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2.141 A picture is a fact; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 1921

“Reference-less" is about the impossibility of withdrawing meaning from an image. The photographs created by Herwig Turk on an empty computer screen appear to fulfil this primordial function with scientific precision. The pictures were created artificially to look like something meaningful yet unknown. They translate a subtle attempt to question the symbolic value of legitimacy as a means of ascribing authority and the power of discourse in ascribing meaning to an image. The need to understand what we have seen,  which translates the anguish of our need to understand the world,  deforms objects to the point where they can be identified with a memory remotely recognised by our own experience.
It could be said, although one probably should not, that Turk’s pictures represent nothing. Or, even, that the pictures do not represent anything.

Turk's photographs presented here seem to be expropriated by the arts and appropriated by science. These are “scientific” pictures that, in their own context, would represent trivial elements of registrating an informational processing. There is, however, rigorous discipline in the production of these images. The pictures represent abstract paradigms of knowledge, suprematic forms of portraying scientific knowledge, opening new avenues that allows for the questioning of its proceedings.
Very much like the arid and geometric purity of Malevich's canvases, these photographs are, to the viewer's surprise, amazingly rigid and dehumanised. There is a clear deliberation to exclude the author from the creative process. Nonetheless, and unlike suprematic language, Turk's photographs require the observer to confirm their meaning. The intrinsic intervention of the observer, which in science is an instrumental part of the scientific process, is required to certify that paradigm.
The pictures, which are flooded with visual information, are illegible for the majority of viewers that do not question the authority of the few to decode and interpret the information contained in them. The information must be decoded through complex means and by applying highly specialised scientific and technical knowledge, which is, of course, assured by certificates, diplomas and academic titles.

Wittgenstein once suggested that when one cannot see anything its always helpful to take a closer look. Many of the highly reputed scientists that viewed these pictures, looked really close and saw few things. Interestingly, many of them saw many things while some saw different things. Conversely and not surprisingly, there are a number of common elements that are described by most of the scientists, and that ensure the unity and cohesion to the communication codes that are characteristic of the scientific process. For example, all of the biologists agree that the images represent microphotographs of biological tissues or cells magnified through microscopy techniques.
It is only through the scale of magnification that details susceptible of interpretation are revealed. It is not particularly important if these photographs are a calibration standard for a laser confocal microscope, an electric signal modulated by the neuronal cells of a zebrafish, if they represent the cornea of a monkey, or a cataractous lens of a whale. What seems to be important is the rigour and precision in the identification of details in subcellular structures. However precarious, the idea that the closer you get the more you see, and that the more you see, the more you know is well illustrated in the descriptions and legends accompanying these pictures.

There is also a playful component to this incursion into the hybrid territories of science and art. There is an invitation. There is a game of seduction between the artist, the image, and the viewer. It is a game where the artist allows the viewer, in a strictly contained way, to create, for his own use, his own image. Ultimately, this represents one possible translation of the postulates of quantic physics: the gaze modifies the object. If the object only exists when observed, then things are hardly ever more then what they appear, and they display only what they can.

For a scientist, gaze is immediately turned into observation. It is a highly restricted, self-contained and disciplined gaze. Our gaze does not change objects according to our individual history, our impressions, or emotional state. Theirs is a different kind of gaze. More standardised, highly trained and disciplined by the rigorous proceedings of the scientific method. Perhaps because of that, different scientists see “similar things” in images of objects that do not exist. Scientists use a common language with reference to shared codes, symbols, standardised semantic formulas, and well identified hierarchies of knowledge. The scientific language is, in this respect, a meta-code. A functional, but minimal telegraphy with no excesses or redundancies, as is revealed by the legends to these images.

Turk's photographs, which portray objects or landscapes that do not exist are associated here with a hyper-real legend written by a scientist. The unsettling and disturbing unity created by the set formed by the photography and its legend creates a heterotopia “a place of impossibilities, a place without a place, a non-place, on the level of language” (Foucault), where all contradictions co-exist in a real space.
The author that is, enigmatically, absent from the work by ascribing it a meaning that he does not know, the deliberation to withdraw all meaning to a representation by flooding it with visual information; the Other, the skilled observer who sees what is not there, and all the others that see nothing other than what they are told.
The representation of this non-place, can perhaps be compared to the fantastic Chinese Encyclopaedia of Jorge Luis Borges with its incongruent, but rigorous, classification systems that inspired others like Foucoult to question the contingencies of our classification systems. The legends to these pictures further illustrate the paradox of such a system, where the information is required for the description and where the description itself generates the information required for the representation of the image. When we look at these pictures we only see what we can. Very often, we indeed see a lot and nearly always we see less then there is to be seen. The image is the surprising result of the overlapping of the object's representation and the projection of meanings, textures and forms, that are borrowed from our gaze.

We all know something about the experiences that question the fallibility of the senses and, for these and other more prosaic reasons, we know that we cannot believe all that we see. We are, however, less familiar with ascribing meaning and value to what we see. The total absence of meaning on over-invested images cannot be accepted without endangering hierarchies and social cohesion. The image is invested with dense, but unknown, visual information, the meaning of which is inaccessible to the vast majority of viewers. Because the image conveys a message which escapes and eludes our common references, it acquires a new value. It is the value of encrypted and coded information that can only be accessed by the other. The other, therefore, assumes the symbolic figure of authority to which a position in the social hierarchy of knowledge confers legitimacy. By exerting that authority the other confirms the image, ascribes it a meaning that ensures or restores social order.
One can imagine that the images presented here have meaning only to those who do not understand them. We look and see so very little that it is only too easy to believe that others should see more. The important thing is that there should be someone who knows and the one who knows is the one who can explain. Like in the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, Sancho Panza ends up tilting at windmills because it is Don Quixote who, from the back of his horse, sees giants. 

Dr. Paulo Pereira, Coimbra/PT 2004