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Camera as Object and Process: An Interview with Victor Burgin

Article  in  Theory Culture & Society · December 2013

DOI: 10.1177/0263276413501346

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Article
Theory, Culture & Society
30(7/8) 199–219
Camera as Object and ! The Author(s) 2013
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Process: An Interview sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0263276413501346

with Victor Burgin tcs.sagepub.com

Ryan Bishop
Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK

Sean Cubitt
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and University
of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
Using a number of his recent site-specific installations, conceptual artist and theorist
Victor Burgin discusses the status and future of the camera from photography to
moving image to computer-generated virtual works that combine both still and
moving images. In the process he modifies Bazin’s question ‘What is cinema?’ to ask
‘What is a camera?’ These works extend and develop Burgin’s long-standing interest in
the relationship of aesthetics and politics as rendered through visualization technolo-
gies, especially as it pertains to space. Burgin’s discussion constructs a genealogy of
seeing, visualizing and image-making as technologically-determined and crafted. The
ideology of vision and the ideological artefacts produced by and through visual tech-
nologies from perspectival painting to analog photography to computer imaging con-
stitute, in Burgin’s argument, ‘the ideological chora of our spectacular global village’.

Keywords
aesthetics, Victor Burgin, camera, digital visualization, image, moving image,
photography, politics

Introduction
In closing an essay on his 1986 six-panel photographic work Office by
Night, Victor Burgin cites, presumably approvingly, an anecdote from
the painter Philip Guston:

John Cage . . . once told me, when you start working everybody is in
your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and

Corresponding author:
Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, Park Avenue, Winchester SO23
8DL, UK.
Email: r.bishop@soton.ac.uk
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
200 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue paint-
ing, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely
alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. (Burgin, 2005: 17)

For an artist and thinker who has championed political understandings,

not only of large-scale movements (the impact of neo-liberalism on art
institutions, for example) but the minutiae of the politics of the everyday,
this might appear an oddity. Yet Burgin’s work began in his escape into
the nascent Conceptual Art movement of the later 1960s, a movement
many of whose practitioners learned from Cage’s handling of the dis-
juncture between absolute materiality and absolute idea. The dialectic of
materiality and concept is a hallmark of Burgin’s choice of media: photo-
text works, prints, and digital video; media in which the materiality of the
medium is important in a modernist sense, but which refer us to both the
materiality and conceptuality of memory, gender relations, and – in
recent works – space and place.
As a thinker, Burgin has also pursued this dialectic in influential essays
on his own and other photographers’ practice (1982, 1986b), drawing on
the work of Barthes and Lacan and later of Foucault, among others. A
2010 interview makes apparent the stakes of his particular concern with
the relation between the concept (in this instance of politics) and the
material:

There is no need for the western political artist, too often a disaster
tourist, to ‘sail the seven seas’ looking for injustices to denounce.
Inequality and exploitation saturate the ground on which we stand,
they are in the grain of everyday life. (Burgin and Van Gelder, 2010)

The statement is less significant for Burgin’s rejection of documentary – a

rejection which has been apparent throughout his career – and more so
for its assertion that what is often referred to as the ‘aesthetic’ is of
paramount importance to the conduct of political life, understood as
the grain of sociality in even the most intimate or unconsidered of situ-
ations. With Debord’s use of the term in mind, it is possible to view many
of his works as turning moments into situations, terrains where the
smallest act might operate not only to reveal but tactically or strategically
to alter the forces at play in it. The stance of objects and people towards
each other, the absences between and around them, and the co-presence
of the image (and in some instances soundtrack) and the photographer
with them is of constant concern, because it is in these relationships that
power and exploitation occur.
Burgin’s turn towards moving images, a turn which has occupied a
period of 20 years, strikes out from a long-term fascination with the
iconography of film, notably in visual quotations from Hitchcock and
other films, for example South Pacific (1958), stills from which he treated
Bishop and Cubitt 201

Figure 1. Victor Burgin still from Hôtel D (2009). Image: Victor Burgin.

digitally to evoke the Family of Man photo exhibition (also of 1958) in

his 1990 work Family Romance. On the one hand, Burgin has an abiding
interest in what is revealed by coincidence, not least in works of com-
parison, like the digital video Venise (1993), which draws lines of histor-
ical, cultural and geographical connection between the port cities of San
Francisco and Marseille. On the other, there is an interest, developed
theoretically in The Remembered Film (Burgin, 2004), in the film not as
cinema but as fragmented memory. The cinema film is of a piece: the
remembered film is a rebus of scenes and sounds, reassembled in recol-
lection according to a logic at best parallel to the logic of the originating
viewing event.
It is in this sense that Burgin’s recent video works need to be con-
sidered as photographs that move. Even that hybrid description does not
do justice: these works are not video as such, nor photography tout court,
202 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

but deliberate, painstaking constructions of viable techniques from avail-

able technologies. To describe them as digital is to curtail both the means
employed and the results. Where the image track evokes several forms of
digital image generation and processing, from games to compositing, the
soundtracks tend to be indistinguishable from analogue recordings,
mostly comprising voices (voice-off in the French phrase clumsily trans-
lated as ‘voice-over’). Burgin’s sense of the ‘digital’ is no more stable than
his sense of the photographic. What counts is the tension between formal
elements – vision, sound, installation, venue in the case of site-specific
works like Hôtel D (2009) – in a practice of formal tension stretching
back through the photo-text works.
The following interview was conducted by email in spring and summer
2012.

Ryan Bishop/Sean Cubitt: In a recent talk you sketched a genealogy of

photography from the camera obscura to virtual photography and
cinema (machinima), and you varied Bazin’s famous question ‘What is
cinema?’ a few times to arrive at ‘What is a camera?’ Such a question
places the apparatus of the camera as a transitional or temporary object
within a much larger stream (or trajectory) of audiovisual tools, includ-
ing perhaps most importantly the shift from a light reception and pro-
duction device to light production solely. ‘When does a camera cease to
be a camera?’ we might ask. Would you elaborate on some of the effects
of this shift as well as the need to ask these questions?
Victor Burgin: My talk moved on from an idea in my book of 2004,
The Remembered Film, where I write about what I call the cinematic
heterotopia – a hybrid material and imaginary space in which we encoun-
ter a heterogeneous variety of fragments of cinema beyond the confines
of the movie theatre. The internet, of course, is a major contributor to
this space, and I spoke about two current internet practices which draw
upon and reconfigure mainstream cinema: ‘video mashups’ and ‘machi-
nima’. The remixed Hollywood film trailer seems the most popular
mashup genre, often used to lampoon box-office hits. Other mashups
satirize prominent politicians, or provide new image-track accompani-
ments to popular songs. In contrast to video mashups, which cannibalize
contents from outside the software used to produce them, ‘machinima’ is
a form of ‘film’ production shot entirely with virtual cameras in such
virtual worlds as those of ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing
games’ and Second Life.
Machinima originated in the 1980s when playback facilities were first
programmed into video games to allow players to record the ‘speed runs’
in which they complete a level of the game. Since then, the form has
evolved to the point where it now has its own annual ‘film festivals’. In
2005 a 13-minute machinima production even gained the attention of the
international news media. The ‘film’ – French Democracy – was made in
Bishop and Cubitt 203

response to the deaths of two French teenagers who were accidentally

electrocuted while attempting to escape from police in a Paris suburb.
The televised response to their deaths by the then Minister of the Interior
Nicolas Sarkozy prompted widespread rioting. Beginning with the two
deaths the machinima film goes on to represent the frustration of French
youth minorities in their routine encounters with racism and other forms
of discrimination. A video mashup on such a topic would typically
sample and remix television footage grabbed off air. As a machinima
production French Democracy was made entirely inside a business simu-
lation game called The Movies. The only imagery available is that of the
virtual world that forms the basis of the game – so, for example, the
electrical substation where the deaths occur is represented by a cowboy-
movie style rustic shack, and the Paris metro is represented by the New
York subway. Machinima films are ‘no budget’ extra-cinematic produc-
tions that nevertheless emulate the ‘look and feel’ of established cine-
matic genres through conventional continuity editing and montage. So I
was making the observation that – in addition to transforming the highly
capitalized productions of the film industry, most conspicuously in the
area of spectacular special effects – digital technologies are also providing
the de facto conditions for demotic practices based on the historic exam-
ple of cinema but with amateur and professional artists enjoying equal
access to the means of production and distribution.
It is notable, however that neither mashups nor machinima depart
significantly from the contents and forms of mainstream media produc-
tions. One line of discussion, then, would take us into an exploration of
alternatives to such contents and forms in what I have elsewhere called
the ‘uncinematic’. In the talk you heard, however, I took another path –
which was to raise precisely the question to which you refer: ‘What is a
camera?’ In brief, I argued that the history of the camera is inseparable
from the history of perspective, and that this history is not to be reduced
to lumps of metal bearing such insignia as ‘Nikon’ or ‘Canon’. I sug-
gested that given the preponderance of computer simulation in our image
environment, we should now be prepared to rethink the ‘camera’ in terms
of a multi-dimensional representational apparatus, comprising such
intersecting practices as architectural and engineering drawing, theatre
design and scenography, cinema, virtual world building, and so on. This
requires nothing more than a different way of looking at a very familiar
history, but to do this might allow us to better theorize what is probably
the most fundamental representational regime governing our society –
the ideological chora of our spectacular global village.
RB/SC: Baudrillard argues that with the advent of television, as well
as other broadcast devices, the subject-object relationship that is
played out within the social space of a scene yields to the obscene of
nodes-networks relationships, a full emptying out of interiority as it is
displaced in public and exterior technologies. How might Baudrillard’s
204 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

formulation from the 1960s regarding the effects of television on this

alteration of the subject-object relation come into play, if at all, with
virtual cinema/photography?
VB: Back in 1990, the year the world wide web was invented, I pub-
lished an essay in which I describe everyday life in the ‘developed’ world
as taking place in an image environment which increasingly resembles the
space of subjective fantasy turned inside out. At that time television was
the primary agent of this tendency. The arrival of the web vastly accel-
erated what Lev Manovich subsequently called the ‘trend to externalize
mental life’ and continues to contribute, in previously unimaginable
ways, to the mechanization and exteriorization of previously purely
‘internal’ associative processes. For example, if I go to a YouTube web-
site to search for a particular clip, I will be offered not only the clip for
which I am looking (assuming I am successful) but also a column of
thumbnail images of other clips that the programme ‘believes’ are related
to my search. Clicking on any one of these will again summon not only
the selected clip but a further column of apparently aleatory alternative
choices. I may quickly find myself far from my original point of depart-
ure. To immediate appearances it may seem that a spontaneous ‘drifting’
of associations has taken place analogous to the type of free movement of
thoughts in, for example, daydreaming. In reality, a computer pro-
gramme has formed a chain of associations between images from a data-
base on the basis of key searchwords, ‘metatags’, attached to those
images – in effect replacing ‘free association’ with bound association.
Such mimicking of spontaneous human mental processes may produce
the uncanny impression of an auxiliary intelligence at work, forming
associations on my behalf and in my place. In these and other ways
the internet is weaving a seamless continuity between physical and psych-
ical processes.
In replicating what psychoanalysis calls ‘primary process’ thinking, the
internet now represents a form of prosthetic unconscious as well as a
form of prosthetic memory. We should note that technology is not the
only agent in the process of exteriorization and objectification of sub-
jectivity. I recently came across a book by a French psychologist who
points to purely discursive aspects of this phenomenon. [Marilia
Amorim, Petit traite´ de la beˆtise contemporaine, Paris, Érès, 2012.] The
writer gives the example of the language of those little texts one finds in
the box when one buys, say, a kitchen device or an over-the-counter
medication. She lists the contents of one of these and remarks on the
displacements of subject positions in its enunciative form. The text begins
with such questions as ‘How does this medication work?’, and ‘What
symptoms may this medication alleviate?’, but then alternates
these with such first-person subjective forms as ‘How should I use this
medication?’, ‘How should I store this medication?’. Here, the subject
position in the text is no longer that of the implied doctor but that of the
Bishop and Cubitt 205

Figure 2. Victor Burgin still from A Place to Read (2011). Image: Victor Burgin.

patient – the external voice of authority masquerades as a kind of sub-

jective internal musing but one which is in fact located in the outside
where it functions as a commonly imposed consensual voice. What is
objectively external is subjectively internalized, in a discursive analogue
of Foucault’s optical panopticism. The writer goes through a number of
other examples – such as the talking chocolate cake that says ‘To give me
pleasure, please recycle my packaging’ – and describes the infantilization
of the subject in these increasingly ubiquitous forms of address, and the
subject’s discursive subordination to what the writer calls a ‘false dem-
ocratisation of the relations of knowledge’ which, to invoke Foucault
again, we may recognize as a false democratization of the relations of
power.
RB/SC: These quite different examples presumably illustrate how the
discursive and the imagistic both contribute to the ‘ideological chora’ you
alluded to in your talk.
VB: I was referring to the psychical space in which the talking choc-
olate cake and the memory trace of the YouTube clip equally ‘take
place’. I have tried to describe this space in various ways, admittedly
mainly psychoanalytic, in previous publications – in The Remembered
Film, but also in such earlier writings as those collected in In/Different
Spaces (1996). More recently I have been working with 3D computer
modelling software and have been struck by how the on-screen space con-
structed by these programmes – a space common to all of them – suggests
206 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

the Platonic idea of the chora, not least in Emmanuel Levinas’ de facto
representation of this idea. In my talk I quoted a passage from Levinas’
Totality and Infinity in which he describes a ‘space of light’ in which
everything comes into being, and describes it precisely in terms of geom-
etry – in terms of points, lines and planes. I was struck by how Plato’s
idea, and Levinas’ articulation of it, seems to perfectly describe the
primal void of 3D computer space. As this computer space is increasingly
the site of the industrial production of the popular imaginary – ‘indus-
trial light and magic’, in the name of George Lucas’ aptly named com-
pany – then the expression ‘ideological chora’ seemed appropriate. It
seems to me that the subjective space of associations in which the frag-
mentary dispersals of elements in the cinematic heterotopia may become
reassembled and reconfigured has much in common with the phenom-
enological and algorithmic-parametrical space of 3D computer
modelling.
This immediately suggests a connection with architecture, as well as
cinema, and it is obviously the case that architecture – no less than
cinema – is providing spectacularly visible manifestations of the associa-
tive capacities of computer drawing, and moreover that these are
deployed in an space no longer entirely circumscribed by the Euclidean
parameters that Plato and Levinas imply. In an essay published in 1987
in the Architectural Association’s journal AA files (‘Geometry and
Abjection’, reprinted in In/Different Spaces), I referred in passing to
Jacques Lacan’s use of non-Euclidean geometrical figures – the torus
and the Borromean knot, the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle – as
heuristic aids in the representation of unconscious structures, where
inside and outside, manifest and repressed, form a single continuous
surface, and where absences are structuring. In more recent years such
topological figures have become ubiquitous sources of reference in archi-
tectural design; but it seems to me that here their use tends to take the
form of what the architectural historian and theorist Anthony Vidler has
characterized as ‘illustration’, and bears out his observation that ques-
tions of space in contemporary architecture have been largely subordi-
nated to categories of style. This failing of architecture is for the most
part a result of the political, ideological and financial conformism of the
business of architecture, but architecture is also inescapably constrained
by the force of gravity itself – which computers and the mind may ignore.
I believe there is more to be made of the analogy between computer space
and psychical space than contemporary architecture has so far been able
to represent – which is why, in my talk, I was careful to pass via
Winnicott on my way to Plato and Levinas.
RB/SC: Your discussion of space leads us to ask a question that con-
tains a few elements, especially as they pertain to your more recent video
work (your machinima work). How does site specificity remain intact
with these works, especially given they are commissioned to be site
Bishop and Cubitt 207

specific? And given the aspersions some contemporary media theorists

have cast about the indexical capabilities of digital media, how do you
assess or construct the relationships between these recent pieces (e.g. the
one for Istanbul, or the Hôtel Dieu in Toulouse) and the places to which
they refer? How does the 3D space of a computer relate to the place of
reference? Or is the relationship something other than referential? A
follow-up to that pertains directly to the Istanbul piece. Part of what
makes the video so haunting is movement and/or stasis, both within the
frame of the image and with the camera. The camera moves ceaselessly
but does so as if filming photographic stills, for nothing in nature moves
(e.g. the leaves of the trees or the Bosporus). Can you comment on the
effects these create, ones unique to machinima, and that also seem to
archive early forms of visual technological image-making? In this respect,
the video also proves haunting as it seems an oblique allusion to Alain
Resnais’ Night and Fog, with its juxtaposition of still images and moving
camera, black and white and colour, and its exploration of a deserted
space.
VB: First, a note on terminology. I do not, myself, make ‘machinima’
works. The philosopher and film theorist David Rodowick has spoken of
a ‘crisis of naming’ in respect of works such as my own – not films, not
videos, what should we call them? If the definition of the word ‘machi-
nima’ were not already established in the quite restricted sense I have
already remarked on, then I might agree to using it in the broader sense
you seem to be suggesting now – certainly it would establish the require-
ment that the work be made with virtual cameras within the confines of
the virtual spaces allowed by the software. I tend to refer to my own
production as simply ‘digital projection’, but admit this may not be very
helpful as it is a category that may equally include films and videos, as
well as such other artists’ productions as slide projection pieces. On the
question of indexicality, I suppose that if I have been unable to share in
the excitement over the question of ‘indexicality’ in relation to digital
photography – or computer simulation – it is because I never considered
traditional photography to be indexical in any fundamentally epistemo-
logical way. Take the example of those news reports that refer to images
of a massacre but with the caution that the veracity of the images ‘cannot
yet be confirmed’. This has become a familiar refrain throughout the
reporting of the recent and ongoing conflicts in the Arab world. The
image is never enough, at some point someone has to step forward and
say: ‘I was there, I saw this’ – and then even this statement has to be
interrogated and either substantiated or denied by others. It makes no
difference to this process whether the image is digital or was shot on film.
The most epistemologically profound register of the indexical is discur-
sive and affective, the optical is quite literally superficial.
In relation to the ‘site specificity’ of my works, what is ‘indexed’ here is
not simply the material substance of the place, or the optical imprint of
208 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

the light reflected from it, it is the registration of the material world on a
consciousness. The ‘image’ is not simply a material thing – a photographic
print or the variegated light on a screen – nor is it just an optical event, the
physiological imprint of this light on the retina. It is a psychological pro-
cess. The image is always ‘virtual’, an idea which most recently gained
currency with Deleuze’s presentation of Bergson – for all that Bergson’s
idea was heavily inflected in its passage through Freud and Lacan, not to
mention Proust. In Bergson’s account, memory takes its force from pre-
sent perception – an insight that is clearly there throughout Proust, but
which also reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s notion that our access to
history has nothing to do with knowing the past ‘as it really was’ but is
rather a matter of the activation of a memory in a moment of crisis.
One way of understanding that moment of crisis – albeit perhaps
somewhat departing from Benjamin now – is as the experience of
affect, or even the apparent lack of it, in our first encounter with a
place. When I first stood in the Hôtel Dieu, in Toulouse – or more pre-
cisely, when I first spent time alone there – I found myself most preoc-
cupied with thoughts of how that now empty space was once full of
hospital beds. The work I subsequently installed there was a process of
the elaboration of that perception of the place together with the purely
physical perception of it. My commission in Toulouse was to work in
response to a particular building, the Hôtel Dieu (Hotel D). In Istanbul I
was asked simply to respond to the city (A Place to Read). After several
visits to Istanbul I found myself most preoccupied by the ongoing pro-
cess of destruction of some of the most beautiful public aspects of the city
in the pursuit of private profit. What came to metonymically represent
this present process for me was the past destruction of an architecturally
significant coffee house and public garden, on a beautiful site overlooking
the Bosphorus, to make way for a hideous and orientalist luxury hotel.
The house and garden had to be disinterred from oblivion through the
agency of surviving drawings and photographs, and was resurrected as
memory in the form of virtual camera movements through a computer
modelled space. The completed work was then installed in the Istanbul
Archaeological Museum. You refer to the affective dimension of the
work: a woman at the opening was in tears – she had known the original
coffee house as a child. In retrospect it is interesting to me that there was
absolutely no reference in Istanbul, either in what that woman and others
said to me at the time of the exhibition or in the response of the audience
when I later screened the work at a conference, to the difference between
the actual building and the computer simulation of it – the ‘indexicality’
of the work in this sense seemed not to be an issue, suggesting that we
need to broaden the definition of indexicality beyond the tacit empiricism
of the media theorists you mentioned.
RB/SC: The need to think indexicality in a larger, more complex and
nuanced fashion is something I think most theorists would agree with.
Bishop and Cubitt 209

Figure 3. Victor Burgin still from Hôtel D (2009). Image: Victor Burgin.

Can you elaborate on this somewhat? One direction to consider could be

the material and the technological. To that end, you suggested in your
talk that the virtual camera is a projector, noting pre-digital antecedents
from Plato’s extramission model of vision to the Lumières’ camera-pro-
jector apparatus. Projection is almost universally based on the geometry
of the cone of vision, which you note does not distinguish the direction of
travel between eye or projector and vanishing point. The chora implicit in
this system presents itself as timeless. Is it the changing geometry, or the
mere fact of apparent motion, that brings about a new relationship with
the image? On a somewhat related point, do you distinguish between the
3D model held in the computer’s memory and the 2D visualizations
which you present in your artworks?
VB: There is a distinction that may have been elided in some of those
debates over photographic indexicality: the ‘index’ is not a thing in the
world, it is a concept in semiotics – a useful one, but a limited one; we
shouldn’t expect too much of it, any more than we should expect too
much of the image itself. You invoked Renais and Marker’s film Night
and Fog. There are of course those who have argued that the death camps
210 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

are simply unrepresentable. Georges Didi-Huberman gives a well rea-

soned rejection of this argument in his book Images malgre´ tout. The
image cannot be everything, but it does not follow from this that it is
nothing. The past takes its force from present perception. The virtual
image of the coffee house that I made for Istanbul was an occasion for
memory for the audience there, but few of them would have known the
actual historical building. My own first encounter with the building was
in the form of a photograph in a book devoted to the work of its archi-
tect, Sedad Hakki Eldem. Apart from some pathologically exceptional
case we might imagine, it seems unlikely that the photograph in the book
would provoke tears.
Or again, let us suppose that I had been given the budget and technical
resources of a feature filmmaker, and that I had physically reconstructed
the coffeehouse and its immediate surroundings, and made my virtual
helicopter shot from an actual helicopter flying around my reconstruc-
tion of the site. The result would have been very different from my simu-
lation, and I cannot believe that the affective dimension could have been
at all comparable in kind. Nor should we fixate on the optical image, for
all that I am obviously interested in the visual specificity of computer
modelling. To return to the optical and geometrical, in response to your
question about the computer image, is to come back to the fundamental
issue of projection. It is convenient to refer to the image produced using a
computer as ‘three-dimensional’, it describes the nature of the illusion we
experience, but of course it is nothing of the sort. As you yourself note,
what is at play is the geometrical projection of three-dimensional objects
onto a two-dimensional plane.
What you refer to as the 3D model in computer memory is fundamen-
tally a matter of fluctuations of electrical intensities – so the analogy with
physiological memory is actually quite well based. These intensities rep-
resent lines of code – very long lines, that describe a particular virtual
world event, let’s say the orbit around the coffeehouse I mentioned ear-
lier, in terms of photogrammetrical algorithms, and others. For example,
the behaviour of photons has been mathematically modelled and
expressed as algorithms that may be built into 3D computer modelling
programs. Here again, to make quite literally ‘the point’, the program
does not model the entirety of the behaviour of the light in the scene; for
any given frame it models only the light that has converged upon the
geometrical position that represents the camera’s point of view, the pos-
ition given to the spectator – which is to say that the program begins with
that given point and extrapolates out from it to the projective geometry
of the objects before it, and their appearances resulting from the light
reflected from them. Appropriately, in this the most Platonic of worlds –
light is in effect emitted by the eye of the spectator.
RB/SC: The point you make about the apparent 3D capacity of some
virtual camera production is productive because the 3D is indeed only
Bishop and Cubitt 211

apparent. There are implications here for the concept ‘camera’ which you
have discussed, but also for kinds of images we engage within this con-
tinuum of reproductive technologies. You seem to be indicating a dis-
tinction between two types of camera, the actual ‘lump of metal’ and the
virtual camera that the notion of ‘camera’ must now include. Traditional
lens-based photography (which would include digital cameras, which use
more or less identical bodies to analog cameras) comes across as
Euclidean, while virtual in-computer cameras can produce the illusion
of a 3D space that opens onto non-Euclidean capabilities. How clear is
the distinction between lens-based representation and computed simula-
tion? And what are some of the effects on the spectator or viewing sub-
ject? Is the ‘affective screen’ of the image, where the cone of vision
telescopes to the vanishing point that then opens out to perspectival
engagement, any different with analog and digital? Or have the visual
technologies over time merely repeated and reinscribed a tale of the
viewing subject as sovereign subject?
VB: What comes to mind is a New Yorker cartoon that shows two
people in medieval dress walking through an architectural environment
of crazily incompatible vanishing points. One of them is saying: ‘I won’t
be sorry when they have this perspective thing worked out.’ The perspec-
tive thing was worked out in the West centuries ago, and has framed our
view of the world ever since. Computer simulated space does not repre-
sent a departure from perspective but rather a ‘third revolution’ in pic-
torial space inaugurated by the invention of perspective. In the previous
revolution photography replaced perspective drawing as the principle
mode of image making in everyday life – the basic means though
which the West represents itself, and its others, to itself. This was con-
sistent with the central impulse of the industrial revolution: the delega-
tion of previously time-consuming and skilled manual tasks to the
automatic operation of machines.
Where photography represents a shift from manual to mechanical
execution, computer imaging effects a shift from mechanical to electronic
execution. As before, the shift is both quantitative and qualitative – an
increased amount of information is deployed in the interests of a higher
degree of mimetic realism. However, where photography represents the
object in front of the camera, the computer simulates the object itself.
I do not, then, distinguish between the camera as a lump of metal and the
virtual camera, but rather see them as different implementations of the
same geometrical and optical knowledge. This same knowledge is
brought to the design of glass lenses in metal cameras and to the speci-
fication of algorithmic lenses in virtual cameras. The difference between
the real world and the virtual world here is one of degree and not of kind.
In the real world I may choose an ‘off-the-shelf’ lens from the wide range
available, along points on a scale specified in terms of focal length:
28 mm, 35 mm, 50 mm, and so on. I can choose between different
212 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

examples of 28 mm lenses on the basis of their comparative performance

in terms of barrel distortion, spherical aberration, etc. In a 3D modelling
program I can similarly choose from a menu of real-world lenses familiar
to any amateur photographer, but I can also type in any number between
the points on the conventional real-world scale. For example, if I want a
26.6232 mm focal length lens then I can have one. Moreover, there is no
reason for the virtual lens to be subject to either barrel distortion or
spherical aberration.
Significantly, however, an enormous amount of expertise is devoted to
writing computer programmes that may not only model a scene as it
appears to a virtual lens, but which may also simulate the results of
the various imperfections of glass lenses. Where film cameras are
involved – with the rider that there is strictly no difference between
film and still cameras in the virtual world – then additional consider-
ations are taken into account; for example, if a real camera movement is
made using a physical ‘rig’ – as in a crane shot, or whatever – there will
be an unavoidable degree of camera shake at the beginning and end of
the movement. Software has been written to simulate that shake, which
moreover allows the user to specify which particular film camera, and
which type of commercially available rig, is being used. The prevailing
standard of realism in computer modelling is not the world as such, it is
rather the world as it appears to the camera. I believe that this is an
ideological artefact of a period of historical transition, and will pass. In
time we will forget how physical cameras showed the world, and we will
adapt our supposedly ‘natural’ vision to the new standards. I have had
intimations of this mutation in perception in the course of my own
experience of working with 3D modelling programs. For example, I
have had the experience of finding myself dissatisfied with the ‘unrealis-
tic’ appearance of a simulated wall on my screen, or the bark on a tree,
and then going out for a walk and finding that walls and bark actually do
look like that. I occasionally visit internet 3D modelling forums looking
for solutions to technical problems. Most of the contributors append
‘signature’ adages of one kind or another to their posts. One I remember,
apposite here, exhorted: ‘Go outside, the graphics are amazing!’
RB/SC: Is it possible that the topological turn of the virtual camera,
the drifting ‘cinematic heterotopia’ it enables, including the ‘trend to
externalize mental life’ that Manovich and others allude to, does not
liberate the unconscious but opens it up to new organizations of power
and exploitation? That, in effect, replacing perspective with a different
system is no more positive than the introduction of cartographic space or
the transition from the temporal organization of double-entry bookkeep-
ing to the spatial organization of spreadsheets?
VB: I see no different system here but rather an evolution, perhaps
mutation, of the existing system. In my talk I spoke of a number of recent
technologies based on ‘photogrammetry’ – the derivation of metrical
Bishop and Cubitt 213

Figure 4. Victor Burgin still from A Place to Read (2011). Image: Victor Burgin.

attributes of three-dimensional objects from photographs.

Photogrammetry is as old as photography itself, but computer technol-
ogy has vastly expanded its applications. The most revolutionary event in
the recent history of photography was not the arrival of digital cameras
as such but rather the broadband connection of these cameras to the
internet. Such photogrammetrical applications can compile coherent
and navigable 3D spaces from the countless numbers of photographs
available on the web. I gave the example of the city of Dubrovnik –
modelled in its entirety as a ‘point cloud’ from photographs on the
internet taken mainly by tourists. If we extrapolate from these present
incipient technologies to their likely future implementation then it is easy
to foresee the time when a navigable computer model of the entire planet
will be available on a mobile device.
There are other technologies already capable of integrating the simu-
lated and real worlds by punching holes in the wall between the two – for
example, by turning the screen of a mobile device into a window through
which the user may see a previous state of what is actually present. We
should remember that it is not the image that is non-Euclidean, it is the
space-time of navigation. Navigation in the simulated world may take
place both in Euclidean space and in a non-Euclidean space for which
there is no counterpart in reality. Some architects have in effect already
attempted to represent this possibility. I think, for example, of some of
the ‘visionary’ pencil drawings of the French ‘brutalist’ architect
Claude Parent. Or again, in 1993, the Dutch architect Ben van Berkel
214 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

designed a house inspired by a Möbius strip – a surface with only one

side and one boundary. The house has since become famous as the
‘Möbius House’ but it remains of necessity within the confines of trad-
itional habitable space. One can easily make a Möbius strip in Euclidean
space by giving a strip of paper a half twist and then joining the ends
together to form a loop. A line drawn down the centre of the strip now
appears on both of what were previously separate sides, but which now
form a single surface. A fly could walk this line without difficulty, but
gravity prevents a human being from living in a building with a truly
Möbius strip topology. There is no gravity in computer simulated space –
unless the programmer decides to simulate it – so the ‘built space’ of this
coming parallel virtual world may be navigated as if it seamlessly com-
bined Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries – giving a whole new
twist to urban flânerie.
Combine this potential with the prosthetic associative procedures pre-
viously mentioned – or the possibility of winding back one’s field of
vision to past states, and so on – and we may foresee a future in which
the dominant visual representational space in the West, the natural des-
cendent of perspective, will have modelled – externalized – the hybrid
perceptual-psychical space that Bergson, Freud, Proust, et al., have
evoked so well in words. This is an inchoate intuition, and I do not
know whether it would be best worked out in theory or science-fiction,
but I do think it relevant to the consideration of ‘new organizations of
power and exploitation’ – not least because the more we ‘farm out’ our
psychical processes to technology, the more easily they may be hacked
into, further facilitating what Félix Guattari, prior to the arrival of this
technology, had already foreseen as a ‘colonization of the unconscious’.
RB/SC: In your visual works, you make a special point of working at
the intersection of text and image, criticizing the subordination of text as
caption and image as illustration. This seemed to produce on the one
hand an effect of equality – perhaps analogous to the desired equality of
the notes in Schoenberg’s 12-tone compositions – but on the other to risk
making image and text supplementary to one another. Is it possible to
destabilize the typical dominance of one over the other, without making
their relation, and therefore their affective or semantic potency, indeter-
minate and ineffective? Another way of thinking about this would be:
how does one combine text and image (regardless of source or duration)
without allowing it to become a kind of Romantic gesamtkunstwerk? We
know you are thinking about and working on a Wagner piece now, so
how does the whole cease to be a whole, or does it?
VB: I am working on a Wagner piece because 2013 is the two-hun-
dredth anniversary of Wagner’s birth, and a work has been commis-
sioned from me for the occasion. I doubt that I would have thought of
the project without prompting, but it has been very interesting doing the
research. To begin with ‘text-image’. . . The optical images in my work
Bishop and Cubitt 215

are interleaved with mental images suggested by the text. I would empha-
size here the error in the otherwise convenient formulation: ‘the text that
accompanies the images’ – because this form of description, albeit liter-
ally applicable to the situation in the gallery, implicitly endorses the
hierarchical separation of text and image conventional to art world
doxa. There are the ‘images’ and there are the words, and there is an
empty space between them. For me, this space is the space in which
I work, in anticipation of the work of the viewer-reader in this same
space. In the Japanese tradition the space between things – ‘ma’ – is
charged with sense. It is, if you like, a semiotic and affective substance.
This is the substance of the ‘image’ as I understand the term, the plastic
substance I think of myself as working with – differently ‘material’ from
paint or clay, but with its own psychical materiality.
The culture of the ‘developed’ West is a text-image culture, from
advertising and the popular press to cinema and live theatre, and
beyond. Questions of ideology and political hegemony are inseparable
from considerations of the scripto-visual regimes in which individual
consciousnesses are formed. My theoretical work on photography has
always been premised on this basic fact of Western society, just as my
artworks have always been produced out of what I might call a ‘demotic
attitude’ – which differs from aesthetic populism in that its focus is not on
actual mass cultural forms and contents but rather on virtual possibili-
ties, alternative configurations and outcomes, inherent in contemporary
technologies and extant languages. Wagner derived his model of an ideal
work of art not from conditions extant in his own time but from classical
antiquity. In classical Greek drama – as it evolved in the city state of
Athens between the 5th and 2nd centuries BC – poetry, narration, acting,
instrumental music, singing, dancing, mask and costume design, props
and painted scenery, combined within a unifying architecture to produce
a form of artistic expression more powerful than could be achieved by
any of the contributory arts in isolation. The Athenian drama staged
everything that touched the lives of the demos, the people, and provided
the occasion for reflection and debate on every issue of the day.
Wagner despised what the opera had become in his time – a commer-
cially profitable, trivially spectacular, entertainment and social occasion
for the more affluent members of society. He dreamed of a transformed
opera – he called it ‘music drama’ – that would be to a future egalitarian
republican Germany what the classical Greek drama had been to ancient
Athens: a mirror to society and a form of spiritual, intellectual and emo-
tional bonding of individuals in a sense of community. The failure of the
1849 Dresden insurrection, during which Wagner fought on the barri-
cades with his friend Mikhail Bakunin, put an end to Wagner’s belief in
the possibility of revolution but did not change his ambition for music
drama – he merely shifts from Feurbachian idealism to Schopenhauerian
pessimism. In 1849 Wagner was at work on what would eventually
216 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

become the Ring Cycle, a work he had begun as a Feurbachian parable in

which an order of Gods ruled by greed and power self-destructs to make
way for a human world based on love. After the failure of the revolution
he interrupted his work on the Ring to write Tristan und Isolde, which
culminates in the famous ‘Liebestod’, which with Freudian hindsight
may appear as the very hymn of the death drive. It is Tristan that revo-
lutionizes Western music and prepares the way for Schoenberg, Webern,
Berg and others – albeit Tristan remains Romantic in sensibility, imbued
with what Schoenberg condemned as ‘psychologism’.
RB/SC: Considering the etymology of the word ‘animation’, when you
animate a suit of still images, what is the mode of temporality involved?
Is it a resurrection and reanimation of ancestral time – in the mode of
memory and nostalgia? Are they simply rendered more fully present by
including motion? Or do ‘moving stills’ open onto some form of futurity?

Figure 5. Victor Burgin still from Hôtel D (2009). Image: Victor Burgin.
Bishop and Cubitt 217

VB: My works are designed to be shown in museums and art galleries.

The setting of the gallery is different from either the theatrical setting of
cinema or the domestic setting of television, and to take this specificity of
setting into account is to arrive at what I have elsewhere called the
uncinematic. In the gallery a projection work typically occupies a more
or less darkened space, usually empty of furniture, where viewers gener-
ally enter and leave at indeterminable intervals. Audiovisual time in a
gallery setting is therefore dual. Although it is possible to enter a movie
theatre after the film has begun and leave before it ends, it is normally
assumed that the duration of the film will coincide with the duration of
the spectator’s viewing of it. In the gallery it is normally assumed that
these two times will not coincide. Most works made for the gallery are
therefore designed to loop, with a seamless transition between the first
and last frames of the material. The non-coincidence of the duration of
the material and the time of viewing suggests that the elements that
comprise the work should be equally weighted and autonomously
significant.
For example, the opening sentence of the voice-over script to a work
I made for a gallery in Cologne reads: ‘The major museums are all close
to the station, which is by the cathedral so I cannot get lost.’ This sen-
tence establishes that the speaker is a stranger to Cologne, there to visit
the museums, and it also states a material fact about the city plan. So far,
I might be writing a short story. However, although this is the ‘opening
sentence’ of my script it is not necessarily the opening sentence for the
visitor to my installation, who may come and go at any time. A specific
requirement of the voice-over text therefore is that it be written so that
any sentence may occupy the position of ‘first’ sentence, just as any image
may be the first image. Characterized by repetition, recursivity, temporal
indeterminacy and the attenuation of hierarchy between elements, the
spatio-temporal structure of a projection work specific to a gallery setting
is closer to that of a psychoanalytic session than a narrative film. No part
or detail of the material produced in an analysis is considered a priori
more significant than any other, all elements equally are potential points
of departure for chains of associations.
Temporality in psychoanalysis is also characterized by reiteration, for
example in the symptomatic phenomenon of the ‘compulsion to repeat’,
and the therapeutic principle of – in the title of one of Freud’s essays –
‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’. What in musical
terms one might call the ritornello structure in audiovisual works has
its analogies in such psychical mechanisms as deferred action, in which
a previously anodyne event may become traumatic when recalled in dif-
ferent circumstances, or in the unconscious determinations of the sense of
de´ja vu and the uncanny. The spacing of isolated semi-autonomous elem-
ents in a gallery work allows the possibility that viewers may see what is
present to perception not only through the recollection of previous
218 Theory, Culture & Society 30(7/8)

Figure 6. Victor Burgin still from A Place to Read (2011). Image: Victor Burgin.

elements of the work but also through their own personal memories and
fantasies. The psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire char-
acterize the reiterative fractional chains that form fantasies and day-
dreams as ‘short sequences, most often fragmentary, circular and
repetitive’. Projection works composed for the specificity of the gallery
setting typically take the form of ‘fragmentary, circular and repetitive’
short sequences. In response to your question about ‘moving stills’ and
the future, it is interesting to me that the philosopher and film theorist
David Rodowick had much the same intuition. In a talk he gave
prompted by a work of mine he saw in a Berlin gallery he spoke of
what he calls a ‘crisis of naming’ in respect of such works, and he sees
a ‘future memory of cinema’ in these forms that may anticipate not only
what the image has been but also what it is becoming in the mutating
environment of digital media. I would add that this is not to attribute the
status of prophecy to the work, but rather to view the ‘still moving’ form
of the work as a symptom of our times.

References
Burgin V (ed.) (1982) Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan.
Burgin V (1986a) The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity. London:
Macmillan.
Burgin V (1986b) Between. Oxford and London: Basil Blackwell and ICA.
Burgin V (1996) In/Different Spaces. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Bishop and Cubitt 219

Burgin V (2004) The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion.

Burgin V (2005) The separateness of things. Tate Papers (Spring), p. 17.
Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/
05spring/burgin.htm.
Burgin V and Van Gelder H (2010) Art and politics: A reappraisal. Eurozine, 30
July. Available at: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-30-burgin-
en.html.

Victor Burgin is an artist and theorist.

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at Winchester School

of Art, University of Southampton.

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths,

University of London, and Professorial Fellow of the University of
Melbourne.

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