Between Data and Dream
The work draws its name from the Portuguese edition of Vilém Flusser’s Filosofia da Caixa Preta (Philosophy of the Black Box), where Flusser famously conceptualises the camera as the primary “black box” of the emerging digital revolution. Flusser’s notion reveals how this apparatus programs photographers by delimiting the creative possibilities available within its technological confines, transforming photography into a space where human intention meets mechanical authority.
Inspired by David Levi Strauss’s Photography and Belief, the work engages with the dialectic of “seeing is believing” and its biblical inverse, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). If the apparatus shapes what can be seen before the photographer looks, belief must precede sight. My initial artistic instinct was a stark, jet-black square, a visual metaphor for the inscrutability of digital images. Upon deeper reading, Flusser’s philosophy illuminated this intuition, positioning the camera not merely as a tool but as a mystifying black box whose outputs invite both belief and scepticism.
The image of a solid black wall also evokes the enchanting ambiguity of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, where the seemingly simple shape of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant reveals the gulf between childlike imagination and adult perception. This duality mirrors photography’s paradox: images on digital devices remain data points, anonymous and inert, until contextualised by human belief and interpretation.
To enact this, I rendered several photographs completely black in post-production and renamed them at random. One was selected to be shown. The others are not. Each was sealed completely, so nothing could be opened or revealed. What remains is a photograph that exists as data but cannot be accessed as an image, and a viewer who must decide what to make of it. Like Schrödinger’s cat, the picture is never observed, and the box stays closed. The unseen photographs belong to the work only as a claim to be believed, never as evidence to be checked, which foregrounds the magic and uncertainty embedded in digital image culture.
Black Box (capsula nigra/nigrum pyxidem)
This idea led to exploring the nature of blackness, first through tones and variations, then through culture. That widened to whiteness, then to the role of grey, and finally to red, the colour that interrupts the tonal scale. That exploration became an essay, The Eyes Listen.