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). 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 concept, multiple photographs were rendered completely black during post-production. Each was randomly renamed and selected, turning the unseen image into a kind of “Schrödinger’s cat” of photography—existing simultaneously as a picture and pure potentiality until “opened” or revealed. This process underscores photography’s reciprocal nature, where intervention and belief are necessary for meaning-creation, foregrounding the magic and uncertainty embedded in digital image culture.
Black Box (capsula nigra/nigrum pyxidem)
This idea also inspired research and thinking about the nature of blackness, the nature of whiteness and the role of grey... IN PROGRESS