Speakers
Description
In 1870 Giuseppe Fiorelli and his team of archaeologists produced a plaster cast of a bubble in the earth in the ruins of Pompeii, revealed to be a dog, which they designated watchdog of the House of Vesonius Primus due to the remnants of its collar and chain, which held it in place when the Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. In 1874, Giorgio Sommer, a photographer and close collaborator of Fiorelli involved in field and artifact documentation, produced a photograph of the cast of the dog he titled “Impronta del cane” (impression of a dog). This talk considers a media genealogy of exposure that runs from the negative impression in the earth left by the dog caught in Vesuvius’ pyroclastic surge, its plaster cast made nearly 1800 years later, the photographic document of the casting, and forward through a set of image-encounters with stray dogs in the long shadow of Vesuvius, which extends to the recent Fukushima disaster and beyond. Drawn from my current book project, Neither Dog nor Master: Essays in Stray Thinking, I examine “stray exposures” across three key registers, that of a subject’s or object’s relation to the world, particularly when characterized by vulnerability; that of a technical practice related to the attempts to control the duration, quantity, and values of light cast upon a sensitive substrate that is always open to contingent appearances; and that of an epistemological practice of revelation of previously imperceptible or unknown phenomena, newly brought to light. I explore these valences of exposure through scenes haunted by catastrophe and immiscible temporalities, featuring what Baudelaire referred to as “chiens calamiteux” (calamitous dogs, dogs of calamity) caught in an expansive sense of le temps de chien (wretched weather; miserable times).