Imagine you could obtain an 'impossible' image of any object or phenomenon that you think is important, with no limits on spatial, temporal, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions. What image would you create? (the answer can be a hypothetical image of course!)
This was the question I asked every scientist I spoke to during my Arts at CERN/Collide Barcelona residency. Not to source impossibility, but rather, to find the types of affordances that draw lines between what is possible and what is impossible.
The COVID pandemic brought an abrupt halt to my research; only on the occasion of an online commission in the frame of the HEK Net Works (2021), I found the push to revisit and process the contributions I had collected. I started by compiling all the im/possible images in a single document to create an initial categorization. I then created the BLOB to present an initial classification
The BLOB (Binary Large OBject) gives a home to the collection of Im/Possible images that all together illustrate the concept of the impossible image and the relationships between affordance, resolution and compromise. As different Axes of Affordance cut the BLOB, they define what is possible to resolve, and what images are compromised, or in other words, will never be rendered. While normally these compromised images would never find their way to our eyes, the hypothetical realms of the BLOB offer pasture to these impossible renders.
In the summer of 2021, I was invited to curate a physical exhibition of Im/Possible images at the Lothringer 13 Halle (München) - an opportunity to transform the Lothringer into a real space actualisation of the virtual BLOB. This exhibition spawned the Im/Possible Summer school and the Im/Possible Reader, which both represent a moment in my im/possible images research, which I will extend in 2023 with unnamed colours and im/possible rainbows. I consider the BLOB and its contingents as a framework to introduce thinking through impossibilities.
