reproducibility has always reproduced itself, but never in an identical manner
(Eduardo Cadava (1))


Among media's earliest, and most enduring, conceits is that of a single 'perfect moment,' a pristine fragment of time, arrested and secured through the minute intervention into the unconscious opticality of a camera, or other device, by an authenticating eye, whether it is that of an enabling author or artist or a witnessing spectator. It is a time-image (2) constituted by, and constitutive of, the process of technical reproducibility. Such conditions of representation are a definitive condition of our contemporaneity. Photography, in and of itself, for example, is little more than a technical intercession, a process of recording, inscribing into a sensitive emulsion, a stabilized image generated by a chemical interaction with light. This produces the photo-chemical index which is arrested, and apprehended as an evidentiary trace, marking presence and absence, simulation and actuality. It is also an artifactuality which exercises a certain promise. By marking the place of an absence, media induces the presumption of presence, as if what had passed away has not abandoned us entirely, but persists in the promise of its recall; as if an event, or a person, having once been present before the camera, cannot entirely disappear; as if what has appeared is the very trace of an object, a countenance, or a scene from the real world, an image which has inscribed itself-without direct human intervention-into the inert technical surface/substance of mediation. But at the same time that it exercises this promise, the image-as Sartre has shown (3) -is also a form of deception.
What do we see when we look at a media-image, a photograph or a film? One forgets that an image is a form of consciousness, that its cognitions and re-cognitions are contingent, and often site-specific, and that its media have a profound and radical historical character. Moreover, there is a permeability between media - a porosity common to photography, cinema and video, analog and digital-such that they share a common ground in perception. One encounters the world already embodied and culturally embedded; the body's perception of itself also persists as a psychic substrate, and the unconscious somatic memory which organizes lived experience, which has been-and continues to be-modified by specific technologies. These form other, subsequent, technical substrates of unconscious memory. (4) Optical devices, for instance, which alter the experienced scale of an observer's body, while at the same time changing the apparent place of that transformation, affect our ideas of spatiality and temporality, causing us to perceive things as closer, or larger, different or more similar, in relation to our own perceived bodies. Perception, linked to technological instruments, stubbornly apprehends different phenomena according to the most familiar tropes and habitual conventions of pictorial representation.  And these technologies have a material history. Such supplements to vision as telescopes, microscopes, and photographic apparatus are organized according to tacit preconceptions wherein somatic inscriptions-of the body's sensorium into instruments, and of prosthetic perceptions into the body-are naturalized. Similarly, notions of inference and continuity, succession and consequence derive from the body's physical/cognitive disposition in the everyday environment. The observer's -one might say 'spectator's, or user's-'lived experience' takes up residence in-is, in a sense, sutured into-media, such that one 'dwells' in the technical, in a continuum of decreasing consciousness and increasing familiarity, moving from alterity to embodiment. (5)
It is this interstitial territory that Frederik De Wilde explores in his various works. Sometimes on the side of the technological, and often in the perceptual, conceptual, social-human-register, De Wilde's notions of intangibility, immateriality, invisibility, the virtual or potential, are grounded in the interaction between complex systems, both biological and technological. Moreover, the indistinct, diffuse, 'fuzzy' arena where the biological and the technological overlap and commingle is a productive and favored ground for his projects/projections.
Frederik De Wilde's para-media works situate themselves in those liminal spaces where we apprehend technically reproduced images-a photograph, a cinematic frame, an LED, a system, process, or device or a transmitted field-without disclaiming the habitual notion that they retain something of the reality from which they have somehow been released  through a technical process. What we might have thought were sensations have been revealed as ghosts, (4) transfixed in a file, or a flash, mere afterimages, a technological  stuttering, an alpha-numeric mirror.
In works such as EOD04 De Wilde addresses  a certain phantasmatic aspect in the naturalisation of media: the possibility of metamorphosis, of a substantiated translation between species-whether it is communicative or not-a conflation of anthropomorphic/zoomorphic bodies secured through the interface (mediation) of a technology. De Wilde is not alone in exercising this fantasy (see in particular the work of Angelo Vermeulen, and also works by Mel Chin, Natalie Jeremajenko, Newton and Helen Harrison, Joseph Beuys, and others), (6) but he is one of the more interesting and promising younger artists. His work also has interesting implications for notions of the post-human (e.g., Stellarc, Alan Rath, and other artists working with prosthetics, robotics, and biological/technological interaction. Quasi-Object (as yet unrealized) situates itself in a particularly interesting crossroads: between the 'dematerialization of the art object' that heralded the conceptualism of the 60s and 70s-arte povera, conceptual art, surface/support, early appropriation and simulation processes-and  later development (e.g., J-F Lyotard's exhibition Les Immateriaux at the Centre Pompidou, Jacques Derrida's exhibition Memoires d'aveugle,  at the Louvre, or certain works by Vik Munic, Felix Gonzoles-Torres, and others) (7). If Frederik De Wilde takes up, and learns from, these 'criss-crossed' histories his current explorations will have an impact that is both aesthetic and philosophical.
But even as a student (8) Frederik De Wilde has a broad, widely informed, and ambitious sensibility. Early works with avionics and media were exciting ventures, certainly more developed and mature than most student work.
In Frederik De Wilde's works we are haunted by images, traces of an elsewhere that we have made our own, domesticated fragments that enter into strangely familiar relations, uncanny economies of sense, our own trajectories mapped through biological, or technical, sensory apparatus, coming back to us as a mirrored mediation. Presence deferred to an impossible proximity, but not lost entirely. How many iterations, one might ask, intervene between a (presumed) direct and originary instance and a matrix of  LEDs, vitrines, cables, microprocessors and projections which constitute de Wildes installations? What degree of excess is necessary before everything that one can attribute to an original instance can no longer be attributed to the copy or mediation? It is perhaps an unanswerable question. But in Frederik De Wilde's works, these mirrorings and doublings, the abyssal extent of the finitude of mediation, is rendered both frighteningly close, and impossible distant. At an early stage in what promises to be a remarkable career, Frederick de Wilde has already produced a brilliant and resonant (if at times fascinatingly uneven) body of work. The promise of his subsequent researches and artifacts is completely open, and much anticipated.

Notes

1.Cadava, Eduardo, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History [Princeton: Princeton 
University Press] 1997.

2.See Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2, l'Image-Temps [Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit] 1985; see also: Deleuze, 
G., Cinema 2, the Time-Image, trans., H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta [London: The Athlone Press] 1989.

3.Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination,  trans. Jonathan 
Webber, [London: Routledge] 2004

4.See: Zummer, Thomas, "Arrestments: The Body in Mediation," in Suturas y fragmentos: Cuerpos y 
territories en la ciencoa-ficción /Stitch and Split: Bodies and Territories in Science Fiction, Nuria Homs, Laurence Risser, eds., [Barcelona & Brussels: Fundacion Antoni Tapies/Constant vzw] 2005.

5.See, e.g.: Rasmussen, Nicolas, Picture Control. The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of 
Biology in America, 1940-1960, [Stanford: Stanford University Press] 1997.

6.See especially the installations Biome1+2, Biomodd [ATH1] and Blue Shift by Angelo Vermeulen; see 
also Vermeulen, Angelo, Conversation avec Yvonne Resseler, Éditions Tandem, [Gerpinnes, Belgique] 2008. Mel Chin's work with biota and toxic sites and Natalie Jeremajenko's work with programmable robotic dogs and bio-sensors are directly of interest. Also, certain of the early works of the present author dealt with the mapping of the trajectories, actions, and attitudes of (human) bodies through the sensory apparatus/organs of other species. (Thomas Zummer, Transduction/Movement series, 1972-74).

7.See Les Immateriaux, Jean-François Lyotard, exh. cat., Centre Pompidou [Paris] 19-- ; see Mémoires d'aveugle: l'autoportrait et autres ruines, exh. cat., Louvre [Paris: Réunion des musees nationaux] 1990-91.

8.Frederick de Wilde was a student of mine in the Transmedia programme/post-graduate at Sint-Lukas, in Brussels. He was one of the most interesting in a consistently high-calibre group of students.