‘Dancing in the dark’ is a practice-oriented artistic research project that situates itself within the Thinking Tools research group. The focus of this research group is on the impact of technology on contemporary perception, imagination and imaging.
Due to its ingrained slowness and strenuous distribution, the analog photographic apparatus (which, in addition to the camera, also includes light-sensitive film, light-sensitive paper and the chemical process) has made way for digital techniques in everyday life. This research project examines how analog photography, while ditched on the garbage heap of profit thinking, makes itself relevant as an artistic medium and, by extension, as an invitation to cyclical thinking.
An apparatus, says Vilém Flusser, is not merely an instrument that one can use at will (with the person using it sovereignly ruling it), but it is a game one takes part in. It is then the task of the operator to continuously activate the new possibilities stored in the program of the apparatus. This project researches the material stubbornness of analog photography and the active role that the artist can play within the ‘black box’ of the device. From the physical work in the darkroom, self-evidences about reproduction, technique, uniqueness, subject, selection, failures and image editing are questioned and explored.
