Erin: Given that you had a previous career as a computer engineer, what drew you to photography?

Akihiko: I took a class in photography while I was doing computer engineering—it was fascinating. It gets you out in the world. And at that time I was in Pittsburgh (I come from Japan). It gave me an opportunity to explore a country that I didn’t know and it felt like I had a license to go to places. So that was the first interest or attraction. 

And then I realized that I like doing research. I like computer science research, but the questions that you get to ask with art are a lot more open and free. At least you could initiate that question, whereas sometimes if you’re in the sciences or engineering you’re actually catering the question to your sponsors. 

E: Yeah, and you fit into the mold of what is getting funded and what makes sense in the context of the scientific community. 

So you use a range of photographic and mixed media processes to create these photo-objects. You pour transparent resin layers between digital scans of analog photos that are printed on silk. Then there’s also the reflective material that you coat the bottom layer of the surface with. I’m intrigued to hear about how you arrived at this complex process. 

A: I think that’s what’s attractive about a studio practice. You go to the studio, you don’t really have a plan. But I think time is one ingredient. I think the type of art I make is wasting a lot of time, and you’re doing something without a very clear set of plans. And then something happens. 

You do a lot of experiments and then the key is to recognize when something important or magical is happening. You have to have the ability to say, “oh, this is working and this is not working”. I think that comes from looking at a lot of art work but also from my research background. The complexity is not something that exists on its own; I bring it to life through this process of discovery. I think it is also about letting go of some agency.

E: I always appreciate artists like you that have that aspect of discovery in their work. Maybe at the beginning of the day they have no idea what they’re going to create. And then at the end of the day it’s a surprise. It seems fun to keep exploring that infinite space of discovery.

A: Although, when I teach conceptual artworks as a professor, I always say this to my students: I envy people who know what the day is going to be like. Like they know exactly what they’re going to do. In some ways I envy that, but I’m not that kind of artist. 

E: Absolutely. I once met a painter who spends four months on each painting. Imagines the whole thing in her head and then just starts! And she makes this beautiful piece. 

When researching for this interview, I came across some curious historical lineages that relate to your work. Apparently the camera obscura was invented around the year 1000 A.D. by a scientist in what is now the Middle East. Silk was invented in 2600 B.C. in ancient China. 

In that sense, your photo-objects are almost like relics from the past that have been reintroduced to the present. I also heard that you sourced some of these images from a few decades ago. So they’re stretching back in time for you as the artist, and then they’re stretching really far back, almost geologically, with respect to your processes and materials. 

A: Wow, that’s great! And that’s why I’m interested in Joan Truckenbrod’s work, which uses silk as well. Julia Stoop’s work has a semi transparent material layered into the work so the exhibition as a whole is rich and interesting from the perspective of material use. But anyway, that history is interesting. The history of the camera obscura is particularly fascinating because it allows us to think about the history of representation. In David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge, he explores how painting, which was a major method of representation, intersected with the use of the camera obscura.

E: I spent some time sitting with your work earlier today. During my first visit to the gallery, I didn’t notice these drips of the resin off the edges that give the work this three-dimensional feel. 

But also, when I was honing in on that geologic aspect of how old the techniques are, it reminded me that they are these organic forms that could almost be growing slowly, the way stalactites grow in a cave.

A: I love that. Another reference point that wasn’t on the surface is the idea of fossils. The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto talks about fossils. Fossils are like photography in a certain way. I think the overall project starts with the question of rethinking photography not as this indexical thing that you capture. There is another way to think about this. And if you think about photography as recording something, like fossils record a certain kind of existence. Like stalactites, it’s a process of water dripping. 

E: Yeah, this slow, slow growing accumulation. 

A: I resonate deeply with that idea of recording time that’s not an instant and it means something. And it has different politics.

E: I agree. Could you expand on how you think about the politics of alternative process photography? 

A: I’m still working through that. In some ways, the politics are trying to resist that predatory language often associated with photography.

E: Shooting, capturing, consuming. 

A: And what does that mean? In some way I think the people who do alternative process photography like cyanotypes and other, older forms, more magical forms, I think they’ve established a certain kind of language and have a different kind of relationship to the world which leads to different politics. There’s something to the idea of photography being more magical and connected to the world. And that the world isn’t something to take, rather it is giving us something. That’s something I’m thinking about, but I’m also thinking about what happens with the digital world—I’m always interested in digital—and I don’t quite know how to jump to that digital aspect. 

There must be a world, and what’s the relationship to that world? Because fossils record certain bits of evidence of something. And I feel like the digital or the virtual also has something, and how does it record? 

E: Like Walter Benjamin’s idea about footprints in the sand having an indexical relationship to the feet that made them. You’re really diving into this in your work. 

And there’s another aspect of history: Charles Sanders Pierce was the philosopher who first coined that concept of indexicality, and he lived in the 1800’s. So it’s about time we update that relationship between photography and the world.

E: Your work definitely invites close attention on the part of the viewer. Only after a while did I notice something odd about the positive and negative photo-objects. As I looked closer, I could see that you have these powerlines in the negative and positive prints that don’t match up. So they are different, yet still complimentary. 

You’re channeling this concept of photographic analogy rather than indexicality. It’s fascinating. 

A: Some are positive and negative, and some are slightly like, what’s the relationship between this one and this one?

E: Sure, there is something very subtle emanating from the relationships of the images to each other. 

I also love Hiroshi Sugimoto–that’s a segue–especially his Lightning Fields series where he activated a tesla coil across the photographic paper in the darkroom to create these lightning bolt forms. Those images really blew me away. 

You also mentioned The Miracle of Analogy or the History of Photography by Kaja Silverman in your artist statement. 

A: Yeah, that book has a really great place where the author discusses Walter Benjamin. There is a great podcast on the topic too. Silverman’s book is where the idea of analogy is explored in relation to photography. Silverman explains, "Most of us are willing to acknowledge some of these similarities, but extremely reluctant to acknowledge others, particularly those that call our autonomy, agency, unity, and primacy into question. Photography is the vehicle through which these profoundly enabling but unwelcome relationships are revealed to us, and through which we learned to think analogically." This quote left an impression on me.

E: I’m struck by your layering of printed silk—it reminds me of early experimental photography, where artists would make “accidental” photographs, sometimes even throwing their camera in the air or twisting it around. When I look at the twisting layers of silk it evokes that visual language of chance and movement. 

A: That’s a very interesting observation because throwing a camera up and taking a photograph is kind of moving away from intentionality. And here, these photos are from negatives made very long ago when I was studying photography. But actually, the original image is much bigger. 

A: So that one (with a rock) is from a larger picture of a car in a parking lot. 

E: Oh, wow. 

A: When I was taking that photograph, my intent was to take a picture of a car. And then twenty or thirty years later I’m scanning that negative and I find this rock that I never noticed and thus  never intended to take a photograph of. So in that sense, there’s something there that’s interesting to think about through the intentionality of  photography too. 

I think about Roland Barthes’ terms, studium and punctum, here. In photography, studium can be thought of as the intended subject or area of the photograph, for example, a violinist. The punctum can be thought of as the unintended area that pricks the viewer, such as the dirt road the violinist is standing on. You can’t exclude the dirt road from the photograph, but it wasn’t as intentional as the violinist. So, what does it mean to focus on and be attracted to the dirt road (or a rock in my case)? It signifies a shift of values and agency. That may be the entry point for the kind of politics I am thinking about. 

The source of the original images are somewhat of a personal one. They are from film negatives I took more than 20 years ago when I first studied photography as I moved to the United States. At the time photography was magical to me and America too was a magical place for me, perhaps slightly naively as one can be when we first encounter something unknown. I am revisiting the images I took while I did several road trips across America. 

E: So you’re composing the image when you first make it. And then you’re re-composing it through that process of selection when you’re cropping the image down. 

E: Could you talk about the pixelation you achieved with this image? 

A: Yes, this one is a little bit different in that it is pixelated. So this one I blew the scanned image  up to the point where I could see the pixels. But most of the other ones are high resolution scans of a film negative blown up enough so that the dots that you see are the silver grains in the film.

E: Oh how interesting. I didn’t pick up on that! There’s also certain moments in these images where I can see the moiré optical illusion. 

Your pieces are so dynamic. I would imagine it's probably difficult to light them, to figure out how you’d like the viewer to experience the work in a gallery setting.  

A: Yeah, the lighting—I think this looks great. The substrates are treated with a retro-reflective paint, the same paint used on stop signs. The problem is that the light has to be coming from the same direction as you are. Because when you’re driving, it’s the car’s light that hits the traffic sign, and then you are able to see it. It has to be a very small angle. You have to be almost in front of the light, so it doesn’t show itself in a gallery like this. Maybe someone will hold it, and when they turn it, they might discover how this reflects light in a different way. It’s subtle. 

I’m not sure how much effect it has on the actual viewing in a setting like this. But it does make the whites whiter. It seems to make the perception of depth clearer. I think that’s helpful. 

E: You’ve mentioned Hiroshi Sugimoto and Gerhard Richter. Do you have any other artistic influences? 

A: I do, I like a lot of artworks. Sometimes I’m on the other side reading a lot of recent MFA graduate’s writing. They often talk about the book Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is about the artist Robert Irwin. I also went through that phase in grad school and I’m also inspired by Irwin. 

E: Yes Robert Irwin! With his thin skeins and experiential work. And the concept of optical illusions and the relationality of the viewer’s body to the work. It’s almost like, if Irwin’s work is in a gallery but no one’s there, does it make a sound? 

A: Yeah, right? I also like Hilma af Klint. She is considered to be an early abstract painter. What I intuitively see in Klint’s work is a visual language that feels profoundly real, embedded within us through perception. In the 19th century, scientists like Jan Evangelista Purkyně transformed our bodies into sites of study, leaving sketches of various visual phenomena that occur in our eyes, such as afterimages. I can’t help but view Klint’s work as utilizing that visual language, similar to how Irwin makes perception an issue, aligning with my interests in perception as that is the mode in which my work is activated.

E: I highlighted this line from your artist statement because I loved it: “The image is active, because the world is.” 

A: There is a very privileged experience you have when you use a large format camera. It’s amazing. I can see why people use a large format camera. I’m sure for practical reasons you might want a big negative or something, but I think just looking at the world through the ground glass of the camera is fascinating. 

E: It’s like a mini camera obscura. But it’s even different from that. 

A: What’s different is that in a regular camera with a view finder, for example a 35mm camera, you’re looking through the viewfinder. So before you press the button it’s not an image yet. With digital cameras and smartphones, you are looking at an image on an LCD but it is so mediated, you are looking at an image that is already degraded through the limitation of the technology. It’s already separated from the world.

But in large format cameras and some medium format ones, on the ground glass where the image is being projected, you’re looking at an image that is continuously and causally still connected to the world in its full richness. That image is an image of the world still connected to it and it’s not limited by the resolution or the LCD of the phone camera or by the specs of technology. That kind of image  is infinitely rich and it's infinitely live, active, and it’s really amazing. In the work you see, I wanted to get at that perceptual experience.

E: This unique image quality of the large format camera reflects back to some of your previous work where you created abstract self portraits, where you placed your body in the work. And it ties into the aspect of labor you address, the laborious process of analog photography.

E: Just the maintenance of operating these antiquated cameras and repairing them, of getting the machine to perform, is its own technical skill. 

Would you like to talk about that aspect of labor and how it ends up playing into the politics of your work? 

A: It might relate to this concept of time. Because I think there’s enough of this instantaneous-ness with photography, where I don’t feel there is much I could contribute to. But the thing I think I could contribute is that slowing down, that act of (for most people) viewing. 

For photographers who use the large format camera, we talk about how it changes the picture. Especially if it’s something like a portrait—it’s going to be a collaboration. It’s going to take around ten minutes just to focus the viewfinder and set up the negative. That’s a very laborious process. I’m attracted to that, and maybe it’s because I like paintings and I like looking at paintings, and you can’t look at a painting in an instant and get it. 

E: Sort of like a Rothko. You could sit in front of it all day and just cry. 

A: Right? And I think that’s something that I’m trying to recover or hold on to. 

E: That’s really profound. 

This is sort of circling back to the silk, because there is an aspect of labor in the production of silk. And silk comes from the silkworm. So it’s both organic in that way and then the process of manufacturing silk can be exploitative to the workers who produce the silk.

That is such an interesting connection between your process, materials, and concepts. Maybe not intentional but it’s there. 

A: It’s there. And the resin is oil, petroleum. So I don’t know what to say or make of that yet. 

E: And resin is toxic. 

A: Yeah. 

E: I can relate to that because I have used plastic in my work, and it is a struggle. Why, as an environmentalist, would I ever be using plastic? 

A: Yeah, that’s something that is a thorn in my side. I also think about the consequence of what we might think of as immaterial actions too - like clicking a button of a mouse that triggers computation far away in the cloud. 

E: I guess in our current day, a lot of people have a certain disconnect over the fact that we are consumers who in some ways have an extractive relationship to the world. And we know that it’s not quite right. Especially artists, whose job it is to think and create. It really hits you, that disconnect.  

A: One answer might be that we shouldn’t be making objects, and maybe that’s the answer. But I’m not there yet. If I stop making objects, will I be clicking more mouse buttons? That, in effect, might trigger some kind of material change through the use of data centers, the cloud, powered by electricity. It’s like the butterfly effect, where a small action, such as a mouse click, can lead to significant and unpredictable changes in the environment.

E: That’s an interesting idea to consider. 

Getting back to the physical aspects of the work, I’m curious how you achieved the vibrant colors in your images of clouds. 

A: Some of the work is color film, so I scan the color film, which translates it into a digital format. You can see the grain a little here. 

If you put a black and white film negative under a microscope, you’ll see that it’s silver crystals forming the image. With color it’s the same, except there are multiple tinted layers. With the pieces that depict clouds in the sky, I actually added color to the black and white negatives. That is why some of the cloud images look unnatural.

E: Power lines show up in many of these landscape photo-objects. 

A: Yeah, many power lines, for some reason. The title of the show, Line in the Cloud, explicitly references that. Literally, there is a piece with a line that goes through a plane of cloud, but we can also interpret it metaphorically, with “cloud” referring to data centers.

E: Yes, so this relates to infrastructure and technology, which leads a little bit into what you are hinting at for your next body of work. 

It sounds like you’re planning to dive more into technology and consider the emergence of A.I. tools. Do you have any ideas how you plan to approach A.I and photography? 

A: I don’t know yet but in my mind it’s hinted at in this exhibition by the use of the term cloud. In A Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu, Hu characterizes the cloud as an epistemic space that constantly fluctuates and is impossible to know. It resists knowing and AI, as of now is a black box, and in many ways resists representation. I take the position that if you cannot represent something, you cannot critique it. So representation is important to me. That’s where the studio practice comes in, I'll just have to experiment and see what happens. And just have the eye to say, oh, I need to stop or I need to take a snapshot of this moment because there’s something interesting happening. I’m not ready to articulate it yet, but I think there’s something important happening with A.I. 

For me, there are a few moments that are important, that influence our lives, and I think that the invention of the internet was important. Maybe this is where my engineering background comes in. I was there very early when the internet was being created. I wasn’t part of developing it but I was there, and I knew what it felt like when things were changing. There also have been other historical moments of change, like the Industrial Revolution. I feel the same way towards A.I. It might change the way we think about images or photographs in general. I know that’s coming. I just don’t know what it means yet. 

E: Yeah, we can’t really know just yet. 

You were ahead of me, maybe one generation or so. So in the late nineties you were working on energy efficiency in supercomputers, and I was playing flash games and discovering HTML as a young person. So I had experienced it as a child, the internet growing up with me. 

It’s almost overwhelming to make sense of how far it’s come. And at this moment it’s like an exponential acceleration towards this faster and faster digital environment. It feels like something is going to happen. Because we can’t keep going so fast. 

A: Yeah. Something is going to happen. And I just don’t know how to relate to it yet. I think I used the phrase “frame of human experience” in the statement for this show. That phrase represents the way I think about art; it needs to find a way to relate to how we experience things with the bodies and minds that we have, even if it’s as amorphous as the cloud and A.I.