The Scientific Instrument and the Camera

A Human Laboratory is an evolving artist publication consisting of one hundred photographs taken during site visits to thirty-five international scientific research centres, laboratories and field stations over the course of five years. Photographs within this project are accompanied by scientific facts that have been decontextualised and anonymised, loosely chosen for their hypothetical connection to the imagery. This combination of text and image harnesses the symbolic nature of scientific instruments, making apparent the notion that human knowledge is indeed heavily codified and increasingly intangible and that such physical spaces can come to represent the ever “black-boxing” of knowledge construction within culture, amongst other things.

This paper proposes that if the primary tool we collectively rely on to understand our visual world is inadequate for describing contemporary visual reality, it sincerely amplifies the notion that we are enveloped within a reality that has little relationship with the material forms that surround us. This problem challenges image makers to move beyond limited and traditional representations and put to work fresh symbolic languages that can reflect a shifting reality. Via examples from A Human Laboratory, poetic and radical photographic documents are analysed for their ability to bring forth new connections in understanding complex phenomena. These categories specifically—via a politic of incoherence—can employ the inventive notions of radical experimentation towards novel interconnections in a visual way.