Saltwork

Pam and I went tonight to the opening of a show of cyanotypes and daguerreotypes by our friend Alyssa Salomon. On the walk there, we started talking about technology and wonder. I’d heard a piece on Radio Lab about EMI, a computer algorithm that analyzes a composer’s work—say, Bach—and then writes the unwritten piece, Emi Bach. Sometimes the results are stilted, but sometimes they are genuinely moving, engendering in the listener the same kinds of emotions that arise with the music of the flesh and blood Bach. We so often think of wonder as the ultra-human, as humanism in the extreme, so this kind of a program is disconcerting to say the least. (It’s possible to try to bring the human back into the picture by noting that it was a person who created EMI, but I think that misses the point.)

But I think we need to be much more thoughtful about technology and wonder, not opposing them but rather looking for ways that they work together. Here’s what Alyssa had to say about her show, called Saltwork:

Light sensitive salts produce photographs. Nearly alchemy, these salts convert light energy into physical matter. Silver salts formed with bromine and iodine, enhanced with gold, generate images on a daguerreotype plate. Iron salts on paper yield deep blue cyanotypes. Intellectually, I understand these chemistries. I am a saltworker. I concoct the formulas in my studio; employ them to retell knowledge and experience. Yet every time, their results emerge wondrous.

Is that the crucial wonder-gap, between the understandable science and the wondrous results? Where does she fit in, the artist/alchemist (who not coincidentally was the first person to tell me about the Museum of Jurassic Technology)?

On a different note, one of the things I think about when I look at Alyssa’s daguerreotypes is the difference between the way I see them and the way a nineteenth-century viewer would have seen them. Then, the wonder would have come from the new possibilities of affixing an image. (Did photography do to painting what EMI does to composing?) But now, we come to that same process belatedly: this is not something new, but something old, so that it is less the novelty than the archaic quality that fascinates me. That, and the fact that these books are hovering backward in their blue depth.