Umbra #eedd82

It‘s worth noting that the advance of data visualization is somewhat aligned
with an advance in navigation, the military/mercantile application of astronomy.
The retinas that monitor the diagram and the star share similar optical
mechanisms. It is the mathematization of the senses of distant perception, viz,
to look at illuminated images without any shadows, derived from phenomena.
Looking back at history, this bright vision, the perfect conceptualization in visual
practice, carried out under the guise of enlightenment (Lumières), abused
celestial diagrams as a means of terraforming - specifically, luxforming. In this
respect, it seems natural that the origin and goal of such an invasive statistic
boil down to two abysmal places that mankind hasn‘t (yet) occupied: the deep
sea and outer space. As the few titles of the early model of the infographic, Napoleon‘
s Russian Campaign 1813-1812 and The Diagram of the Causes of Mortality,
suggest, the purpose of such logistics of the visual is to disassemble the
apperception of birth and death and to telescopically abbreviate it.

The circular composition of optical vision, as in a telescopic sight and a pie
chart, deploys self-evidence in a grid of nowhere, what Paul Virilio once called
teleobjectivity. Everything seems closer and clearer to the retina than ever
before, but the gap between the seeing and the seen, which the traverse of a
fiber-optic cable or the practical template that enables high-speed decoding in
a single glance fills in real-time, is now beyond the range of the senses. Yet the
distorted perception induced by the gallop of light is the only source that defines
the cutting-edge interval between the retina and reality. Seeing, as in the
ancient Greek ‚theōria‘, now becomes just the theory of staring only at the eternal
distance. Thus, within this extreme quarantine of perception, the ground
that the eyes have seen recedes into an invisible scene, an imaginary stage/tent
in a fatal lux of light. The physical aspect of the eye is displaced in various ways
as the lumen of the LED surface gradually increases.

As a result, a chain in the ocular topology breaks when the perception of the
ocular is significantly distant from the evidence of physical phenomena. It turns
into a self-referential entity, similar to causa sui. In the flat and flawless surface,
the diagram exists to a mild presence, devoid of shadows that surrender their
nociception. The epistemological qualm of the eye shuts its own eyes in the
quasi-meditative session of the self-sufficient diagram. The more train delays
persist, as is often the case, the more resilient the timetable persists within an
autonomous aesthetic. Even if all the roads to Rome disappear, the road signs
will forever point. As in Oppenheimer (2023), the appearance of a mushroom
cloud (all by itself) in bright silence is certainly meditative. The cruel optical
sovereignty produces absolute tranquility. From this point of view, it‘s an ideal
residence without the need for territory and real lethal ammunition without
victims.

If Adorno portrayed the „ideal of blackness“ as one of the deepest impulses
of abstraction in the modernist era, today the „ideal of light,“ the highest impulse
of digital abstraction, reigns supreme. The height of the gap, used as a
metaphorical expression, the analogy of altitude, implies a new perspective on
the dichotomy of brightness, suggesting an insight into low light and high darkness.
In this respect, a lowering of the angle of elevation, a contour flight of vision,
has the potential to expand the spectrum of the retina. In a glaring exhibition
space, massive nociceptive icons and pixelated figures made from the basic
material of fabric reveal the topography of dark light; the highest ground at the
lowest point. Similar to an x-ray, the permeable lowest light bends the line of
sight of heliotropism. It is to reveal the bright camouflage through the logic of
the dark light and to depict the physiological diagram on the dimmest ground.
It is the inverted ballistic; an inverted trajectory that pushes the bullet back into
the dark and narrow muzzle - like the final scene of the movie Wanted (2008). It
is a persistent trace that pulls a shadow on the ground out of nowhere, forever.

– Donghyuk Lee