The invisible …

associating on the repeated appearance of the term from recent developments, which lead to actual contributions of it in different fields. The aspects of the notion come to mind when taking into regard its span from an article by Kareem Fahim The invisible men, associating to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man to recent tasks of making visible. Especially those themes, more or less regardless to inherent social implications, are covered by competition like the actual call of the swr/zkm invisible concerning the creation of the visible, which also was examined at the last ars electronic as this comment in domus describes:

Reality seen through code
The elaboration of an image taken from reality and elaborated by the computer was one of the central themes in the interactive works on show at the exhibition Cyberarts, organised at the Ok Centrum and in the exhibition hosted at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz. The image of the visitor becomes part of a coloured mix, placed into a kind of clock where the passage of time is represented by the flow of images taken by a camera.

The question of the invisible eventually leads to the unrecognized gap, which takes up unseen forms and spaces, thus the following quote from Calvino’s Cosmicomics can only hint that signs might to have been looked at with an ambivalent attitude.

We see ourselves macro and microscopically, singular and plural. And through it all, we feel basically uncertain, restless, proud, conceited, and most of all, in love! The beloved, of course, usually eludes me. And when she doesn’t, I often lose interest. I might desire her more if she lived on the moon (chapter 1), unreachable. But she drives me to build a shell (last chapter), which is really the prototypical architectural, evolutionary and artistic feat. Making a thing to be seen, I instigate the fact of the visual field, and the apparatus of sight, through the creation of something to be seen. Me! It was My doing. (The world, and all it contains, I had foreseen it all!) Elsewhere, I make the primordial sign, which is later copied and distorted ad infinitum, until the original, forgotten, in it’s purity, is lost, and space is so full of signs and signs referencing other signs, there is no longer a speck of clear space anywhere.
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