Sight, Insight and Out of Sight: From Light as Information to Colour as World

The current understanding of the expanded image is based on visual experiences given to us by information turbulence in contemporary convergent media. We are thereby challenged to rethink everything we have come to understand about visuality, particularly those things based on the physics of light and the physiology of the human eye.

This paper will develop an alternative philosophy of visual perception based on hints given by Martin Heidegger and partially developed by Merleau-Ponty. It involves a new language for seeing that looks into the light of the technological world as a way of apprehending the self luminous. The result is the creation of an ontological sight that looks beyond the objectification of what is, to reveal the way humans come into presence with other beings, natural and technological.

Using the ideas of Catherine Malabou and Jacques Taminiaux it will be shown that we can no longer repeat contemporary notions of sight that say we have on the one hand, things identical to themselves, which give themselves to sight, and on the other hand, vision at first empty which would then open itself to the visible. These ideas will be deconstructed and shown to be remnants passed down to us from the ancients who developed a primary language for accuracy of looking and ideal representations of sight.

Instead another kind of looking, latent in our reductive techno–vision, will be invoked such that the so called primacy of perception will be made secondary to the opening of presence. Ultimately this results in an ontological tension between being looked at by the world, and gazing at things of the world. This results in a chiasmatic overlapping of active and passive modes of being that goes beyond the completion of an optical process.

Mark Titmarsh (born 1955, Ingham, Australia, PhD, UTS, 2009) is a visual artist working in painting, video and writing. His paintings and filmwork are currently held in public collections across Australia, and in private collections in Europe and the United States. His current work executed under the rubric of ‘expanded painting’ is painting about painting or painting that dissimulates into objects, videos and performance. Recent work has included paintings on industrial materials, environments of fluorescent string and video works for mobile phones.

Mark is currently a tenured, part time lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, where he teaches Interdisciplinary Studies.