Abstract
In this thesis I am making an attempt to take on a certain function of perceiving vis-à-vis Ellen K. Solbergs installation Blå Oppbevaringsboks according to an interdisciplinary approach to the object of analysis as mediated event. In the intersection between political philosophy, anthropology and sociology we find ways of apprehending the functions of art as a correlate of opposing percepts in society. The installation in its re-presentation, visibility and invisibility in a time-space creates modalities of spectatorship that differs from traditional ways of perceiving. The spectator, migrating through percepts across temporalities and places, discerns new spheres for seeing and acting and new political arenas for utterance. Oscillating in a state of pensiveness, a movement in-between the exterior media of the installation and interior archive of memories of the body-mind, the beholder discerns a new figure of an image in motion. Moving inside a postmodern landscape of screens and pictures, a disinterested spectator discovers a figure that escapes ways of perceiving according to traditional approaches to art. At the same time the beholder restores and re-animates sensations that seems to have lost their functions in the practices of economical governmental rationality of our times. The restoration of compassion happens in the production of the remaining image of an unregistered movement, the trace of a passer-by. An interdisciplinary method of analysing imagery surrounding us brings forth a notion of an active and a passive way of relating to art and objects in our everyday environment. Images that in the past have occupied a space for representation have lost their original locus and circulate freely between heterogeneous percepts. They do not choose their locus of residency from interest or preference, but remain available in a non-totalising whole of external images for an indifferent spectator surfing the web or navigating through the landscape of screen surfaces in everyday life. The dichotomy of the images we observe within Blå Oppbevaringsboks, the images as active and passive, as internal and external draws our attention to the way we participate in society and the way we behave according to agents of power. As well as manifesting itself to the individual body, it similarly appears to and colonises the body-mind of a community, a heterogeneity of perspectives taking part in a common sphere of percept and affect.