Claudio's Thesis - printing page

28/02/2024 - An anecdote from last year. (2)

I spent a substantial part of my first year working on a research project centered on North Sentinel Island, a small island in the Indian Ocean whose inhabitants have refused contact with the outside world for centuries. The island is therefore mostly unknown, and the only knowledge about it comes from the very few images existing of it - the only possible ones, taken from far away, through telephoto lenses, from the sea or the sky. Although I gradually abandoned this project, I was - and still am, intrigued by this island that resists contemporary hyper-representation demands, and its compelling status of a place whose images are almost impossible to make - where image-making somehow is confronted with its limits.

In my research, which mainly consisted in trying to retrieve and reflect on all the existing images of the island, I often inspected the island on Google Earth Pro. While scanning the aerial imagery, I noticed a peculiar and unexpected detail that caught my attention, in that it seemed to strikingly and precisely address the core meaning of what I was trying to do.

I observed that Google Earth had mapped/pictured the ocean surrounding the island only up to a certain radius. I observed that all around the island, at a quite regular distance from its shore, the photographic imagery ended and the surrounding ocean was left in a blank, solid blue color, as a generic placeholder for an oceanic area that has not been rendered photographically. The "interest" of Google is focused on the island, limited to it, while the rest is left unmapped, not worth of a mimetic representation, not worth of photographic realism.

What was even more intriguing was what I observed at the border between these two modes of representation - realistic/photographic and symbolic/iconic: a threshold, a circular edge, a pixelated gradient, a strip of clustered pixels, jerkingly transitioning from the ocean's photographic images to the solid, flat blue standing for a symbolic reprsentation of the ocean.

A similar artifact allegedly appears around every similar island - sufficiently isolated in the sea. However, this visual phenomena seemed to acquire a particular, unique, relevant meaning in relation to the specific case of North Sentinel Island - its inhabitants' struggle to be left alone, their refusal towards the outside world, the inaccessibility of the island both for people and for cameras. What seems to be at stake in that pixelated edge is the clash between an effort, an attempt, a desire to see, know, grasp, control and an active resistance to that, its refusal, that poses that desire in front of its own limit, that makes it fail. Also, a reflection on the constructed nature of images - digital, photographic, scientific, but all images in the end: their supposedly realistic nature against their abstract, opaque materiality - pixels encased in a grid on a screen.

Instead of scanning the island from above, as I was planning to do before, I resolved to only make footage scanning this line, orbiting all around the island without showing it, yet suggesting that there’s something in the middle, which is left out, unknown, unseen, while focusing on the treshold between representing and not representing it, on the very act and moment - whose that pixelated edge is a trace - of the making of an image and its layered implications.

This discovery was rather eye-opening in terms of understanding the reasons and core concerns of the research I was making. It made the island and the attempt at making images of it catalysts to speculate about bigger topics that the island alone couldn’t answer but only hint at. It made me slowly realize that the point of that research was image-making in its essence - a certain human attraction to see the unknown, making sense of the world by making images of it. A matter of mankind, of image-making, of image-making mankind, of mankind making.