Helena Gouveia Monteiro

Best known for his deeply immersive and medium defying experimental films, Werner Nekes (Germany 1944-2017) was also an avid collector of pre-cinematic optical devices. In addition to conservational and pedagogical concerns, better exemplified in his Media Magica documentary series, Nekes also used his knowledge of and access to this extensive archive as a means of studying the underlying mechanics of film and devising new ways of engaging with his artistic medium.

Items relating to relief techniques, such as stereoscopes and stereoscopic prints, perspective theatres, peepshow prints, and zograscopes (the bulk dating from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century) make for a significant part of the filmmaker’s collection and reveal a particular interest in three-dimensional representation and binocular superimposition.

This paper will investigate the relation between the optical devices found in Werner Nekes’ collection and the conceptual and artistic gestures deployed in his film practice. By analysing the editing techniques employed in the films, in co-relation with his theory of the medium, it will exemplify the direct influence of stereoscopic techniques and how they relate to the concepts of horizontal and vertical montage.

Within the context of an alternative history of film, this research takes into consideration the use of industry’s byproducts by visual artists and the readapting of devices and techniques to new usages that stray from and even deny their originally intended purpose and contribute to the creation of new artistic forms, contributing to a better understanding of how filmmakers and artists have used the audio-visual dispositif to create non- narrative sensorial experiences that radically differ from the pursuit of accurate representation and verisimilitude.

Helena Gouveia Monteiro is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker from Portugal living and working in Dublin. She received her MFA from the Villa Arson in Nice in 2015 and is a PhdD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Lausanne. Her work has been shown internationally in both cinema and gallery settings and she was recently awarded the Digital Media Residency at Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin, the Light Cone Atelier 105 Residency in Paris, and the Film Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. She is the co-founder of Stereo Editions, an independent publishing collective of artists’ editions, and currently co-directs the LUX Critical Forum Dublin.    

Tonje Haugland Sørensen

In 1918 a French journal proclaimed the stereoscope the most important weapon of the First World War. Such a proclamation seems at odds with the legacy of the First World War as the war of tanks, gas and trench warfare. Yet, the journal had good reason to signal out the stereoscope. The western front had seen the rapid development of aerial photography and aerial recognizance as an increasingly important source for military intelligence. For the interpretation of these masses of aerial photographs – often taken at high altitude and vertical to the ground – the stereoscope had proved vital due to its ability to create a sense of 3D-immersion which significantly eased interpretation. The following paper will reflect on this use of the stereoscope as an instrument of war, with particular focus on how the combination of aerial photography and the stereoscope created a sense of an immersive battlefield. A special focus will be on the interpreters who employed stereoscopes as part of their intelligence work, and who through manuals and memos written by the Royal Flying Corps (R.F.C) were told to put aside their own human sentiment for the proposed objective view of the battlefield given by the combination of aerial photographs and stereoscopic apparatuses.

Dr. Tonje H. Sørensen is a post-doc researcher in Art History at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is currently working on a project called Overview – the art of the aerial which deals with the historical, cultural and medial context of the aerial in visual culture, and how it ties in with the current drone culture. Through close readings of different aerial visual templates, the project will focus on the intersection of ideologies, military, media and art. She has previously worked on the role of photography and film in representing war, as well as written about the use of photography in museum exhibits about atrocities.

Olivier Perriquet and Eric Kerr

This paper exposes how vision and touch have been historically interrelated, and explores the implications of this connection for a photogrammetrical account of visual immersion. Photogrammetry is today an accessible technique initially performed by geographers on the basis of stereoscopic photographs. Since then, the technique has evolved to allow for the creation of three-dimensional images by algorithmically extracting the geometric information of a scene or an object from a larger set of photographs, taken from different angles. This recording method is able to represent entire objects or scenes, i.e. more than what would be visible from any specified angle when the objects are opaque. Vision in this case is related to the objectual nature of percepts: their “objectivity”. At first glance, objectivity might seem to be a touch-related attribute. This evocation may not be entirely a coincidence: vision and touch have, in fact, been intimately associated throughout history. The connection can be traced back to the antique “emission theory”, which assumed that vision was performed by a beam coming from the eye and touching objects, a conception that has surprising reminiscences in modern laser-based alternative methods to photogrammetry. But this association is perhaps more intricate and intertwined than it might seem. The famous Molyneux thought experiment proposed in the 17th century, asking whether someone born blind could translate the experience acquired by touch into a visual experience, was given a negative verdict only in the 21st century. The interrelation of hapticity and opticity is still largely a terra incognita. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, already outlined a picture of the senses as together contributing different strands of meaning to a complete understanding. While stereoscopy involves frontality and framing, and is similar in this respect to monoscopic photography, photogrammetry frees itself from the directionality of the gaze of the viewer, while remaining inherently selective, filtered, incomplete. Building on the phenomenological tradition, we explore the limits, constraints, and nascent grammar of photogrammetry to imagine it in terms of its technical unfolding (through a combination of stereoscopic views) and conceptually (in terms of multi-stereoscopy).