Empathic vision pdf download

Stanford: Stanford University Press, Bentley, Nancy and Sandra Gunning. During the course of a survival test, the apprentice experiences a moment in which her empathic vision widens and seems capable of taking in all the living.

Beneath the frantic, smothering In the second paragraph, memory supersedes empathic vision. In her study of this complex relay of art, trauma and time, Empathic Vision : Affect, This thesis examines the ways that a history of secular magic has shaped contemporary culture and design lexicons. The idea of empathic vision , or 'feeling seeing', reveals an allied inquisitiveness concerning Introduction Examines seven idealistic women writers from England, France, Germany, and ancient Greece and their confrontation with the threat of war.

Cologne: Morphomata. Bal, M. Journal of Visual Culture, 10 3 : Baumgarten, AG. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms.

Bennett, J. The primary benefit of empathic affect is the necessary movement across the constructed formal boundaries between There are no graves. Her deployment of this performative act of driving and shooting differs from documentary photographers or photojournalists who position themselves in direct proximity to violence. Ractliffe ibid. She speaks about the ways in which she might at times quite literally reconstitute the mechanics of the camera, allowing for chance occurrences and spillages of light.

She sets out to capture what Downloaded by [Yvette Gresle] at 27 November cannot be seen, but simultaneously tampers with the evidence. The photographs — whether as works in and of themselves, or deployed in the video — draw attention to their status as construction: the borders of the photographic ilm with its numbers and letters revealed; the deliberate double exposure; and the washed-out sensibility of photographic ilm encountering light.

The soundtrack is composed of segments of speech appropriated by Ractliffe, which are to be found in online archives of the Truth Commission special report Truth and Reconciliation a and b.

In the video, as opposed to in the photographs, actual violence is brought into the space of the work although it is heard and not seen. A car engine segues into a male voice, one of a number of voices that feature in the video. The voice belongs to Dirk Coetzee, the notorious founder and former captain of Vlakplaas. Coetzee speaks of his application for amnesty at the TRC and, as he speaks, a second voice intervenes and unfolds simultaneously, its volume oscillating. Du Preez invokes the name of National Party cabinet minister, Adrian Vlok, Minister of Law and Order between and , but the various constituents of the sentence are barely audible.

He recounts, now audibly, questions directed to former State President F. You could no longer prove You could no longer say it was just rumours and we then took steps as information I hear an account of abject violence narrated as though it were a banal, ordinary occurrence. Historical, discursive and epistemic violence is embedded in the idea of who is audible and heard.

I think about how the joined-up photographs are animated within the space of the video as a temporal structure constituted by movement, duration and time. This dragging suggests a performative iteration of the drive-by shooting; an affective sense of the moving car crawling past the site as the artist photographs. Empathic unsettlement The conjoined photographs Ractliffe ilmed for her video suggests the idea of a panoramic view.

But here there is no attempt at a seamless, spectacular vista. This is a landscape that appears unremarkable and banal. It is not spectacular, picturesque or sublime. Vertical black or white lines suggest distinctions and separations, but I am not always certain where one image begins and another ends. The beginnings and endings of roads and gates, and their location in the site in which they are embedded, are unknowable.

Dirt roads are imprinted with the tracks of car tyres — markers of journeys that remain invisible. The photographic sequence is unevenly paced: it moves in gradations of slowness, from right to left. Its trajectory disallows any attempt to imagine a narrative guided by conventional ilmic languages which, shaped by movement, deploy seamless pacing and causal openings and closings. Relations between scale, horizon line, background and foreground are ambiguous and unstable: I see a miniature landscape of mountain and water tower nested within a larger image.

I make out what appear to be joins between the photographs: tree is joined to tree, gate to gate and so forth, but the joining is artiicial and the overlaps not always congruous. Trees, gates and road appear repeatedly and insistently, but I am not always sure how it is I am seeing them. The landscape is cropped from above and below, structuring and shaping how I look. I see shadows, folds and the whited-out images of the double-exposure. An ambiguous black form is perhaps an unstable indexical reference to the wing mirror of the car from which Ractliffe photographs.

As I watch the video, I enter the imaginative space of a simulated car journey. I Downloaded by [Yvette Gresle] at 27 November reach a paved driveway leading to a gate. Behind the gate, trees obfuscate my view.

Dogs are behind the gate: distant, barely visible. The video continues its movement and the imagery of dogs moves to the foreground. A dog confronts me, barking through a fence. As the video moves, I encounter what I imagine to be a still and stagnant pool of water surrounded by dense grasses and what may be trees and shrubs.

The barking dog, tyre tracks, water, illegible signposts, ambiguous spatial ordering of the landscape, repetition of gates without walls or fences, itful movement and pacing, and the unexpected trajectory from right to left function in my imagination as points of disturbance.

They puncture the veil of ordinariness, and suggest that which cannot be seen. This ambiguity between banality and disturbance threads itself through the narratives, in the image, text and spoken word that shape the meanings and affects associated with Vlakplaas. Stories are vividly told, but Vlakplaas remains in many ways unknowable and unreachable. Ractliffe mobilises a visual language vastly different from media images of Vlakplaas circulated during the course of the TRC: episodes of the Special Report featured images of explicit violence, including the bloodied aftermath of killing Truth and Reconciliation b.

Rather, it imagines a carefully negotiated and situated relationship to a site of historical violence, which considers the power relations and archival absences that circumscribe it. The disturbance of surface — spillages of light, imagined cuts, folds and bends, the smudgy effects and the phantom forms I project — must yield something.

De Klerk responds to Du Preez and I hear the stutters and half-inished sentences. Downloaded by [Yvette Gresle] at 27 November Ractliffe journeys towards a site of historical violence, and the works that emerge from her process, simultaneously affective and critical, invite me to respond to their internal worlds.

These works do not seek to empirically explain or represent Vlakplaas, nor do they assume an authoritative, totalising voice. The scale of trees, mountain, wire fence, farmhouse, water tower, veld grasslands is carefully pictured. References Ahmed, S. Willful subjects. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Atkinson, B. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing. ArtThrob, July. Empathic vision: affect, trauma and contemporary art. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cole, C. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Coombes, A. Visual culture and public memory in a democratic South Africa: history after apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Dlamini, J. Askari: a story of collaboration and betrayal in the anti-apartheid struggle. Johannesburg: Jacana. Enwezor, O. Exodus of the dogs. Garb, T. Gobodo-Madikizela, P. A human being died that night: a South African story of forgiveness.

Boston and New York: Houghton Miflin.