Vision’s End

The abyss: you are looking into it in which your image cannot be reflected. (from Benjamin Bratton’s talk).

My take: This is one of the scandals of the Copernican turn that has gone interplanetary, galactic. The voyeuristic attempt to see the cosmos deep in its arcane past, the unprethinkable ancestrality, reveals a planetary subject that will be lost without focus, without technical framing, against the background of empty space with no interest in localization. (If it did, like a renegade black hole, localization is still an illusion of a ‘moment’ suspended between a point of entry and vast emptiness). In short, the subject will remain earthbound without a visual or media culture, arguably, the condition of possibility of planetarity. But it is a visual culture that ultimately seeks where the light ends, the vision’s demise – no less the end of the cosmos as a media artifact