A thousand years ago, a certain monk, dressed in black, was walking across a desert - a few miles from where he walked, another black monk slowly moved across the surface of the lake. This second monk was a mirage. Now forget the laws of optics... the mirage produced another, this second mirage produced a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be transmitted endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to the other. He finally left the atmosphere and now wanders the whole universe; never meeting the conditions which would make it possible for him to fade away. Precisely one thousand years after that monk first walked the desert, the mirage will return to the earth’s atmosphere and appear to people.¹

Anton Chekhov’s description of a perplexing spectral encounter in his short story The Black Monk has remained a crucial reference within my art practice since first reading it in 2018. The protagonist, Andrey Kovrin, is repeatedly visited by the figure of this Black Monk. Chekhov’s positioning of this apparition is decidedly ambiguous; we can never be sure whether we are greeted with a supernatural visitation or merely a hallucination. Originally published in 1893, Chekhov’s discussion of the blurred boundaries between madness and sanity, illusion and reality, surprisingly resonated with my own research into our perception of images and their dissemination within contemporary modes of communication. Within my master's research in 2020, I began to reflect on this infinitely retreating figure, characterising it as a ‘fugitive image’. This research led me to adopt the phrase ‘fugitive image’ as a useful term with which I might discuss how images function within my video, photographic and installation practices.

During preliminary master’s research, I returned to The Black Monk whilst concurrently reading Hito Steyerl’s In Defence of the Poor Image. I wrote in my thesis that Steyerl discussed how: 'displaced, "the poor image" degrades as it circulates through maze-like digital networks; she described it as ‘a ghost of an image…an errant idea…an itinerant image’. Guided by Steyerl’s discussion of the elastic, complex trajectories of online image dissemination and its phantasmagorical mechanics, I began to read this segment of Chekhov’s prose through Steyerl’s semiotic methodology.”² Steyerl’s discussion of how digital images circulate in degraded, low-resolution forms led me to characterise ‘the poor image’ as ‘fugitive’, in the sense that it evades fixed translation, taking on different meanings through distribution.

I consider this shadowy figure of the monk as an allegory for the ‘fugitive image’. Both the monk and the ‘fugitive image’ are unrestrained by the boundaries of space and time. The tumultuous orbit of the online image degrades in clarity. Like the monk, it leaves a shimmering trail as it echoes across the digital realm in ever more mutable guises. It was this reading that led me to further investigate the idea of a 'fugitive image'. As my studio practice developed, I focused on both the mechanics of image dissemination and moments in which images deteriorate or withdraw over time.

I characterise ‘fugitive images’ in my thesis as material that “resists a singular interpretation and visibly performs multiplicity.” I became interested in “images that materially adopt the nature of a ghost, that recede or hide when looked at, refusing to openly present a viewer with information that is easy to negotiate.”³ To further unpack what I define as a ‘fugitive image’, I looked outside of my practice to existing images and optical occurrences.⁴

One example is the phenomenon of Fata Morgana in which far-off ships upon the ocean’s horizon seem to levitate, a ghostly illusion caused by changes in light refraction due to thermal variations.⁵ Another example is the 2019 image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87. Formed using approximate data points, the image is not mimetic, but a useful visualisation conjured by scientists to represent the data found.⁶ Other examples I characterise as ‘fugitive’ are the mercurial shimmering surface of a kitschy souvenir lenticular print or obtuse internet memes for which one must have not only a contextual understanding of their source material, but of a library of other memes whose composition it references. In each instance, the image eludes a singular, stable reading, instead inhabiting a shifting territory where perception, context, and imagination intersect to produce meaning that is provisional, contingent, and always on the verge of slipping away.

This paper will discuss my notion of the ‘fugitive image’ within the internal mechanisms of my studio research and how such ideas manifest within specific exhibition outcomes. I shall consider how the notion of the ‘fugitive image’ has expanded and grown as it is contemplated and questioned within three video projects. In each work, the conceptual content considers the spectral nature of representation and discusses the difficulties of visually capturing material using optical, photographic and 3D mapping technologies. These videos consider ‘fugitive images’ as they both refer to and contain visual material that resists visual perception and translation.

Cities of Glass

The video work Cities of Glass (2024) continues a consideration of slippery, withdrawing images and optical apparatuses. Cities was made for the exhibition Windows at Metro Arts in Meanjin/Brisbane and filmed the year prior in Venice and Murano.

Cities explores the bewildering nature of vision and how the ways that we see the world affects our experience of our bodies and of time. This video focuses on the history of Murano mirrors and briefly touches upon early modern notions of optics. The video is made up of footage of early Renaissance optical equipment, fifteenth-century mirrors and palazzo interiors and is accompanied by a recorded fictitious narrative. Cities explores the way the eye encounters reflective surfaces and the history of mirrors’ construction, considering the implications of these ideas in both historical and mythical contexts. The video depicts mirrors as portals. Cities’ narrative traces the evolution of mirrors from natural occurrences to sophisticated glass objects, emphasising their role as both technological marvels and symbols of self-reflection. It explores how mirrors split the world into reality and its image-counterpart, a duality that invokes both fascination and suspicion. Murano is reimagined as a mythical city in which strange, colossal mirrors were constructed. These mirrors are portrayed as dangerous, capable of merging the real world with its reflection. The city and its artisans become embroiled in mysterious, possibly magical phenomena.

An excerpt from the video’s narrative reads as follows:

It is said that, like Narcissus, we became acquainted with the image of ourselves by staring into watery depths; a wavering, unfaithful likeness that, nonetheless, doubled our field of vision. The world split in two: a fine glittering seam between life and its image. The first mirrors that could be held in the hand were most likely made by chance encounters between magma, seawater, and sand. Natural glass that took form during lightning storms or volcanic eruptions, worn down by the caresses of the ocean.

 In the early Middle Ages, glass mirrors remained rarefied objects, whose methods of construction were complex and required specialised knowledge and skills. These small portals to the reflected world belonged only to those who could afford such luxuries. During this time, mirror-makers encountered an alchemical problem: it was not possible to create mirrors that stretched larger than a foot in height. The molten glass and sheets of metal fought one another, creating jagged surfaces riddled with fissures and cracks. Owners of pocket mirrors could only grasp a partial, fragmented view of themselves and their surroundings.⁷

I became particularly fascinated by the moment in time when Venetian artisans managed to construct large-scale mirrors with considerably fewer faults and aberrations than had previously been possible. Cities considers the moment of schism within reflected representation, how encounters with large mirrors might be confounding as these new constructions succeeded in their illusory capacity far greater than their smaller counterparts. Rarely having the opportunity to encounter images of themselves, Cities imagines that communities had little trust in these optical devices and that subsequently strange stories arose about the magical and mysterious powers of the mirror.

The allegorical narrative of Cities follows a king whose daughter is bedridden with an unnamed illness. Desperate to bring her consolation, the King panels her bedroom in mirrors so that the princess might engage with the world outside through its reflection. In this speculative tale, the act of viewing the reflected world back-to-front drives her mad. Cities concludes with the following prose:

For many years in this city, on nights when the moon’s pearly light was at its brightest, people would gather in the town square to break their household mirrors and commission the building of new ones. When asked why, the townspeople spoke of a princess who lived long ago, driven mad by visions of sprites, wraiths, fairies, and demons. It was said that they could speak to her from behind the glass, that the caresses of moonlight on the mirror’s surface brought this world and theirs terrifyingly close.⁸

This video considers the notion of fugitive images in two ways: firstly, it characterises the reflected realm of the mirror world as a capricious and confounding view. The video considers the historical field of optics as a dichotomy in which enormous strides forward in technology meet a public that lacks sufficient understanding, creating a problematic arena in which the mirror is both a scientific tool and magical entity. Secondly, most of the footage used for this video depicts early modern mirrors within the palazzos they are housed in, alongside the warped lenses of Renaissance optical equipment. The act of filming such materials became a problem, with the camera’s lens unable to document their perpetually changing refractions. The image of the mirror becomes a fugitive image itself; an expanse of light that fails to communicate with the eye. Cities adopts a historical scenario to comment on simulacra, hyperreality, and the power of image dissemination; ideas that resonate with contemporary fields of representation.

A Lonely Circumnavigation

Similarly to the capricious manner with which mirrors evade the camera’s aperture, the video A Lonely Circumnavigation (2022), also contemplates subject matter that is visually difficult to film. The following is an excerpt from my master's thesis on the experience of making such a work:

Circumnavigation comprises footage mainly filmed from within my apartment, its view overlooking the Austin Hospital and panoramas of the hospital edifice. The video is predominantly filmed at night when vision is limited. The video is filmed in Raw File format to mimic the eye’s struggle to see in the absence of light – the world is shrouded by night, and vision becomes treacherous. The video was captured using no additional light sources. This made for a complex filming process, with a small viewfinder that was dark and completely desaturated. It was almost impossible to film in the darkness, to make sense of any images or footage within the viewfinder, and therefore, sight could not be a tool for reference to assist with filming.

When outside my apartment, I would step out into the dark, rain-sodden suburban lanes surrounding the hospital and position the camera in the general direction I hoped to capture, panning back and forth to ensure that I was able to record as much as possible. I would return home, fumble for my SD card and watch as file after file of black impenetrable expanse was retrieved. Over the next hours, I would sit and excavate some kind of intelligible image from this obsidian footage using colour-correcting tools. In this sense, I was capturing footage blind, unable to ascertain camera angles, lighting or subject. The act of filming became an act of divination, footage had to be retrospectively sorted through, navigated, edited and translated.⁹

From 2022 onwards, I began to conceive of the notion of the fugitive image in relation to methods of display for video work. I started to think about how, when a monitor is installed horizontally, a viewer must traverse space, physically moving around the screen, to be able to view all incarnations of the footage.

A standard, ubiquitous vertical configuration for a TV monitor usually succeeds in broadcasting its content with clarity and ease, but when reconfigured horizontally, it somewhat fails in its illusory capacity. The ‘broadcast’ of information is disrupted, and the seductive surface of the monitor is marred. The pictured video, A Lonely Circumnavigation, is presented low within a fabricated structure, and visitors must orbit the work as they walk through an exhibition space to excavate a clear image from the tenuous realm of the screen. Visitors must also reorient their bodies to face downwards, adopting an alternative form of spatial engagement to achieve a successful ocular encounter and to negotiate this highly reflective surface. This choice destabilises the act of looking and creates a moment of indeterminacy, creating a situation in which footage is not overtly recognisable and becomes fugitive.¹⁰ This method of both image capturing and display methodology has continued across recent exhibition projects.      

The Surface is a Prism

The problem of attempting to render information visually continued in the exhibition Currents at tcb Art Inc, for which I collaborated with fellow artist and architect Sam Murnane. Currents considered the poetic potential of the politics, technologies and history of submarine fibre optic internet cables. The project imagined our global network of submarine communications cables as the metaphorical body of a gargantuan kraken, whose monstrous tentacles span the globe.

For this project, we fabricated a facsimile raised data centre floor beneath which we inlaid monitors displaying two different video works. This paper focuses on the second video: The Surface is a Prism {After Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Deep Sea Cables, 1896’} (2024). This project is accompanied by Kipling’s poem, written as an ambiguous reflection on the new communications technology of submarine telegraphy.

For Surface, we considered the local geopolitical contexts of fibre optic cables. Due to government data security policies, the exact location of cables and the landing stations that house and disperse the cables along the coast are not made known to the public. Some research conducted by the telecommunications consulting firm Telegeography led to the understanding that the Te Waipounamu cable feeds through Port Philip Bay, underneath the Blairgowrie Peninsula on Boon Wurrung/Bunurong country, before stretching out to Sydney and Aotearoa.¹¹ For Surface, we made extensive topographic maps of the area using Lidar scanning technology. Mapped from several different vantage points, this video models a large expanse of coast where the cable may or may not be buried.¹²

Surface presents the modelled coast as a ‘fugitive image’ of an unseen, other space. The term ‘Lidar’ stands for ‘Light Detection and Ranging’. Scanners emit pulses of light and measure the time for the reflected light to meet solid mass and then return to the receiver. Each minuscule point of light ‘locates’ a point in space, and when these accumulate, the model becomes increasingly detailed, providing an accurate topography of the coast at the time of imaging. And yet what the video depicts is the scan itself as an impenetrable shell, beneath which the cables purportedly lie. The video documents a forensic search for missing information and infers an unseen and inscrutable reality. The lacunae presented by the unseen cables becomes a ‘fugitive image’, an attempt to represent absence.

The mechanics of global telegraph cable infrastructure and their complex history also generate ‘fugitive images’ and invisible cartographies. In 1850, the English Channel Submarine Telegraph Company laid the first spool of telegraph cable across the English Channel. Threads of copper wire, thinly coated in natural rubber and interspersed with lead weights, were lowered to the sea floor. The first message, snaking between Dover and Cap Gris Nez, was unintelligible due to signal dispersion. Regardless, the notion that transmission was possible created frenzied excitement over modernity’s possibilities.¹³

As years passed cables were laid more successfully, though messages were still slow. For the inaugural Transatlantic Telegraph Cable in 1858, it took sixteen hours for a confirmed message to reach US President James Buchanan from Queen Victoria in London. In the nineteenth century, the ocean depths were more remote and incomprehensible than today; neither diving suits nor deep submersibles existed. Cables enabling communication across vast distances were simply lowered from ships into immense void-like depths. Unseen, the ocean floor was a phantom entity that, at that time, could only exist within human imagination.¹⁴

Over the decades submarine telegraph cables spread globally, their routes along ocean plateaus enabling unprecedented communications between nation-states. For over a century, cables spanning 36,049 km linked the British Empire, from South Africa to the West Indies, Canada to Australia and New Zealand, centralising and perpetuating Commonwealth power.¹⁵

While fibre-optic cables supplanted telegraphy in the 1980s–90s, they often followed these earlier routes, aided by existing infrastructure. Today, more than 95% of international internet data travels through these cables.¹⁶ This serpentine network is tethered to the weathered foundations of empire, like a barnacle-clad carcass fallen to the ocean floor. For Surface, two forms of ‘fugitive images’ converge: the lidar scan as spectral representation of omission, contrasting with the structures of the cable network as a penumbral historical palimpsest.

Smoke and Mirrors or Further Considerations

These three projects articulate the beginnings of a broader research enquiry. They graze along the edges of new territory for my studio practice. This paper attempts to chronicle the trajectory of how my research arrived at the idea of a ‘fugitive image’, the contextual background that led me to this areaand its practical exploration, considering themes of spectral representation and the challenge of capturing elusive material. 

Across the three projects discussed, the ‘fugitive image’ emerges as both concept and material condition; an unstable site in which sight falters, meaning slips, and the image withdraws. Cities of Glass locates this fugitive image in the mirror’s restless refractions and its entanglement with technology and myth; A Lonely Circumnavigation stages it through darkness, oblique filming, and a destabilised display that forces viewers to physically negotiate fragments; The Surface is a Prism pursues the ‘fugitive image’ in invisible infrastructures, where Lidar scans can only map a surface while the true object, the submarine cable, remains hidden.

Materially, these works reveal the friction between representational technologies and the limits of capture: mirrors that the camera cannot replicate, footage filmed blind and excavated after the fact and mapping that depicts only absence. In each, the ‘fugitive image’ is defined as much by gaps, refusals, and occlusions as by what may be seen. Historically, these works are linked by systems of transmission – optical, reflective, communicative – each acting as a conduit between realms, splitting reality into doubled, displaced, or inaccessible forms. The ‘fugitive image’ resides within these thresholds: between object and reflection, image and viewer, surface and concealed depth. To pursue the ‘fugitive image’ is to work within instability, accepting that its most potent meanings may lie in what it withholds—in the spaces where vision fails and speculation must intervene.