https://joannedorotheasmith.format.com/
joanne.dorothea-smith@plymouth.ac.uk
The imagination is a deeply consuming place, and yet its hold is delicate and fleeting, a moment of reverie can be easily ended by small external, or indeed internal, forces. A noise, a movement a banal thought, can remove us, only to return at a later time and the moment is lost or changed, never being recaptured in the same way, we have changed since the last visit. This is a phenomena that is attached to the photographic artefact, every time we revisit this place of memory it is different, here is the crux, photographs are not merely representational an aide memoir—they can be mirrors into to the imaginary. We are the mediators and we decide on meanings of place and is this infinite? Imaginings have perceived beginnings and the possibility of no end, just a series of visitations that are differing and open ended. The photograph is a revenant.
My research sets up and enquiry into the ontology of photography and the overlap with the ontology of matter. Exploring creative interventions, re-thinking the technological as a way of illuminating the relationship between matter, truth and the creation of representational visual forms. Exploring diverse areas of trans-disciplinary research will form the basis for an intervention in and contextualisation of photographies that acknowledges the molecular and quantum. Many disciplines talk in terms of the human and the quantum but can the photographic be a useful way to discuss a link between these spaces? The persistence of the visual and its saccadic motion within the human body create a unique question about the photographic and the need to ‘fix’ images in place. The surfaces of the retina receive discrete packages of information in the form of photons with which our neurological matter and receptors perform processes which decipher what we see. But as we continue to extend the possibilities of what we might ‘see’ with new technologies and our understandings of the molecular and quantum spaces–will this change our representations and also our perceived experiences?
I am a photographic artist, multimedia technician and current Transtechnology researcher working in HE within the arts sector. I am also part of the Frequencies photographic collective and a member of CAMP. My work makes use of photographs, moving image, creative writing, sound and printmaking.