Post on 23-Sep-2020
Text on “Clouds” by Mimi Hope
Ben Galyas
On 25th February, 1964, Iowa based Look Magazine published the first commercially printed
lenticular spread. Pictures of women in luxury clothing and homages to American inventors
appear as “parallax panoramagrams” which were to become a regular feature throughout that
year as commercial uses for the technology began to multiply across North America.
Look Magazine worked closely with Intertype
Corporation, a little known print press who had
merged with competitor Harris-Seybold less than 10
years earlier in 1957. Moving forward to 2015 and
another publisher, Condé Naste (itself owning several
influential fashion and lifestyle titles) listed the same
printing press, now Harris Corporation, as the second
most dangerous threat to public safety in an article
first published in 2015 by WIRED . In the time in 1
between, Harris Corporation had become a powerful
figure as a military contractor in a journey that began
through printing multicolour maps and graphs for the
US Army before expanding into radio, then satellite
and communication technology. They became industry
leaders in Stingray technology, used by military and
law enforcement operations across the world in order
to intercept telecommunications between citizens.
Evidence acquired by Stingray has been used
controversially as evidence to convict across the
developed world despite falling into murky legal
territory.
Harris Corporation’s growth from a small press to a powerful enabler for a global establishment
characterised by violence and techno-omniscience is significant and helps to characterise the
intention of the development of lenticular printing beyond what is seen and understood of it
from a lay audience who would draw an immediate association to lenticular with cheap, often
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/dangerous-people-internet-right-now/1
saccharine consumables; 3D rainforest mousepads, cutesy kitten gift cards, waterfall fridge
magnets etc.
Developed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lenticular printing became the
obsession of a handful of optical technology companies. Many credit French artist Gaspar
Antoine de Bois-Clair for its conceptualisation. His portrait of King Fredrick IV and Queen
Louise (circa. 1680) exemplifies his work as a whole, creating double portraits that require 2
movement to see a different appearance, depending on the physical positioning of the viewer.
Scientists began to develop this concept from the late 1900s, and it became commercially
available in the mid 20th century. Whilst it was initially popularised as a photographic
technique used in lifestyle magazines, it took on a resurgence in the mid 90s, as graphic artists
had access to both digital technology and commercial lenticular printers in order to create and
adapt imagery for advertisers. 3
Mimi Hope first created a series of lenticular prints
in 2017 as part of a presentation of work that also
contained a number of jesmonite cast National
Lottery stands and a series of uniform, blank
scratchcards. These works contained a very
deliberate criticism centred around the
iconography of dreaming and accumulation (or
dreaming within technocapitalism). It was clear on
first viewing that Hope saw the concept of lottery
for what it was; a mechanism first used by the
Italian ruling class in order to fund war against the
Republic of Venice and has continued to be used 4
by modern governments as an emancipatory trick;
to make what was previously impossible seem
attainable. 5
https://www.thecultureconcept.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Bois-Clair-Portraits.pdf2
David E. Roberts, 2002, History of lenticular and related Autostereoscopic Methods, Hillsboro, Leap 3
Technologies https://www.historytoday.com/archive/italian-roots-lottery4
Mark Fisher, 2009, Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative?, London, Zero Books5
Hope has continued to produce multiples of her Cloud prints, titled by number, and often
shown together without the context that previously guided their rationale. They show an acid
blue sky and rolling white clouds. They’re framed in minimal, brushed aluminium. Some show
aeroplanes, but nothing more. Without the movement and passing of time implied through the
lenticular print, they become surfaces with an overriding sense of ornamentation rather than
work that requires thought, reflection and projection. Given the historical association of
lenticular, they become loaded with allegory to the consequences of consumerism and
advertising, aspiration and accumulation.
As ideological objects, they have an immediate view of the bureaucracy of images akin to work
surrounding simulacra or Situationism; appearing as a distorted exaggeration of cheap
consumables, a luxury iteration of mass production. The blue skies are loaded with a literary
sense of promise, warmth and hope that is, by the nature of the 3D imagery itself, slippery and
uncertain. As the images jutter and transform, from one sky to another, it refers to its own
forgery in a way that seems poignantly deliberate. These are an enhanced reality, in reference
to a world of images tailored, customised and accelerated through editing (the repercussions of
which are felt throughout the world of publishing, advertising, and television) for an image of
the world that is better, or more convenient, than the one we immediately inhabit.
Dérive , a strategy theorised by Guy Debord in 1956 (the year preceding Intertype’s merger 6
with Harris-Seybold), is an anti-Capitalist strategy of psychogeographical observation that
empowers the subject to wander without logistical purpose and observe, collect and reflect on
their observations and the consequence of spectacle. Dérive aims to focus not on the utility of
one’s actions as an individual, but to consider the landscape (of architecture, signage,
advertising) as a direct ramification of a specific agenda. Hope’s Clouds are functionless,
unable to move through frames without the movement and meandering of its viewer. They
encourage a similar dichotomy between creating an awareness and ambivalence as to one’s
physical positioning. It is impossible to engage without moving one’s body, whilst the sense of
engagement promised by that form of what might be described as relational aesthetics is lost
as one becomes enveloped in the act of viewership. As a crucial point of separation from
Dérive, an analysis of geography is abruptly denied, replaced by the absence of a physical point
of reference or any sense of specificity beyond the banal notion of an endless blue sky.
The possibility of dreaming, its relationship toward our sense of desire and its direction by
powerful, often violent agendas via the enhanced version of reality presented to us through
images.
Wittgenstein’s view of cinema was of its capacity to consummate its audience. “...film was the
acting out of a wish fulfilment/dream, therefore bound to end up with the gratification of
desire”. Hope’s pictures reference the illusionary quality of cinema, the pathetic fallacy of the
blue sky and its relationship to dreaming in order to draw her audience. Conversely, the chasm
between her pictures and Hollywood cinema allows the audience an opportunity to avoid
envelopment. Through the repetition of seemingly identical skies, empathy to the imagery
itself wanes. In time, it is necessary to read these images as objects in themselves. They are
aware of, but distant to their relationship to photographic art; more akin to materialist film
than they are to narrative cinema or photography.
Beyond the photographic process of capturing and enhancing the imagery itself, Hope co-opts
industrial processes by hand in order to produce the work; something she describes in uncanny
terms as a “production line of happiness” (itself a direct reference to a Jean-Luc Godard
interview with a factory worker). Although technically handmade, the result is not distant to
the conceptual history of Minimalism, especially considering their self consciousness and
proximity to their own objectness (or nature as objects). The choice of frame for example, a
cool, brushed aluminium, seems a deliberate acknowledgement to Judd. As objects, and in
https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html6
denying their reading as photographic or narrative art, they deny gratification or “...this
optimistic search [and] annihilation of the real, which is other and certainly not (t)here for
gratification…” . They frame their own illusionary qualities, and portray illusion in terms that 7
are difficult to cut through. If dominant ideology places representation and illusion at the
centre of oppressive structuring, these works move to highlight that through drawing and
repelling in equal measure. Their presence as objects allows them to become critical
interventions that succeed in displacing or unsettling what they initially seem to so sincerely
celebrate.
Peter Gidal, 2016, Flare Out Aesthetics, London, The Visible Press7