Photography Goes Electric

October 14, 2025

The Temporary Seeing Platform has started to make the rounds in the city, and it certainly is a spectacular sight. Today and tomorrow are the remaining locations but I have started to get a sense of how it operates and what kinds of reactions/experiences it provokes in those who visit. For a quick reminder, the Temporary Seeing Platform is a big orange tower that roams the city of Trenčín visiting places that are hidden and unfamiliar, sites that have some kind of relationship to the city yet for whatever reason are overlooked and unconsidered. This, also, is what the Bureau of Operational Landscapes is all about: redirecting focus to sites that shape out lives yet remain under-examined. The way I have always understood it is in terms of the “official” and “unofficial:” for example, here in Trenčín (and just like any other city, really) there are sites and sights that make up the image economy. Here, that’s the castle. Not just because it looms large over everyday activities, but because this is where attention is directed: it is, therefore, an “official” part of the city, one that is stable, historical, picturesque, and aligned with civic identity.

The platform makes its way to the grain silo.

However, in contrast to the official there is its counterpart, the unofficial. This unfolds at the speed of the everyday and the ordinary, through life and work and the infrastructures that support those activities. These are places not necessarily designed to be looked at, but function as vital participants in the city’s lifeblood. In the case of Trenčín and for the purposes of this project, I have identified six sites to visit that reflect such status (or non-status). While I won’t get into too much detail about each one — there is a map coming soon where each one of these will be elaborated more fully — suffice it say the Temporary Seeing Platform will visit the Children’s Home, the Unknown Bridge, the House of the Army (a cultural centre), the grain silo, the power plant, and the destroyed factory site of the Merina Textile Works.

The unofficial is also a repository of narrative, fact, myths, legends, and memories. It is where places are made, through an accumulated collection of fragments that compile together to extend what is already known and reach into the other, the left out, and the forgotten. And that is where the big orange tower — the Temporary Seeing Platform — comes into play. The tower is part camera, part sculpture, part mobile architecture, part stage: a public platform for observation. Its weird form and bright colour is an invitation to those around to climb up, look, and reframe their surroundings through a set of three apertures integrated into its structure.

Here we are at the site of the unknown bridge.

The idea is to introduce “photographic thinking” for a civc audience, which in my belief is a fantastic way to reorient one’s attention. When we photograph, we pay attention. We look, scan, squint, and otherwise try and make sense of what we’re looking at — it is a sustained way of seeing. And thats what I want to bring with this orange tower, a way to look anew at overlooked and transitional sites, the cast-offs of industrial ruins, infrastructural edges, socialist modern remnants, construction zones, and other actors in the operational landscape. The tower, because of its 4.5 meter height, turns these sites into temporary viewpoints, activated through looking and shared experience. And, because it travels, it creates a kind of distributed exhibition across the city rather than a fixed display. As such, the tower creates a moment of situated seeing, a chance to view the city as a living photograph, something that is always in flux: it is, then, unofficial.

While my intention is not a critique of photography per se — there’s enough of that handled by people much more capable than me — there is an inherent tension with photography because the medium has long claimed to capture the world from a single, stable vantage point. And yet, the tower turns photography inside-out, making it a physical and participatory medium that hinges on contingency. My intention here is to construct the conditions for seeing; the Temporary Seeing Platform is a camera you walk inside of.

At the Children’s Home.

Its output is a three-dimensional photograph, framing, selecting, isolating, and composing, but without a lens or a sensor. Photography becomes an event instead of an object, enacted in space and time. Lastly, I see this big orange tower as a social and infrastructural practice, which echoes my earlier point about the Bureau’s notion how official and material systems determine what counts as visible. So, in this scenario, we move from picture-making to perception-making.

What I have noticed is that people are certainly drawn to this orange monster; perhaps not the right word as I do believe there is something anthropomorphic, almost cute, in its shape and form. It is inviting. And that’s when people choose to climb, and look: at first it is something new and different, to encase oneself in ‘art’ is not an everyday occurrence. And yet, they do linger, they share stories, and they listen. Last week, we were at the site of the “unknown bridge,” which many of the participants had either only heard about vaguely or not at all; they all began to share stories around this site, how they remembered it or experienced it, and compared various perceptions of it. Yesterday, we took the Temporary Seeing Platform to the grain silo, a beautiful concrete structure on the other side of the river. Surprisingly, quite a few people showed up: nearly all I talked to commented that this structure is an icon, and yet none of them had every considered what it is, why it exists, and what happens there. The tower gave them an excuse.

At Old Herold distillery.

With each visit, a local expert of the site in question shares a few minutes about that particular locale. Yesterday, the CEO of Boskop, the company that owns the grain elevator, was our guest. A young-ish guy in his early 40s, he was thrilled that anyone would express an interest in his facility. To him, the tower is vital: not just because it is the source of his income, but because of its importance in the node of food security and distribution. It is hardly an invisible structure, it is one of the key sites in Trenčín.

With such enthusiasm, he insisted that we go to the rooftop, for a “view better than the castle.” Here was a man after my own heart, and something I have been railing about for weeks now: yes, the castle is great, but what other views of the city exist, and what do they share? And so we all clambered into an elevator and rose 12 stories to its roof where indeed, a new view of the city unfolded before us.

And there it was, the city rearranging itself. The castle, once the unquestioned centre, was now on the periphery, shifted to the margins of view and consciousness. To me, the city looked completely different, an almost shy kind of rearrangement. i sensed that things were in equilibrium, where all parts of the city worked in tandem, freed from their obscurity or prevalence. In some ways, a new portrait emerged, an unofficial one, reminding us that every landscape contains multitudes just patiently waiting its turn to be seen. The Temporary Seeing Platform, for a moment, invited a shared, collective, and unstable image — a temporary photograph made by many eyes at once.