all-embracing view

about this contribution

This pan.able initially anchors the user’s attention in a portrait of a viewer, to reveal, progressively and successively, image display devices with contrasting purposes. Using the conceptual framework of the instrumental approach (Rabardel 1995) seems to us to be heuristic, in order to bring out the instrumented activity of the gaze, which is situated in different times and places. Shaping the problematic of our research through a visual approach is not to close the analysis but to accompany the genesis of the views in the process of being made.

Indeed, if the user first discovers a portrait of a viewer, the questions on either side of the portrait invites them to navigate either towards the object of this viewer’s activity (“What is she contemplating?”), or toward the instrumentation of her gaze (“How does she look at what she is looking at?”).

Questions guide the user in the different aspects of the conceptual model, which constitutes the core of the instrumental approach: the instrument (the image display device), the subject (the Viewer) and the object of the activity (Faux Terrain)

The successive questions allow the user to browse within two photographic series by Arno Gisinger (Betrachterbilder and Faux Terrain) to address the question of the gaze’s formatting through the intermediary of a panoramic device of the end of the 19th century, that of the battle of Bergisel in Innsbruck.

As a counterpoint to the panorama that conditions the gaze, the user is then invited to discover this double series (Betrachterbilder and Faux Terrain) exhibited opposite each other in Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, in a scenography that encourages the emancipation of the gaze. Indeed, according to their own path and their own singular logic, each visitor can rearrange the images shown in the rotunda.

Through this gesture within this pan.able, combining photographic and conceptual prisms, reiterated in a variety of contexts, we invite .able users to become progressively aware of the framework of their gaze by making visible image display devices through graphic representations. When there is a genesis of the gaze, the gaze initially stumbles, and is prevented from seeing as usual. Then, if, and only if, the experience is opened up, the world being viewed, and the viewer, are both transformed in the interweaving of the gaze. It is by wandering through the staging of successive re-creations of Arno Gisinger’s photographic and scenographic work that viewers of the .able journal come into contact with the experiential depth of their own gaze. It is thus the successive reworkings that give shape to the experience of the gaze, which settles in a superimposition, an accumulation of worlds like nesting dolls. This mise en abyme is extended in the reflexive gesture of inviting .able’s viewers to look back on their own gaze within the pan.able.

The aim of this visual publication is to open a research-creation program titled “genesis of gazes,” at the crossroads of ergonomics, photography, and education.