Reclaiming Vision

Marjolijn Dijkman’s (1978, NL) works are tied together by a quest to interlink science, technology, speculation, art and spiritualism. Prevalent in her practice are vital questions about the role of fiction in scientific inquiry, on humanity and artificial intelligence, post-human theory, and extra-terrestial life. Both Dijkman and Toril Johannessen (1978, NO) * are interested in the mediation of nature and the kind of relationships it evokes, for instance through scientific paradigm shifts. Liquid Properties, a collaboration between the two artists, resulted from a commission by Munchmuseet on the Move in Oslo, Norway. The project consists of the film Reclaiming Vision and an installation containing glass sculptures. The film’s starting point is that seeing developed underwater (the eye, in fact, evolved from marine algae). Reclaiming Vision was filmed through a light microscope and offers a vivid choreography featuring millions of protagonists, otherwise invisible to the human eye, who live in brackish water. Some of these microbes were sampled from the inner Oslo Fjord, alongside algae, and few of these were cultivated at the University of Oslo. Brackish water conditions commonly occur where fresh water meets salt water. Due to melting ice caps and ocean levels on the rise, brackish water zones are growing around the world. These might be seen as transformative microzones, as temporary liquid archives, including different species and traces of expanded human activity on a global scale. Dijkman & Johannessen produced a trillion images for this film, to evoke sentient empathy with otherwise invisible organisms and processes, and to explore cinematic strategies to animate speculative narratives that would remain far too abstract on a microscopic scale.x