COMPROMISED VISIONS “Lately, she’s been seeing things differently”

EDITORIAL

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“Late­ly, she’s been see­ing things differently”

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Who is she, though? A prophet, awok­en, touched by God? A new­ly elect­ed leader of the peo­ple on a quest to over­throw kings? A queen, tired of the car­nage, now keen on striv­ing for peace? An under­fund­ed ambi­tious sci­en­tist who has final­ly put it all togeth­er under her micro­scope or a scared con­fused child, trem­bling under the cov­ers after a haunt­ing dream? 

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Is she even human? Maybe she’s the lens at the back of a sniper’s rifle, hav­ing sec­ond thoughts while the com­man­der is yelling take the bloody shot? Or maybe the sniper is a revamped drone called Lucy, that can assess all alone, the col­lat­er­al dam­age of a locked-on target?

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Depend­ing on where she’s stand­ing, all these may apply. Depend­ing on how she looks at it. And the odd thing about it all is that she might not even have eyes. And yet she sees quite fine. 

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Does her vision make her weak­er or ten times stronger? Is her “see­ing dif­fer­ent­ly” a mark of exclu­sion or a sign of divin­i­ty? Is it a dis­tor­tion or an aug­men­ta­tion? Vision can mean delu­sion or fore­sight, it can imply a whole­some grasp or a par­tial glance through a crack; a col­lec­tive pic­ture put togeth­er by a frag­ment­ed many, or a collective’s blind faith in a sin­gle p.o.v that binds them.

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By now, vision is such a preva­lent metaphor that it can be all these things at once. More than any­thing, it implies one’s posi­tion, one’s cir­cum­stance and situation—and one’s abil­i­ty to inter­pret situations—within a dynam­ic of power—a dynam­ic that often­times dates way-way back.

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Here’s what a few vision­ar­ies said about vision:

“The field of vision has always seemed to me com­pa­ra­ble to the ground of an archae­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tion.”  Paul Vir­ilio

“Vision is always a ques­tion of the pow­er to see – and per­haps of the vio­lence implic­it in our visu­al­iz­ing prac­tices. With whose blood were my eyes craft­ed?” Don­na Haraway

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So with all that in mind, when a vision­ary nego­ti­ates, when she set­tles, is she more prag­mat­ic, more cal­cu­lat­ed? Or does it mean she lost her edge, is her vision now impaired, not as sharp? In oth­er words, what exact­ly are “com­pro­mised visions”? Then again, what types of vision aren’t? 

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We admit, as an edi­to­r­i­al team, we so far couldn’t meet around one world­view. The way we see it, though? It’s up to you to show us.

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In the sec­ond issue of Work­ing Titles, we asked the widest array of both aca­d­e­m­ic or non-aca­d­e­m­ic con­trib­u­tors to respond to this provo­ca­tion, for­mu­lat­ed above, which lies some­where between poet­ry and elu­ci­da­tion. Out of the count­less pro­pos­als we col­lect­ed, we now present 14 contributions. 

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Edi­to­r­i­al team for issue No. 02:
Xenia Mura Fink, Angela Matthies, Ann-Kathrin Müller, Gabriel S Moses

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Sup­port­ed by Bauhaus-Uni­ver­sität Weimar, Pro­fes­sor­ship Arts and Research

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Pub­lished by Work­ing Titles, c/o Bauhaus-Uni­ver­sität Weimar, Ph.D. Studiengang

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Kun­st und Design, Geschwis­ter-Scholl-Straße 7, 99423 Weimar

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For issue No. 1, go here

ESSAYS

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After 32

Brynn Hig­gins-Stir­rup

- Making Visible the Invisible — The Art of Seeing Black Holes 

Angela Matthies

Zoom! Shake the
{conference} Room

Gabriel S Moses

The Denied Image

Gian­lu­ca Cosci

In the Pipeline:
A Bottom-Up Look
at Social Inequity

Gilad Perel­man

The Uncertainty of Vision

John Hill­man

Soiled Sights

Kirsty Bade­noch and Tea­gan Dorsch

Situating the Gaze:
Towards an Embodied Ecological Approach to Screendance

Lux Eter­na and Sarah Pini

About Optical Empowerment.
How to Train Your Eyes While Exposed to Monumental
Dystopia

Maria Sideri

Figurprobleme.
Ein Erfahrungsbericht aus der künstlerischen Praxis

Clau­dia Rößger

Do You See What I See? Revisioning Ireland’s Orange Halls

Philip Arneill

To Watch Others Play:
A Subjective and Trans-Disciplinary Exchange

Simona Zemaityte and Pao­lo Fazzari

Risky Objects:
Illustrating Situated Body Image Experience

Bev­er­ley Irving-Edwards

BIG VISIONS:
Navigating Community and Mural Making

Kim­ber­ly Ellen Hall

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