The ethos of Light Paths is a nurturing placed-based and regional digital space. It aims to encourage, nurture and foster the culture of an independent and contemporary art photography in Australia; a regional visual culture that explores how Australia’s regional identities connect with the rest of the world.
Light Paths, as a digital space marked by regional difference and particularity, can be interpreted as a receptacle (or Khôra or chôra). Throughout the history of philosophy, the receptacle/container concept of space has in some form or another been dominant. Humans come out of the first receptacle, the mother’s womb, and they end in a grave, also a receptacle. Traditionally Khôra (in Plato) was interpreted as a passive, homogeneous or characterless, inert space serving as “support” for the impression, imprinting, or reflection, of virile forms.
An alternative or counter interpretation of chôra is an active, fluid relationality space: the place of human creation and participation: it is the space when you open something for things to take place. In Japanese philosophy (eg., Nishida Kitarō) chôra is a dynamic and relational primal, formless space where nothing becomes being: where things become determined and differentiated from one another. It is an ever-changing space of moving, differential multiplicity actively informing the elements within it just as it is itself informed by the latter, before its subjection to the processes of geometrization and domestication.
Light Paths is where connections among actual photographies happen, are nurtured, and art projects emerge and develop. As a digital space it exists beyond the consumerist algorithm of a social media feed and the fixed physical location of an art gallery, thereby providing open access to contemporary art photography to people no matter where they live.
Despite around 98 per cent of Australians, regularly going to gigs, seeing plays, reading novels, attending festivals, listening to music and looking at images, the arts apparently have an “image problem.” They are seen as elitist, disconnected from everyday life, and a luxurious indulgence. The criteria for addressing this is a neo-liberal economic lens that focuses on big visitor numbers, box office dollars, international accolades and funding applications that address the concept of Australian nationhood or identity.
The art sector’s decline and gradual rejection as a federally funded public project has seen the genuine, thoughtful discussion about Australian culture is getting harder to find, the ethos of Light Paths is also committed to a contemporary culture of critical engagement, discourse and accessibility. The content that is published is open access and is free to view and read. This is a photography as a networked digital image that we can access through our own portable devices.