy of Photography’. I think this relates to your question about no longer being able to fully access the meaning of an image. In the press release, I described something like this, in quite a blunt way, and perhaps through conversation with Catriona, who set up Turning Space, which is where the exhibition we are also discussing took place. The animicity of the objects that I described as ‘looming large in my images’ , I suggested, relegates the viewer/ observer to an adjunct bystander, or a foreign body, in their worlds.
I think this tries to speak to a kind of affect connected to the inevitable increasing awareness of all these other agencies at work in the production of images and the production of the self.
With images there is this sense of a meaning, a production of meaning that is for us, that speaks to us in a way that we can understand.  However, in line with your own concerns, I am also interested in my own growing anxiety about my inability to speak in, or understand the languages through which images now communicate.
I remember a quote – sorry, this is just coming into my head in a really weird way – It’s by Walter Benjamin. Or initially it’s Benjamin, and then Flusser continued it. In his Mechanical Reproduction essay from 1936, Walter Benjamin says something quite extreme: “the illiterate of the future will not be the ones who cannot read the Alphabet, but the ones who cannot take a photograph”. Vilém Flusser takes this further, suggesting that we are entering into a ‘post-literate’ era dominated by what he terms ‘technical-images’.
These images are produced by ‘black-box’ devices such as cameras, computers, algorithms and software. According to Flusser, the danger of such images is that they continue to appear to be direct windows onto reality and therefore do not need to be decoded.
Technical images are constituent of what he calls an ‘Apparatus’- a form of hegemonic structure, or set of conditions, comprising technical devices (computers, cameras, etc.), media-systems and corporations, that produce both the complex, programmable internal logic of the devices used to create technical images, as well as technical images themselves.
Flusser warns that to avoid becoming passive to the forces exerted by these kinds of images – our becoming Functionaries whose choices, behaviours and desires are entirely delimited by the possibilities pre-programmed into the internal logic of these technical devices and media – we must develop a new kind of visual literacy that is appropriate to decoding such images. He calls this a new techno-imaginary.
I feel like this relates to the feeling that you’re pointing to in the images. Perhaps it’s not a reassuring feeling.
 
Matthew Johnstone & eva duerden, Bike_8262 (case), 2025/26. Archival C-type print, synthetic suede, synthetic leather, PLA, aluminium, plastic, Metrons & Logons, Turning Space, Berlin, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Turning Space
Morgane
In May 2026, I went to the Venice Biennale, and I remember seeing Helter Skelter at the Prada Foundation, with Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa. Did you see that exhibition? Seeing those works reminded me of a world, a past world in which you could collect images that didn’t belong to you, and where those images could function as artefacts of particular historical events. One where images were accountable. Something that now feels almost impossible, out of reach.
Continuing from there, and connecting this observation to your practice, when you produce an image that contains temporal, associative, or historical layers, do you think of it as becoming an “operational image,” in Harun Farocki’s sense? And if so, does that change the way we think about the image as an artefact, or does it become something else?
Matthew
They may be becoming artifacts, I suppose. Something in their architecture, as you mentioned earlier, is, for me, where their language is.
This precariousness around their content, and what their content is supposed to be signaling, is a way to circumvent an obsolete language in photography, one that has to do with the indexical character of the photographic image, or the idea of it as a memento or record.
The traditional idea of a photograph as capture is something that I personally feel quite focused on dismantling. This is in light of some of the things I’m thinking about and have mentioned around technology and my own relationship to technology.
Just to go back a bit, I’m interested in the way that you described some of the images you’re looking at as no longer being representative of a world that you know.
I’m curious about this because, when I look at my own photographs and their incredibly processed surfaces, I think about how that opens onto the way they have been digitally manipulated and regurgitated, and how they’re zombifying and reproducing a lot of language that I do feel familiar with.
But in the way that this language is being presented to me, I feel as though it’s somehow not doing what I’m expecting it to do; as you’ve mentioned, it’s speaking very ambiguously.
The way I’m representing the scenes, objects and recognisable elements within the content of my images, even where this appears to signal their becoming artefacts, is also a way of getting into their processing and the different levels of mediation going on. In this way they become more relatable, personally, to my own experience of reality and to the world that I feel I know.
This disjuncture is central for me: the world that I see when I look around and the breaking down of this narrative around photography’s authentic mode of capture.
Morgane
What you’re saying makes me think about the possibility that highly processed or even artificial tools, such as AI or pixel augmentation, might somehow reactivate life in said images. I’m not too deep into the theories around aliveness or necromancy in relation to AI, but there seems to be something here, speculatively, about breeding a kind of life back into images in a way that can no longer be flattened into a simple past-present-future timeline. And this connects to what you were saying about zombification. A zombie is still something alive, in a sense. It’s a monster, but it survives by feeding off other things. How do you think about the distinction between the organic and the non-organic, or between what is alive and what is not when it comes to image-making? And how was that distinction perhaps made more visible through your collaboration with Eva and the introduction of works they made in response to your images?
Matthew
Again, this is a really good question, although I find it very complex. These are things I’ve tried to get into and address through the way I approach my own practice and image-making.
The zombie figure, this living-dead construction, or the hauntological Gothic – not supernatural in any way – the material present being impressed upon by the unrealised or failed futures contained in certain pasts…the diminished promises and dreams of technological realities that never became the futures they were expected to become.
It’s similar to something that you described: dead but still operational. I think that the medium (photography) undergoes a continual process of mutation and transformation; however, this can feel obscured by the historical conversation around photography among other constructions weighing on it. It can be very repetitive – a kind of rhetoric that feels trapped in a process of endlessly recycling its own past. For me, this has the effect of displacing or dislocating the reality of photography’s current historical present. It’s as though a huge period of its recent history is somehow missing or is constantly being redacted and made inaccessible.
I think this is where Mark Fisher’s ideas about hauntology (taken from Derrida’s term in Spectres of Marx) are interesting for me. Gothic Materialism, or the analogy of the Zombie, has become a really interesting and useful vehicle for me.
Mark Fisher was writing at a specific time in the UK. Looking towards any future horizon in that moment, post-Thatcher, produced a strong sense of collective anxiety. A sense of totalising cultural stagnation, and the impossibility for any cultural imaginary to produce an alternative future not doomed to the same morbid failures as those of its recent political past.
For me, Mark Fisher does this reconnecting of the illegible or incomprehensible ruins of the present to the pasts in which they made sense and where they once existed as monuments to a future yet to come – he reconnects to the contexts that enable these ruins to be decrypted by a somewhat alien civilisation doing an archeological dig on a planet they inevitably discover, in horror, to be their homeworld haha.
This is somehow why I really like the feeling that the shine has come off of the obsolete or outmoded technologies I’m interested in – their ruination. I like the way they’ve been discarded by ideas around progress and are no longer expected to perform well because they’ve been supplanted by newer, more sophisticated versions of themselves.
They’re no longer expected to meet the ideological demands that are made of them when they’re at the cutting edge of what is broadly considered progress. They’re sort of freer, as things to experiment with, or to repurpose, and can somehow more easily produce surprising or unlikely outcomes.
In Flusser, this is about the possibility of somehow giving form to information,  through experimentation and through attempting to rearrange the apparatus, despite being implicated by it – despite speaking from within it.
A lofty idea, but in this deadness around things, my ancient camera, for instance, from around 2005, somehow this idea feels present. My camera is adequate for making images that I think are interesting, and it still does what it’s not supposed to do (according to its successors), especially when it’s combined with some of the other processes I use in creating these very slick, highly resolved images. A kind of retroactively ascribed newfound purpose resulting from its relations to things that didn’t exist when it was considered current. I think this helps to produce the kinds of meanings that I want to use to open up particular conversations. It helps to dissolve the myth of obsolescence.
In your question, you also asked about how the frames created by eva duerden might further emphasise a distinction between aliveness and the organic, and the non-organic. I was curious about whether the material iteration of these frames would somehow give an impression of stability, something tangible and consistent – a kind of body. I was interested in the tension this might produce in terms of how the content in my images is operating ambiguously and conversely in a somewhat unstable way. However, it’s the other way around, I think! I wasn’t anticipating how the frames would double down on this defamiliarising or destabilising effect going on in the images.
This was loosely coming from an idea in Katherine Hayles’ ‘How We Became Posthuman’, about the ‘flickering signifier’, which is to do with digital signs that are being continuously generated and transfigured. They imply forms of materiality that appear to us to be permanently unstable. Hayles talks about how this has been (mis)-conceived as a form of disembodied information that has been uncoupled from any material substrate whatsoever – a disembodied lifeform flowing freely among things. For Hayles, Flickering signifiers don’t appear to represent meaning or arrange concepts in a way that appears to be as stable as material iterations of their analogues – physical photographs, other printed imagery and media, books, letters, paintings, or other kinds of seemingly traditional objects used to physically inscribe signs.
I still think quite a lot about the way that I’m exporting files off of my computer that are constituted through a set of digital tools and information, and how I am translating those into various objects. I think about how this changes them. What that means to a form that began as a sequence of code derived from light hitting a sensitised surface that converts it into electrical charges… Maybe it’s boring, but I think it’s important.
Beyond this, I am very interested in methods of display and the way that eva’s armatures not only emphasise but perform slippages of their own usual registers. They become ways of modelling something else, modelling the idea of their own functionality as frames, and becoming framing devices simultaneously.
So, for me, part of the collaboration is to do with a curiosity around how (I hoped) eva’s frames, or display structures, would interject an unusual kind of material presence that would conflict with the way that the surfaces of my images, along with their processing, register a different kind of form, or materiality. I also hoped that they would operate somewhat contradictorily as this ‘information’ that flows in, or crosses over, and would perhaps change the way that my images try to assert or produce their own meaning.
Morgane
The exhibition text describes your work and eva’s as works that “talk at cross purposes and occasionally agree.” Can you give an example of a moment when her display system either supported or disrupted what you imagined the image would do?
Matthew
So that’s a really good question. And actually, thanks for pulling on that thread because it does bring me to something that might be relevant.
Earlier, I was talking about the way that the image itself kind of constructs its own meaning through the associations and categorizations that are involved in different languages that it regurgitates –  photographic mechanisms or tropes.
When eva and I spoke about making these works together, I was really happy, and I think she was too,  for eva to use the pre-existing images to respond to without too much conversation around specifically how they could interact well together or work together.I enjoy the way that the displays are so ornate, detailed, and densely layered. I think the more that you engage with them, the more detailed and layered they become. They’re so loud within the work as a whole that I think they really do start to overpower the images. What I mean is that their tactile materiality prevents the photograph, or its surface, from feeling quite so removed…This brings the images closer, albeit in a rather disturbing way.
I’m very interested in the way that the frames become obstacles, or inhibit the image – in some of the mechanisms and design features that support the images within their armatures, these elements physically press up against or interrupt their surfaces. Their noisy material presence operates on the authority of the image to assert its own meaning. It gets kind of confused by and embroiled with the frame. Very distinct elements in both works seemingly fighting to prevent themselves from being dissolved into one another.
Morgane
Did you just give away your images to eva so they could interpret them, or was there a sort of conversational, maybe systemic way to approach this construction around the image?
Matthew
Pretty much the former. We’ve had a long, ongoing conversation happening generally, however. Unavoidable due to sharing a studio space haha! Occasionally we talked about the specific process.
I personally was more interested in the idea of not having too much conversation around them because I also wanted to see what would happen in the way that they might act on one another, and in the way that they could cause conflict with one another.
Rather than mine and eva’s individual practices folding into a single coherent object, I wanted to maintain the individual identities and differences of mine and eva’s separate working approaches in a way that would be very clear, but in a way that would come together to produce a cohesive work within which these differences would not be resolved but would become very productive.
Matthew Johnstone & eva duerden, Blest_Bereft_0518 (slats), 2026. Archival C-type print, glass, mdf, PLA, aluminium, rubber, Metrons & Logons, Turning Space, Berlin, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Turning Space
 
Morgane
Referring to Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine, what interests me is less the idea of learning to see like a machine than how machine vision is changing the conditions of seeing itself, and therefore how we perceive the world, phenomenologically.
That feels particularly relevant to your work because technology doesn’t have to be attached to the body, through a brain-computer interface or wearable device, to alter cognition. It can also change the conditions through which we look at, read, and make sense of images. So, returning to this idea of a flattening between past, present, and future, do you see these shifts in technology as also producing a shift in cognition? Have they changed where we look for the focus of an image, how we understand what we’re seeing, or how we read its internal architecture? In other words, how are these technologies changing not only the images we produce, but the way we experience them, and the world at large?
Matthew
This is a thought I am very interested in – for me, it is really important to acknowledge that technologies that both constitute the environment around me and that actively construct that environment absolutely alter conditions for seeing, as well as conditions for deciphering meaning and decoding images (as we talked about earlier). Not only with regard to ‘machinic’ vision, but with regard to countless other technological objects, entities, and technological features of reality. For me it feels straightforward that this profoundly changes human cognition – the ‘neural link’, the one that I think has produced the image of a matrix, is one that is fundamentally tethered to the environment – to its technical apparatuses and technological transformation. I feel that I am only happening as an expression of relations among other things. There is no ‘me’ outside of this system, yet within it I maintain some sort of discernible outline, but one that is permeable, contingent, and very much subject to the conditions of this reality I am a part of.
I can say that I am a cyborg every time I sit at my computer, or put in my contact lenses, or use contactless payment, but what does it actually mean, or when does it mean enough? The classic image of the cyborg as a part-human-being, physically altered and augmented by technology,  is perhaps a symbol we can tolerate because it assures us of our ability always to remain cognizant of changes happening to us and within us – the image of the cyborg suggests that these changes will remain tangible, externally perceptible – measurable as changes to our physical borders, to our bodies. There is a more disturbing image of a cyborg, which is the one we cannot tell apart from ‘ourselves’ until we peel back its skin and reveal the machine underneath. I suppose for me the thought that follows is to do with a privilege we assume in having any degree of autonomy to choose whether we would or would not wish to ‘learn’ how to see like a machine. The question as I would perhaps (re)phrase it is ‘how do we avert being transformed into a thing that only sees like a machine?’
In relation to my occupation with creating images, this loops back to thinking about a techno-imaginary – a way of developing technical and visual literacy that can help to decode how images operate. This is linked very directly to the technological means that have been used to produce images and the codifications baked into the internal logic of these means. How does one contend with a technical apparatus that imperceptibly transforms human cognition and human ways of seeing?
Morgane
Yes, and what if looking at the world with the naked eye can already produce a technologically conditioned form of subjectivity? Perhaps we don’t need a tool in front of us to see through technology. We already carry so much knowledge about how things are constructed that it shapes what we perceive and how we make sense of it. That makes image-making, not just photography, a particularly generative space—a constant fabulation.
To me, this raises an important question about technological enhancement. What happens to the image when technology no longer simply mediates between us and the world, but starts to mediate the conditions of perception itself? Returning to your work, you write in the show notes that “the images look back at the viewer like odd neighbours.” Is that sense of estrangement something you are deliberately trying to produce, or is it simply a reflection of the way you think we now encounter images?
Matthew
It’s really interesting to think about in terms of some of the things you’ve been saying through your questions, because the odd neighbor thing could be taken, and I think perhaps once, in the discourse around images, was taken very negatively. The idea of something to which no agency has been ascribed, actively looking back at us, a thing to which no authority has been conferred that would permit it to look – an unsolicited gaze upon us seemingly belonging to an inanimate thing – this was either tacitly dismissed or taken very uneasily.
I think my images looking back, if in fact they do this or are able to do this, is, I hope, a very positive sign they are still operational (despite being dead). Still able to do their job and to operate as a mirror. Earlier I think I mentioned Flusser’s worry about technical images still appearing to resemble a direct window onto reality and therefore not seemingly needing to be decoded because they simply show things ‘as they are’. I would be tempted to say this of my images looking back – that their look sees things ‘as they are’.
I think a mirror is very similar to a photograph in this precise way. A mirror appears to reflect objects that are in front of it. However, this interpretation privileges me as an observer of someone, or something, else’s reflection, free to look without being looked at. Not implicated by the thought that what is in fact being reflected in a mirror is a psychological process, the forming of an interiority, which I think speaks to all sorts of ways in which mirrors return my ‘gaze’.  So this look, the odd neighbor, reflects a set of conditions being produced and affecting us despite us and despite attempts to make images behave – to make them show us what we want to see.
Morgane
Looking at your odd neighbour, pondering, ‘Is this dead yet?’
Matthew
Yes.