3. 4. 2024 seminar of accidental wisdom: Martin Charvát
seminar of accidental wisdom: Martin Charvát
3.4.2024
Immortality and Synchronicity: On the Apparatus of Vision
The lecture is based on a series of reflections on the inherent properties of the medium of photography and other apparatuses of vision, which are the ability to capture a scene/life forever, and the transformation of the affective and perceptual structures of the human subject.
Organisms exist only when they are captured by apparatuses, and when the apparatuses subsequently replay what has been captured by them. The instruments' recordings contain a footage of the repetitiveness of human life that is a mere theatrical farce in the middle of nothingness. The images are the ones that really live, as they are preserved forever in hardware, in virtual nothingness, in a timeless void, from where they are called up at the touch of a button to replay a few scenes over and over again. They never age, they are eternal.
But in order to see something, there must be a simultaneous modulation of the image and the eye, or the conditions under which the image would be transmittable and visible, as well as the conditions under which the eye must be recalibrated to be able to perceive the transmitted image adequately. The human becomes the apparatus, and the apparatus becomes human.
Martin Charvát (1989) works at the Department of Media Studies and serves as the head of the Center for the Study of Media Culture at Metropolitan University Prague. He has published 7 authored monographs and co-edited or co-authored others. In the past, he has also worked as a research scientist at FAMU. His focus lies in media archaeology, visual media, techimagination, and contemporary audiovisual culture.