The Vision Machine

by Ji-Yoon Han

First published in ‘Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis’, catalogue for the MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, 2023

At the crossroads of various disciplines including law, business, politics, and science, Carey Young’s work scrutinizes the rhetorics of power within the institutional, commercial or state structures on which capitalist societies are built. The UK-based artist creates highly socially relevant installations in which performance, text, photography, and video re-enact some of the codes that govern the interpersonal relationships of the office, the courthouse, call centres, or psychoanalytical practice. Contracts, clauses, licences, forms, disclaimers, advertising slogans, executive orders, and inventories inform her formal vocabulary and activate mechanisms of mimetics and performativity. This bureaucratic arsenal is set in tension with the human body—beginning with her own—with the expressed purpose of highlighting gender inequality within the workplace and in public space. With a keen sense of abstraction, the sublime, and the immeasurable, Young illuminates the ways in which transactions, contracts, and documents in general shape our everyday lives and realities.

How do we account for the optical relationships we maintain with our current image-saturated world? What transformative processes are at the origin of our vision—an ability that inevitably needs to be supplemented? For example, the lens: that small, round piece of slightly convex glass that intercedes between our eye and the physical world as soon as we seek to document it, to create a tangible record of it or reproduce it as a still or moving image. Young isn’t concerned with creating an archeology of the lens, from its historical origins in Ancient Mesopotamia to its insertion inside a camera obscura, and later the camera. Instead, she exposes the real, current conditions behind the production of camera lenses—before they are marketed, but after any discourses of invention—and to forge an alternative, feminized history to counter the canonical narrative of Man’s optical conquest of the world.

Young’s video The Vision Machine (2020) was filmed in the factories of the SIGMA Corporation, a manufacturer of high-quality lenses for photography and filmmaking.  Based in Japan, like many similar companies, SIGMA is known world-wide for optical precision. Shooting her video with lenses manufactured by the company, Young silently observes their production process. Conveyor belt, rotating cylinder, sorting tray, the thrumming of machines. The mechanized flow of the production line leads us, like each newly manufactured lens, to a control and assembly station where the final product is hand-finished and examined. The technicians, all women, occupy several roles at once. At work, they are experts who ensure what SIGMA’s promotional material calls “tactile perfection,” that is, the human ability to control qualities that aren’t easily quantifiable, which underscores the body’s role within the apparatus of production. Visually, the women blend into the factory’s sterilized environment, dressed in matching hooded coveralls, surgical masks, gloves, and latex finger cots. Under Young’s gaze, they collectively form a counter-image to the modern heroic figure of the “image hunter” by substituting it with their own piercing eye, delicate movements, and depersonalized selves. Absorbed in the precise and solitary nature of their tasks, the workers of the Aizu factory, in Fukushima Prefecture, maybe don’t take pictures: they allow them to happen.

A SIGMA lens manipulated by an artist “looks” at skilled workers making SIGMA lenses. This mise en abyme transforms the video into a reflexive microcosm whose hyaline surfaces mirror its reflections to infinity. Gradually, Young’s documentary-type footage seems to enter the realm of speculative fiction, whereby the metaphorical matrix of all contemporary visual culture, namely the lens factory, is entirely run (and perhaps even owned) by women. The Vision Machine ends with the calibration test that is performed once the camera lens is assembled. This takes place in front of an optical resolution test pattern that seems designed to hypnotize the onlooker. Self-possessed, a woman calibrates a telephoto lens. This final scene suggests that while advances in vision technology have often occurred within a military context, where the goal is always to see further and more clearly than one’s enemy, these optical tools are crafted by women. They are the ones who create the potential, the dream, of a gynocentric culture.

Ji-Yoon Han

trans. from French by Jo-Anne Balcaen