In his reading Hegel (via Bataille), Jacques Derrida puts considerable pressure on the word Aufhebung, meaning to “lift up” but also an autantonym encompassing implications of negation and conservation (to relieve, as one soldier of another at a post, might be the closest English equivalent). By transposing code to the plane of the image that its algorithm has produced, Mohr allows the generative code to both construct and dismantle an image which in turn both preserves and erases a text integral to the image’s realization yet never intended to be read (by humans). Accordingly, we might view the work as a relief (in the sentinel, rather than sculptural sense), or an allegorical painting of Abstraction and Materiality, in which the latter is only ever legible within the former’s frame, while the former’s idealisms always depends on the material particulars which belie and destroy it. The entanglement here may be visual, but what it makes visible is the prosopopoeia of Text. With its negating trace, Derrida’s Aufhebung is the emblem of Writing, and so we might understand “Visual Entanglement” as most embodying a writing at the very point at which it renders script unreadable.
In his reading Hegel (via Bataille), Jacques Derrida puts considerable pressure on the word Aufhebung, meaning to “lift up” but also an autantonym encompassing implications of negation and conservation (to relieve, as one soldier of another at a post, might be the closest English equivalent). By transposing code to the plane of the image that its algorithm has produced, Mohr allows the generative code to both construct and dismantle an image which in turn both preserves and erases a text integral to the image’s realization yet never intended to be read (by humans). Accordingly, we might view the work as a relief (in the sentinel, rather than sculptural sense), or an allegorical painting of Abstraction and Materiality, in which the latter is only ever legible within the former’s frame, while the former’s idealisms always depends on the material particulars which belie and destroy it. The entanglement here may be visual, but what it makes visible is the prosopopoeia of Text. With its negating trace, Derrida’s Aufhebung is the emblem of Writing, and so we might understand “Visual Entanglement” as most embodying a writing at the very point at which it renders script unreadable.