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