Katherine Waugh & Fergus Daly: I See a Darkness

I See a Darkness is a multi-media exhibition probing the complex historical relationship between photography, cinema and science. Emerging from the trans-disciplinary art practice of Katherine Waugh & Fergus Daly, this new body of work builds on their research-based, philosophically-framed past projects in film, writing and artistic events, drawing on material often overlooked or hidden: shadow archives, neglected cultural narratives in film, art and literature, disappeared or challenging areas of knowledge.

The artists have created a unique gallery iteration of the film project I See a Darkness for Photo Museum Ireland, the national centre for contemporary photography, framed by photographic prints, videos, archival images and publications. The film and exhibition materials present an artistic exploration of the impact Irish-born Lucien Bull's chrono-photographic experiments had on the interwoven developments of image-capture aesthetics and science throughout the 20th century. Bull, born in Dublin in 1876, was made director of the prestigious Institut Marey in Paris in 1914 and President of the Institute of Scientific Cinematography in 1948. The exhibition explores how new technologies of vision were from the outset aggressively instrumentalised by the military-industrial complex for its own ends, as the 20th century quest for an aesthetic ‘sublime’ in still and moving images collided with the scientific discovery of an ‘atomic sublime’. The atomic shadow photographs found in Hiroshima and Nagasaki surely testified to, in Akira Lippit’s words, “a form of total photography that exceeded the economies of representation, testing the very visibility of the visual.” For Sylvère Lotringer, the problem (as posed to Paul Virilio in Crepuscular Dawn) becomes: “[is] the apotheosis of science the apocalypse of science?”

Questions are raised about the streamlining of cinematographic technologies in the 20th century by scientific rationality and the value of looking again at experimental practices and ways of thinking sidelined as a result. A mapping of the often contentious fusion of artistic and technological representational models of our world, with their complex political ramifications, emerges, pivoting on three iconic figures whose lives and work intersected in compelling ways: Lucien Bull, Harold E. Edgerton (MIT Professor and Engineer), and oceanographer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau.

A new perceptual paradigm related to high-speed photography (Bull), atomic science (Edgerton) and the undersea world (Cousteau), is revealed, using rarely seen photographs and archival footage alongside extensive new film work shot in the Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique and Conservatoire des Techniques Cinématographiques, Paris, the MIT Edgerton centre, MIT photographic archives, the Nevada Nuclear test site, and Death Valley. Contributors include leading cultural thinkers, film archivists, scientists and writers Akira Mizuta Lippit, Jimena Canales, Jonathan Crary, Susan Schuppli, Ben Marcus, Laurent Mannoni, Alexis Martinet and Edgerton Center Director J. Kim Vandiver.

I See a Darkness reaffirms Trevor Paglen’s rallying cry: “It’s imperative for other artists to pick up where [Harun] Farocki left off, lest we plunge even further into the darkness of a world whose images remain invisible, yet control us in ever-more profound ways.”

I See A Darkness ultimately questions what was disappeared in the ‘progressive’ narrative of image-capture technologies, especially considerations of the non-human and animal, and gestures towards what Jean-Christophe Bailly reminds us of when he writes: “the world in which we live is gazed upon by other beings, that the visible is shared among creatures, and that a politics should be invented on this basis, if it is not too late.”

Public programme
A programme of events will accompany the exhibition including workshops, a short film programme and symposium. 

Vision Machines: A Shadow Archive is an international symposium curated and moderated by Katherine Waugh, responding to the political, philosophical and aesthetic subjects addressed in the exhibition I See a Darkness. Participants: Susan Schuppli, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Jimena Canales, Thomas Zummer, Leslie Thornton.

*Please note that this is a hybrid event taking place at Photo Museum Ireland with a live audience and online presentations made available through Zoom. For details, visit here.

Katherine Waugh is a filmmaker, writer and curator whose trans-disciplinary practice includes films such as The Art of Time (co-directed with Fergus Daly), a film essay on the complex temporalities in contemporary art, film and architecture, which has screened internationally.

Her curatorial projects include Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street in SPACE gallery London (with David Morris): an exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference in New York. She was the Irish producer for Sylvère Lotringer’s film The Man Who Disappeared, based on Lotringer’s decades of writing on Artaud. Other projects curated with Lotringer include Artaud on the Beach, Showroom Gallery London, The Question Itself, South London Gallery, and Strange Relations/Relations Étrange at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. 

Her essays include a commission by Stony Road Press for an essay on Brian O’Doherty’s Structural Plays (a limited edition art book exhibited in IMMA Dublin), Delicate Yet Deadly for the book Artist-Run Europe (Pallas Projects), and most recently The Memory of Skin on artist Mary Ruth Walsh.

Fergus Daly is the co-author (with Garin Dowd) of a book on Leos Carax and has contributed essays to the books Jean-Luc Godard: Documents and Movie Mutations.

His films include Experimental Conversations (2006), Abbas Kiarostami: the Art of Living (co-directed with Pat Collins), Armand Gatti: Welcome to our Battle of Images (2009), Matter & Memory (2010), Immortal Stories (2014), Crimson: An Irish Georg Trakl (2020), Melmoth the Wanderer 1820-2020 and The Mirror of Possible Worlds: Kiarostami on Aran (2021). His films have screened worldwide, most recently at MUTA, Lima, the Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival (2022) and the Viennale (2021). He organised the first International Conference on the work of French filmmaker Philippe Garrel. He was the Programmer of the Different Directions Experimental Film Festival, Galway 2008–10)

Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.

Photo Museum Ireland would like to thank Science Foundation Ireland for kindly funding the programme of public, educational events during the exhibition as part of National Science Week.