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Preliminary Summary and Outlook

Splicer Wiring Aftermath 

SPLICER / WIRING AFTERMATH
C-print, 40 × 50 cm

Preliminary Summary (Summer 2025)

As of summer 2025, Splicer stands as an open, performative, and situated photographic apparatus designed to query the transformations in contemporary photography culture. The project has developed through a transdisciplinary method, interweaving conceptual reflection, technical experimentation, artistic collaboration, and critical engagement with the infrastructures and aesthetics of image production.

The project began as an applied critique of photography’s entanglement with the attention economy, computational abstraction, and publication platforms. Rather than rejecting these dynamics from the outside, Splicer was built to operate within them, while simultaneously partially resisting their logic. Constructed from industrial surplus and open-source components, the apparatus deliberately foregrounds its own material and operational transparency.

To date, the work unfolds through four distinct yet interlinked approaches:

Theoretical Contextualisation

The theoretical contextualisation retraces the shift in contemporary photographic practice: from traditional lens-based, seemingly objective, consumption oriented image-making, toward a grounded and reflexive process. Splicer positions itself within the tension between lens-based photography and post-photographic practices, proposing a hybrid alternative grounded in materiality, abstraction, and situated engagement.

Development of Splicer (the apparatus)

The core of the project is the development of Splicer apparatus itself. Built over several years, this original visual sampler operates through nine motorized axes and a line-scan sensor, enabling the generation of high-resolution images that condense temporal and spatial dimensions into abstract visual forms. The hardware design, software logic, and performative interface form an open-source system made to be operated, modified, and questioned.

Reflexive engagement with the Development of Splicer

The development process itself became a space for artistic research. By embodying multiple personas (engineer, programmer, theorist, assistant, etc.), I deconstructed disciplinary boundaries and performed Splicer as a metaphor for transdisciplinary creation. The resulting open online documentation functions both as technical reference manual as well as a reflective artistic artifact.

Application of Splicer through Conversations Format

Through collaborative image-making sessions (“Conversations”), Splicer became a platform for situated dialogue. Guests from diverse fields: experimental music (Charles Kwong), engineering (Lukas Schmid), and geography (Rony Emmenegger), brought samples and perspectives that shaped the resulting images and insights. These encounters emphasized process over product, producing a form of situated, shared knowledge through performative engagement with the machine.

Reflections on the Research Questions

  1. How can a lens-based photographic apparatus for a post-photographic era work?
    Splicer demonstrates that such an apparatus must operate both with and against computational image culture. It maintains the material grounding of traditional photography while enabling alternative modes of image production. By making the photographic act durational, collaborative, and open to interpretation, Splicer proposes a lens-based practice rooted in resonance and resistance – rather than in acceleration and optimization aimed at platform circulation.

  2. How is Splicer perceived by other disciplines?
    The Conversations reveal that Splicer is legible as both a tool and a metaphor. Moreover, the act of approaching Splicer from different disciplinary perspectives transforms what Splicer is. Two guests from non-artistic professions described the experience as liberating: for once, they worked on a project without knowing in advance what the outcome would be. Lukas (engineer) saw Splicer as a site of complex emergence from precision logic; Charles (composer) perceived it as a compositional instrument; Rony (geographer) approached it as a speculative imaging tool for engaging with temporal uncertainty. In all cases, Splicer prompted reflection on the constructedness of vision and the potential of cross-disciplinary image-making. Future Conversations will broaden the understanding of what Splicer is - and what it can become.

  3. How can abstraction in photography help overcome the attention economy?
    The abstraction between sample and resulting image produced by Splicer resists immediacy. While the images remain consumable as two-dimensional outputs, they are marked by the slowness of their making and by a conceptual density that hints at unseen processes. In this way, abstraction charges the image with a latent invitation: to inquire, to slow down, to dwell. To fully address this question, further work is required, especially through public exhibition and direct discussion with viewers. Ideally, the slowness of the images may shift modes of perception and help revalue ambiguity as a political and aesthetic strategy.

Outlook

Splicer remains an ongoing and open-ended project. Already, the methodology of the Conversations has evolved, moving from a rigid three-phase structure to a more fluid, responsive mode of engagement. As a discursive tool, Splicer continues to offer a platform for discovery, reflection, and transdisciplinary artistic research.

Next steps include:

  • Continuing and expanding the Conversations with new collaborators across a broader range of disciplines. Through this practice, Splicer aims to open further paths for discourse, co-production, critical making, care, failure, and embodied seeing.

  • Updating and extending this open documentation, enabling open access to the evolving technical and conceptual framework of Splicer and its outputs.

  • Exploring exhibition formats in which Splicer is activated as a live tool for performative photography, transforming the gallery into a space for dialogue, experimentation, and image-making as an unfolding process.

In its ongoing state of becoming, Splicer is not a resolution but a provocation, a device that asks not just how we produce images, but how we might see, relate, and think with photography differently in the future.