The exhibition had the effect of a breeze to me. After spending hours on the internet, coming across hundreds of images, of which you never really know their origin; and when the manipulation of any image is a knowledge available to any 10 year old, seeing these images in the museum seemed like a pause in the middle of all that noise.
I knew at least watching these, that their purpose was neither glamour/beauty nor economical or political.
These images are somehow free from the media society, which is allowing them to just be, simple as they are, an “objective” observation on life. Of course some decisions were made by the maker of the experiment, incorporating some subjectivity in the result, but all in all, these images depict some sort of truth.
Without pretending to be anything else than documentation or aknowledgement of what “is”, you become interested and surprised by their beauty value, but certainly more because of the fact that these images are not seeking it. But couldn’t we have this feeling by just going to a science museum? To placed them in an art museum and naming them art is really questionable. Since these images are not meant to be beautiful in any way, even if we find them beautiful, it seems a bit too simple to show them to the society as “hey, look at these, we never noticed how pretty they could be”. It’s almost as making an exhibition of children drawings in a museum, of course they can be interesting, but it’s more of the rank of a gallerie exhibition. A museum should show works that are relevant socially, in the sense that each exhibition should (and are meant to) convey a message. These scientific images in this context just seem to be visual enjoyment. Somehow I couldn’t figure out clearly where was the museum going with this choice.
Nonetheless, it made me wonder how strange and surprising nature, the universe or us are, and made me think that in these overmediated times, we can easily derail from our own awareness of basics, such as our own body, by being just a big communicative muscle.
