Eyes to See With

Laura Marks discusses Tran, T. Kim-Trang's The Blindness Series and its ideological evolution from a characterization of vision as inextricable from domination to one that views vision as merely an potential instrument of power, one that can also be engaged in an emancipatory way.  Marks points out that Tran counters the traditional oppositionality of vision and blindness, instead seeing blindness as a condition that allows one to actualize the myriad of other perceptual resources at our disposal.  This actualization is enabled by Tran’s distortion of her films’ audiovisual content, thereby distancing the video medium from its connotations as a direct and transparent form of visual representation.  Marks examines this effort on Tran’s part to make the viewer work to decipher the content of her films as an experimentation with Gilles Deleuze’s idea of haptic visual modalities in which we are made to feel intimacy with the medium itself.