Dioramatron #2
with AAMSO Roger
AAMSO Context Verticalization
Content Designator: AMSO 4107-30103133[D] – Roger
Project: A2026. Naarm Fields, Miegunyah Site 2
Chronos: 3321 OECT
Lunar Cycle 9
Roger from digital exhibitions logging into the cyclorama screen.
Protocol 01 Face Rec confirmed (despite my smile!)
Input: quietude.
Input: stillness.
Open neural pathways.
T2T calibration complete.
Activate Speculative Protocol 02: connect external and internal sensorial rhizomes.
Connected.
Activate Speculative Protocol 03: scan image of artefact from field hacktivist to camera-futura-obscura.
Yep.Done.
Activate Speculative Protocol 04: prepare for neural interplay and multi-valent knowledge distribution.
Here we go…
*
Transcript One: Sun Writing
On the screen. Melbourne Benevolent Asylum circa 1860s.
The image has the semblance of immutability within the frame, but the clamour around it is deafening. Horses, humans, wheels and hammers.
And there’s Charles Nettleton.
The chyron says: Moved to Melbourne 1854. Appointed Royal Photographer 1867. Appointed Official Police Photographer 1860s –1880s Victorian Government. City of Melbourne Corporation.
There’s a camera box and a portable darkroom beside Nettleton. He watches as photographs come flying out of the dark room and spread across a map of the world that’s spinning on the screen. Pin-points drop on Dublin 1865, Paris 1867 and Sydney 1879
*
A curator speaks from her desk: “The gold-funded construction of Melbourne’s many colonial mansions and impressive public edifices overlapped with the emergence of photography…”1
*
In spoken-word: Daguerreotype. Calotype. Lithograph. Water-loving-oil-loving EM-UL-SION! Wet Plate. Albumen. Drawing in. Drawing down. Molecular starshine. Bonds Break. Alchemy prevails. Nature re-assembles before our mechanical eyes. Our flesh-tech hands are writing with light. Writing the sun. . A heliography!’ A thin glass sheet. A short window of time. A bath in egg white. Coating. Exposing. Processing. A hyposulfite of soda. A reddish, purplish-brown ‘hypo’ curling the corners of science and art in reduced exposure time.
*
There’s Nettleton again, picking up his equipment and walking away. Not happy. Not unhappy. As far as I can tell. Other photographers are moving into the scene with new dry plate photographic technology.
1. Alisa Bunbury in Pride of Place, 2020, pg. 157
Unquiet Voices 