HOPE

100x100x45mm

Thomas Scheffer

VG Bild-Kunst 2026

The installation HOPE operates within the field of contemporary image practices in which the

digital can no longer be understood as a representational medium, but rather as an infrastructural

condition of visibility. Its starting point is the shift from an iconic to an operational logic of the

image: images are no longer depictions, but events of technical execution. Their appearance is the

result of computation, feedback, and the production of difference within closed yet dynamic

systems.

Against this background, HOPE can be read as an investigation into the epistemic function of

algorithmic image systems. The work operates with recursive shader structures, controlled flicker

regimes, and minimal displacement operations that are not intended to produce aesthetic effects in

the traditional sense, but rather to modulate the conditions of visibility itself. The image is not

composed, but exposed in its operative genesis. It appears as an unstable condensation of

computational processes whose temporal structure does not follow linear succession, but rather a

circular logic of feedback.

In continuation of media-archaeological perspectives—particularly those that understand media not

as neutral transmission devices but as active dispositifs of world production—the image system of

HOPE can be understood as a technical arrangement that does not represent perception, but

produces it. The work thus shifts attention from the question “What does the image show?” to the

question “Which operations enable its visibility?” In this sense, the work is not to be read

iconologically, but operationally.

The recursive structure of the installation refers to a fundamental property of digital systems: every

operation is simultaneously the condition and result of further operations. This circular temporality

generates a form of imagery that cannot be stabilized without negating its own process. The flicker

is not a disturbance, but an epistemic condition—an indicator that visibility exists only as a

temporary coherence within continuous production of difference.

In line with systems-theoretical and media-philosophical positions—particularly those of Bernhard

Siegert and Erich Hörl—this operative form of imagery can be described as a shift in the cultural

guiding distinction: not subject and object, but operation and observation structure the conditions of

perception. The installation renders this shift not discursively, but performatively, by placing the

stability of perception itself under recursive tension.

At the same time, HOPE can be read in the context of technical individuation as formulated by

Gilbert Simondon. Here, the image is not a pre-individuated object, but a process of continuous

individuation that never reaches a final state. Form remains metastable; it exists only as a temporary

consistency within ongoing becoming. The work thus becomes a medium of individuation itself, in

which technical, algorithmic, and perceptual processes are inseparably intertwined.

From the perspective of N. Katherine Hayles, this constellation can be understood as an

embodiment of information: code is not abstract, but materializes in temporal, energetic, and

sensory events. The shader is not a representational instrument, but an operative form of matter

whose behavior directly translates into perception. The distinction between semantic content and

material substrate is thereby systematically undermined.

Within this structure, the title HOPE shifts the concept of hope from a psychological or teleological

category toward a systemic property of operative openness. Hope does not designate expectation of

the future, but the non-closure of recursive systems: their capacity to generate new states underconditions

of structural instability without being reduced to complete determination. In this sense, the work

is not an image content, but an effect of its operational logic.

HOPE thus articulates a critique of contemporary regimes of visibility in which images are

increasingly organized through algorithmic selection, prioritization, and infrastructural

preconfiguration. By not representing these logics but recursively enacting them, the installation

shifts focus toward the conditions of its own possibility. The work becomes an epistemic

experimental setup: it does not show images, but the operations through which images emerge as

such.

In this respect, HOPE can be understood as a contribution to a media culture in which the image

must no longer be conceived as a surface, but as a process of technical world constitution. Visibility

does not appear as given, but as a temporary stabilization within an open, recursive, and

fundamentally unfinalizable system.

Thomas Scheffer, July 2026