Eva Wilson, M.A.
Doctoral Researcher
Research Project
In 1831, Scottish physicist David Brewster made the physically justified distinction between “real” and “virtual” images in his Treatise on Optics. Virtual images cannot be intercepted or recorded, and thus have no material location. Following this definition, reflections appearing in the mirror (or seemingly behind the mirror) are virtual images: they appear in a place where, physically, they are not.
Brewster and his colleagues within the British science community were not only theoretically concerned with this ontological definition of the image. Rather, it was their inventions in the field of optical media—the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, early experiments in colour photography, etc.—that first created interest around this epistemology of the virtual. William Henry Fox Talbot, experimenting with his photographic inventions at Lacock Abbey, theorised about the use of photography to record rays of light beyond the spectrum visible to the human eye. James Clerk Maxwell, working from his Cambridge laboratory, used stereoscopy to visualise higher-dimensional mathematics, which went beyond a human sensorium of the visible. Half a century later, the concept of virtuality and the phrase “virtual images” appear in the work of Henri Bergson (Matière et mémoire, 1889): in his thinking about virtuality, he derives his definition from its physical purpose, thus directly linking it to an epistemology of the virtual and an ontology of the virtual image that was developed in the context of optical media and experiments within physics.
With the exploration of stereoscopically simulated space, higher-dimensional geometry, latency, and virtuality as aesthetically operative categories, an episteme of the virtual emerges which has little to do with sensory evidence, yet can be operated on and analysed in the field of the aesthetic.
Profile
Studies of art history, cultural studies and philosophy at the Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität Berlin. 2004-2011 studio manager for Olaf Nicolai, 2008-2011 student assistant at the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” in the project „Die Wirklichkeit bildlicher Affektdarstellungen“ (director: Prof. Dr. Klaus Krüger). 2011-2013 curator with the art foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna, 2014-2015 director of the Schinkel Pavillon Berlin and 2017-2018 editor at documenta 14, Athens and Kassel. Co-editor of the publication series “ ” (quotationmarkquotationmark.com, NERO, Rom, since 2018). 2012-2016 and 2020 academic researcher of the Centre for Advanced Studies BildEvidenz.
Research Interests
- 19th-century photography and stereoscopy
- Space, simulation and virtuality 1850-1950
- Contemporary art and curatorial practice
- Publishing as artistic practice
Publications
Exclusion Zones, in: Ge(ssenwiese) K(anigsberg), Library for Radioactive Afterlife, Susanne Kriemann, Künstlerbuch, Spector Books, Leipzig (forthcoming)
None, Not, Ever (über Cerith Wyn Evans) und Bovine Intervention (über SUPERFLEX), in: The Commissions Book, TBA21, Sternberg Press, Berlin (forthcoming)
Preparing the Arrival of the Geodes, in: 7 Postcards for Innsbruck, Olaf Nicolai, Katalog, Spector Books, Leipzig (forthcoming)
Publikationsserie “ ”, edited by Adam Gibbons, NERO, Rom, seit 2018
Echo Chambers, Radicality as Style, and Bell Systems’ Laboratory of Transgressions, in: The Legacy of Transgressive Objects, hg Katja Müller-Helle, August Verlag, Berlin 2018
Trapped in the Dream of the Other (über Revital Cohen und Tuur Van Balen), in: The Work of the Wind: Land, hg. Christine Shaw und Etienne Turpin, K-Verlag, Berlin 2018
Stepping into the Same River Twice: Mario García Torres’s The Way They Looked At Each Other, in: Mario García Torres. An Arrival Tale, hg. Cory Scozzari und Daniela Zyman, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2017
Hinter den Spiegeln. Virtualität und virtuelle Bilder im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Periphere Visionen. Wissen an den Rändern von Fotografie und Film, hg. von Heide Barrenechea, Marcel Finke und Moritz Schumm, Paderborn 2016.
ContactEva WilsonCenter for Advanced Studies BildEvidenz Arnimallee 10 |
