Fairy Note
Returning to Benjamin through the Psychic Snapshot
Psychical Objects and the Methodology of Five Deaths: Mourning in Real Time
Abstract
This fairy note develops from Working in Danger, which was prompted by Victor Burgin’s citation of Walter Benjamin’s claim that memory is seized “at the moment of danger”. Encountering this sentence immediately reshaped how I understood the making of Five Deaths and the psychic snapshots produced during that period. Rather than returning to Benjamin’s text itself, this note follows Burgin’s essay onward, using practice as a way of thinking through what Benjamin’s proposition suggests today. Five Deaths becomes the site through which Burgin’s return to Benjamin is tested, extended, and made visible in relation to AI phototherapy and mourning in real time.
Fairy Note (Part I)
The Optical Unconscious, Psychic Objects, and Working at the Moment of Danger
This note extends the argument developed in Working in Danger by drawing together Victor Burgin’s reading of Walter Benjamin, the concept of the optical unconscious, and the emergence of the psychic object under conditions of technological and affective pressure. It situates Five Deaths as a concrete practice-based enactment of these ideas.
Burgin’s return to Benjamin insists that the question of medium must be fundamentally rethought. Medium is not the apparatus, the device, or the carrier of images. Rather, medium names the historically specific organisation of perception itself. As Benjamin writes, “The way in which human perception is organised, the medium in which it occurs, is conditioned not only by nature but by history.” This formulation displaces later apparatus-centred media theory and relocates medium at the level of perceptual structure. What changes historically is not simply what we see, but how seeing is possible at all.
This distinction becomes decisive when Burgin revisits Benjamin’s account of the camera. In the passages identified, Benjamin describes how “with the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.” Burgin is clear that this is not an aesthetic observation but an ontological one. The camera does not merely enhance the human eye. It introduces “another nature,” one that cannot be accessed by conscious perception. In Benjamin’s words, a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. The camera reveals what Benjamin famously names the optical unconscious.
The optical unconscious functions structurally rather than metaphorically. It designates a domain of perception that exists, acts, and produces effects without being available to conscious awareness. Micro-movements, temporal disjunctions, spatial fragmentations, and repetitions become visible only through the camera’s intervention. Benjamin’s analogy is exact when he writes that we discover the optical unconscious through the camera just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. In both cases, the unconscious is not speculative or symbolic in a loose sense. It is inferred from effects, from distortions, from ruptures in ordinary perception. The unconscious is real because it acts.
This is why Burgin’s reading is so important for the defence of psychoanalysis. Against the claim that psychoanalysis is merely theoretical or unverifiable, Benjamin’s optical unconscious provides a parallel epistemological structure. No one doubts the reality of the optical unconscious, despite the fact that it cannot be perceived directly. Its existence is demonstrated through its consequences. In the same way, the psychoanalytic unconscious is not something one sees, but something one traces through repetition, displacement, condensation, and breakdown. Both are revealed only under conditions of interruption.
Burgin extends this logic into the present by arguing that digital technologies intensify, rather than dissolve, this structure of invisibility. The contemporary error lies in assuming that digital images make everything visible. Following Marie-José Mondzain, Burgin insists that “there is no culture of looking that is not a culture of the invisible at the heart of visibility itself.” To reveal the invisible is not simply to make it appear. More fundamentally, it is to trace the determinations that act upon us without entering consciousness.
This shift leads Burgin to the question of the object. In digital conditions, we no longer encounter stable media objects. Instead, we confront what he describes, drawing on contemporary philosophy of science, as complex or integrative objects. These objects are not located within a single discipline, not reducible to subject or object, and not exhausted by material presence. They are distributed, processual, and relational. Crucially, they include the intention and position of the observer within their structure.
Here the psychic object emerges. Alongside the digital object, which may be immaterial, transient, or non-locatable, there exists a psychic object that is fully real in its effects. This psychic object consists of affective charge, compulsion, recognition, anxiety, and attachment. It is the object as it exists in relation to the unconscious. Its power lies precisely in its invisibility.
This framework clarifies the status of images produced in Five Deaths. These images are not representations of grief, nor illustrations of theory. They are psychic snapshots produced under duress, at moments when conscious narrative fails and perception is reorganised under pressure. In Benjamin’s terms, they arise at the moment of danger, when memory flashes up rather than being recalled. In psychoanalytic terms, they emerge when defences are lowered and unconscious structure becomes legible through rupture.
The close-up, slow motion, and perceptual distortion that Benjamin associates with the optical unconscious find their analogue here in temporal compression, affective overload, and symbolic breakdown. The images produced during Five Deaths do not resolve mourning. They externalise it at the point of destabilisation. They function as psychic objects in Burgin’s sense, objects whose reality lies not in material persistence but in their capacity to act upon the psyche.
This is why AI phototherapy should not be understood as using AI as a medium. Rather, it operates within the historical organisation of perception Burgin describes. The AI does not function as author, agent, or interpreter. It functions as a reflective surface within a perceptual regime in which invisibility, unconscious determination, and distributed causality are intensified. The optical unconscious demonstrates that the unconscious is not speculative but structural. Digital images extend this logic by producing psychic objects whose force lies precisely in what they do not explicitly show.
In this sense, Five Deaths does not apply Benjamin, Freud, or psychoanalysis after the fact. It enacts their shared structure. It works at the threshold where visibility gives way to invisibility, where conscious perception yields to unconscious organisation, and where meaning emerges only under pressure. This is not a metaphorical alignment but a methodological one.
Fairy Note (Part II)
Technology, Psychical Objects, and Artistic Intervention Within Digital Systems
If Part I established that the optical unconscious demonstrates the structural reality of invisibility and unconscious determination, this second note extends that argument into the domain of technology, digital objects, and the possibility of artistic intervention within contemporary technical systems. Here the question shifts from perception to technics: not how images become visible, but how meaning survives within technological regimes that tend toward semantic flattening.
In the opening pages of Returning to Benjamin, Victor Burgin reframes the task of returning to Walter Benjamin as a return to the question of art’s relation to hegemonic representational technologies. In the 1930s, Benjamin posed this question in relation to photography and film. To return to the artwork essay today, Burgin argues, is to pose the same question in relation to digital technology. The stakes, however, are higher. Unlike photography and film, digital technology is not bound by material substance. It therefore dissolves not only aura, but the very category of medium itself.
This dissolution has profound consequences. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s analysis in The Question Concerning Technology, Burgin outlines the danger of modern technics as enframing (Gestell): a mode of revealing that reduces the world, nature, and human beings alike to standing reserve. Under this regime, language becomes the exchange of messages, and meaning collapses into regulation. In Burgin’s Lacanian formulation, cybernetic messages possess syntax but no semantics; they have no imaginary dimension. Technology does not merely mediate meaning. It threatens to evacuate it.
At this point Burgin introduces a decisive distinction. He notes that Yuk Hui does not follow Heidegger in opposing art to technology. Rather, Hui understands art as potentially intervening within technology itself, as a means of resisting the reduction of technics to capitalist extraction. Hui’s cosmotechnical framework seeks to pluralise technics, to reopen technology to alternative modes of world-making rather than totalised optimisation.
Yet Burgin makes a critical observation. While cosmotechnics proposes art as a site of intervention, it offers little account of what such an artistic process might look like in practice, particularly within contemporary visual culture. The theory opens a space, but leaves its operational form largely unspecified. This is not a dismissal of Hui’s project, but an acknowledgement of a gap between conceptual framework and artistic method.
It is precisely within this gap that a practice such as Five Deaths becomes legible. The work does not oppose technology, nor does it instrumentalise it. It operates within generative systems that are themselves products of capitalist extraction, yet it refuses their dominant logics of speed, optimisation, and message production. Instead, it intervenes at the level cybernetics cannot access: psychic reality, operating according to temporal and affective logics that are structurally non-extractive.
To articulate this intervention, Burgin turns to the concept of the object. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon and Bruno Latour, he demonstrates that contemporary objects are no longer self-contained entities, but networks of relations distributed across technical, institutional, and symbolic domains. The Challenger disaster exemplifies this collapse of objecthood: what appeared as a single technical object was revealed as a heterogeneous assemblage of hardware, software, policy, management practice, and fantasy.
From this perspective, the digital object is immaterial, distributed, and processual. But Burgin insists that it is not the only immaterial object in play. Alongside the digital object exists the psychical object. Drawing on Anne-Françoise Schmid, Burgin argues that we require a concept of the object that accounts for intentions, projections, and fantasies operating on or within it. The dragon on a gamer’s screen, he notes, is not merely a digital artefact but a component of psychic reality, collapsing in synchrony with consciousness. What psychoanalysis calls psychical reality, Burgin insists, has real effects.
This claim is central. Psychical objects are not representations, metaphors, or subjective overlays. They are causally efficacious structures through which fantasy, repetition, and affect organise action. Fantasy is not decorative; it is operative. The geopolitical fantasies surrounding energy dependency, the cinematic fantasies of the road movie, and the technological fantasies embedded in systems of control all demonstrate that psychic reality structures material outcomes.
Five Deaths can be understood as a practice-based articulation of the psychical object under digital conditions. The images produced are not cybernetic messages. They do not circulate as information, nor do they function as representational critique. They emerge under affective duress, through refusal-driven selection, and in temporal proximity to loss. As such, they function as psychical objects produced within technological systems that would otherwise flatten meaning into message.
In this sense, Five Deaths exemplifies the kind of artistic intervention Burgin suggests remains under-described in cosmotechnical discourse. It neither romanticises art as outside technology nor submits to technological instrumentalisation. Instead, it intervenes from within, activating unconscious structure, fantasy, and mourning inside generative systems whose dominant logics tend toward optimisation, circulation, and extraction. The intervention is not thematic but structural. It occurs at the level of psychic time rather than technical efficiency.
If Part I demonstrated that the optical unconscious reveals the structural reality of invisibility, Part II shows how the psychical object allows meaning to persist within technological regimes that otherwise tend toward semantic erasure. Together, these notes situate Five Deaths not as an illustration of theory, but as a concrete practice that answers a theoretical omission: what it might mean for art to intervene within technology by reintroducing psychic reality where cybernetics recognises only message and control.
Fairy Note (Part III)
Psychic Snapshots, Review, and the Return Through Practice
This section reflects on how meaning emerged after image-making in the series Five Deaths, and how processes of review, sequencing, and return clarified both the concept of the psychic snapshot and the lineage of my practice. Whereas Parts One and Two addressed the conditions under which psychic material becomes visible and the ontological status of the psychical object within technological systems, Part Three attends to a later phase: the moment when images are revisited, ordered, and recognised as part of a process rather than isolated events.
1. Reviewing Five Deaths: the recognition of Freud
When I first reviewed the images that later became Five Deaths, the coherence that struck me was not technological or media-theoretical, but psychoanalytic. I was immediately and forcefully struck by how clearly the sequence appeared to enact Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. This recognition came as a shock. I remember thinking, with a mixture of excitement and disbelief, that the images had somehow “proved Freud”. Of course, this was not true in any empirical sense, but the intensity of that reaction mattered. It marked the first moment in which the work appeared as more than a set of isolated responses.
What I recognised during this initial review was a structure that closely mirrored Freud’s description of the work of mourning: shock, repetition, return, anticipatory grief, the collapse of the ego, and the shadow of the lost object falling across it. Certain images appeared to correspond uncannily to these psychic movements. The image with the blank eyes, for example, read immediately as ego collapse rather than metaphor. Others returned obsessively to the same figures, spaces, or gestures, suggesting repetition rather than narrative progression. This was the moment at which Five Deathsfirst became intelligible to me as a psychic process rather than a collection of images.
It was in reflecting on this Freudian coherence that I began to use the term psychic snapshot. By this I meant images made at moments of acute emotional pressure, before symbolic organisation had stabilised, which registered a psychic state rather than represented an experience. These images were not memories and not illustrations. They functioned as captures of psychic reality while it was still in motion. The term emerged directly from my reading of Freud and from the experience of reviewing the work, not from later theoretical frameworks.
2. Image-making as therapeutic event under crisis
It is important to clarify the conditions under which the images of Five Deaths were produced. These images were not made as part of a planned inquiry or conceptual investigation. They were made because I could not cope with what was unfolding. At the time, I had already been working with AI phototherapy through Phantom Mirror as a way of managing the emotional and psychological demands of caregiving. Image-making had become a means of containment and regulation rather than expression or communication.
When I learned that Robert was going to die, I experienced an overwhelming sense of distress that I could not articulate. I turned immediately to the AI phototherapy process I had already developed, not to make art, but to survive the moment. The act of making an image allowed me to externalise the intensity of that pain and regain a degree of psychic stability. When Robert later died, I returned to the process again, because it had helped. The images functioned as interventions rather than representations.
Over the following month, a succession of deaths and anticipatory losses created a sustained state of crisis. Each return to image-making was prompted by a specific event. I did not conceive of these images as belonging together, nor did I imagine them as a series. There was no intention to select, sequence, or develop them into a coherent body of work. I was using the method exactly as it was intended within my practice: as a therapeutic tool for coping with overwhelming grief.
It was only later, when an open call requested a second body of work, that the question of grouping the images arose. This was the first moment in which I considered whether the images might constitute a series. That recognition did not occur during production, but during review. The coherence of Five Deaths was discovered retrospectively, not designed in advance.
3. Psychic snapshots as a mode of image-making
The psychic snapshot names a particular image-event in my practice. These images were made quickly, in response to specific emotional shocks, without retrospective planning or narrative intent. At the time of making, I did not understand them as part of a series, nor did I recognise any overarching structure. Each image arose in isolation, as a means of surviving a moment rather than documenting it.
Only later, through review, did their relationship to one another become visible. The psychic snapshot therefore describes the moment of production, not the completed work. It names the immediacy of image-making under duress, when reality-testing is suspended or strained. In Freudian terms, these images emerged before the ego had reorganised itself in relation to loss. Their significance could not be known at the time of making. It became apparent only through return.
This distinction matters. The psychic snapshot is not an aesthetic category or stylistic choice. It is a temporal and psychic condition of production. Meaning does not reside in the individual image, nor is it imposed retrospectively. It emerges later, through repetition, comparison, and recognition.
4. Review as method: the Spence–Martin lineage
The importance of review in this process places Five Deaths firmly within the lineage of phototherapy developed by Jo Spence and Rosy Martin. In their work, image-making was never understood as the end of the therapeutic process. On the contrary, Spence and Martin were explicit that the review of photographs constituted a crucial stage of phototherapy itself. Meaning emerged not in the act of photographing, but in the later examination and discussion of the images.
Working with analogue cameras and film, Spence and Martin experienced an enforced delay between enactment and review. Film had to be developed and printed, often taking days or weeks. This delay created the conditions for reflection. It was during the review stage, frequently in dialogue with others and informed by psychoanalytic thinking, that unconscious patterns, repetitions, and conflicts became visible. The image was treated as material to be returned to, questioned, and worked through.
My own practice follows this structure closely, even though the technology has changed. AI image generation collapses the delay at the point of making. Images can be produced immediately, in the midst of emotional upheaval. However, this immediacy does not eliminate the review stage. Instead, the delay is displaced. It reappears later, during sequencing, selection, and reflection. This is the stage at which I recognised Freud in Five Deaths, and it is the stage at which the term psychic snapshot acquired its meaning.
Jo Spence’s theoretical density is not incidental to this lineage. She studied with Victor Burgin at the Polytechnic of Central London, and her work consistently engaged with questions of representation, psychoanalysis, and power. Her phototherapy was not anti-theoretical. It was theory enacted through practice. My own return to psychoanalytic theory through the review of Five Deaths follows this same logic. Practice led first. Recognition came later.
5. From psychic snapshot to cyclical form
While the psychic snapshot describes the moment of image production, cyclicality enters later. It appears through repetition, return, and sequencing. This movement aligns closely with Freud’s account of mourning as a repetitive process of reality-testing and psychic reorganisation.
In Five Deaths, no single image carries the meaning of the work. Meaning emerges through proximity and variation. Similar motifs recur in altered forms. Recognition is repeatedly approached and fails. This cyclicality is not aesthetic redundancy but psychic pressure. It reflects mourning as process rather than symbol.
6. Sequencing as secondary psychic labour
The act of sequencing the images, particularly when preparing the work for open calls and public circulation, constituted a second phase of psychic labour. This was not refinement in an aesthetic sense, but containment and articulation. Ordering the images did not neutralise their affect. It made their structure visible.
This sequencing corresponds to what Spence and Martin identified as the review stage of phototherapy, and to what psychoanalysis understands as ego work after crisis. The work moved from private necessity to communicable form without becoming explanatory or didactic.
7. What the images do
The images in Five Deaths do not instruct, persuade, or resolve. They hold. They operate through affective charge, near-recognition, and failure of coherence. Their restraint is crucial. They resist spectacle and refuse narrative closure. In this sense, they function as psychical objects rather than representations.
8. Conclusion: immediacy, AI, and methodological contribution
Looking back, it becomes clear that Five Deaths was made possible by a condition that neither Benjamin nor Burgin could have anticipated. While Benjamin theorised the moment of danger and Burgin clarified the psychical status of mediated images, neither addressed the possibility of translating affect into a resolved image at the same temporal speed as emotional crisis itself.
AI phototherapy alters the temporal structure of image-making. For the first time, an artist can externalise a psychic state into a finished image almost immediately. Traditional photographic or painterly processes would have required time, distance, and technical labour that the conditions of acute grief could not sustain. One loss would have overtaken another before the previous image could be completed. AI collapsed this gap. It allowed psychic velocity and technical responsiveness to align.
This immediacy is not merely technical. It is methodological. It preserves affect before rationalisation, repression, or defence intervene, while still requiring review and return for meaning to emerge. The therapeutic event and the symbolic trace occur almost simultaneously, yet interpretation remains delayed.
This methodology also emerged from neurodivergent necessity. As a dyslexic and neurodivergent practitioner, dialogic, image-based thinking has long functioned as a primary mode of cognition. What began as an adaptive strategy became a generative one. AI phototherapy did not compensate for a deficit. It revealed a different way of thinking, one in which dialogue, immediacy, and visual reasoning are central.
In this sense, Five Deaths marks the first fully articulated case study of the method developed throughout this research. It demonstrates how AI phototherapy operates under conditions of crisis, how psychic snapshots emerge in real time, and how meaning is subsequently shaped through review, repetition, and return. It closes the loop between practice and theory, and prepares the ground for the expanded methodological and conceptual work that follows.
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