Cynthia Browne

Ali Feser

Susan Schuppli

Panel Title: Exposure, Doubled: Sensitized Matter and the Dynamics of Disclosure 

 with contributions by Ali Feser, Susan Schuppli, and Cynthia Browne; discussant: Anna Polze

Individual Paper Abstracts can be found here

Panel Abstract: In the wake of the 19th century invention of photography, the historical semantics of “exposure” broadened to encompass a technical meaning; “strictly speaking,” exposure refers to a measure of the light-energy which reaches the plate or film within a given amount of time (Turner 1940) Both wavelengths of visible light, as well as high frequency gamma rays—which are invisible to the human eye but registered in the more-than-human sensorium—can elicit changes on a sensitized surface, transforming it into a document. Photography and film, thus, do not merely represent a subject, but document the effect of exposure, materialized in the form of an object through the synthesthia of touch.

Exposure as a mode of objectification is thus dependent upon documentary devices, materializing in the felicitious mating of vectors and sentient matter, the properties of both conditioning the representational, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions exposure acquires. As these objectified effects circulate, such acts of exposure acquire other semantic entailments: exposure as a matter of unrevealing or disclosing, proving events as forms of evidence and affecting different publics.

This panel explores this doubled aspect of exposure as both relation and effect, offering new insight into exposure’s conceptual and material valences as it becomes registered across a range of material surfaces and scales—planetary, geological, sonic, and corporate—and differentially mobilized in the making--or deferring—of political, scientific, and ethical claims.

Keywords: exposure, nuclear fallout, secrecy, disclosure, sensorium