## FROM COPILIA TO ANYWHEN

## Ina Blom

In the summer of 1963, knowledge of the technology behind TV images instigated a significant zoological discovery. A group of researchers led by British neuropsychologist Richard Langton Gregory spent a few weeks in the bay of Naples examining, drop by drop, sea water hauled from 200 meters depth. Their hope was to find a rare animal described in 1891 by zoologist Selig Exner, but never seen since. The team had almost given up when 'she' -the object of the researchers' desire -suddenly appeared under the microscope, 'incredibly beautiful, perfectly transparent -so no veil hid the secrets of her eyes.' 1

The secret of the eyes that was now finally revealed -at the historical  moment  of  television's  breakthrough  into  general culture -was that  they  seemed  to  be  televisual  eyes:  'possibly single channel scanning eyes, like a simple mechanical television camera, feeding information of spatial structure down a single neural  channel  in  time.'  Copilia,  a  copepod  of  about  3mm  in length who lives in subtropical waters, is remarkable for an eye structure that consists of an anterior lens connected by a delicate cone-shaped membrane to a posterior lens far inside the animal's body. This posterior lens is attached to a bow-shaped structure that contains the photosensitive elements, and that is engaged in a continuous lively movement independent of the static anterior lens.

It was this independent movement in the posterior part of the eye that made Gregory and his team understand it as a form of scanning, swiping across the image plane of the anterior lens. Selig Exner had described the double lens system and the peculiar movement, but at first had not seen it as an eye, since he did not understand how it could possibly function. In 1891, the principle of image scanning invented seven years earlier by Paul Nipkow was still an esoteric knowledge -it was only in 1930, with John Logie Baird's  first  successful  television  experiments,  that  the implication of Nipkow's invention was fully understood. By the early  sixties  however,  the  concept  of  televisual  scanning  was familiar enough and contributed significantly to the excitement about Copilia -not least because scanning functions are highly unlikely in the optical systems of living beings. The retina of a human eye is a densely packed mosaic of more than a hundred million light-sensitive receptors that transmit patterns of retinal images simultaneously through the million fibers of the optic nerve.  This  principle  of  simultaneity  contrasts  greatly  with televisual  'seeing,'  which  is  based  on  scanning  a  scene  and sending the information on a timeline down a single channel. This operation requires a type of fast-acting components which are generally not found in living organisms but are standard in electronic engineering.

The discovery of Copilia's scanning system was a scientific event, but one could equally call it a media event. Copilia was, so to speak, discovered by television, and also seemed to provide a tangible link between the realm of live signal-based feedback technologies  and  that  of  living  organisms.  Imaginations  of  a televisual body did in fact already exist (related to the tendency to  see  video  as  an  avatar  of  the  human  eye  and  the  seeing subject). But Copilia demonstrated that there was no reason to see the televisual body as specifically human. In fact, Copilia's perfect  transparency  seemed  designed  to  support  ideas  about the technicity at work in the production of alien life forms. To the biologists, her body presented itself like a technical drawing or a circuit diagram, all internal functions clearly visible in the electron microscope without the need for dissection. Moreover, she  did  not  eat,  but  appeared  to  run  on  stored  energy,  like  a battery. And even more strangely: she had no heart. When she was not scanning, she was impossible to distinguish from dead specimens. 2 For  Copilia,  life  was  in  other  words  tantamount to scanning: the scanning movement -which was linked to her reproductive capacities -outlined a strange form of existence constantly at the brink of life and death. Her life was, in fact, not unlike that of a piece of electronic equipment that would be turned off when not receiving or disseminating signals. Seeing, in this animal, would have to be understood in terms of technical operations rather than visual representations. Just as in video, its 'images' would have to be understood as living forces.

Some fifty years later, an aquatic animal inserted in a museum context is describing itself to me in videographic terms. 'This is me now -this is me 100 frames later,' it says, through the voice of  a  famous  ventriloquist.  It  also  speaks  of  semiconductors, biochemistry,  standardization,  miniaturization,  information, bacteria,  sound-to-light  conversion  and  realities  beyond  the 'photo  logic' -to  quote  just  a  few  fragments  of  its  dreamily autobiographical discourse. In other words, its discourse evokes a modern techno-logic that has evolved historically from discovering the strangely life-like properties of video and computer feedback to exploring the continuities between genetics and computer codes, between the wet 'in vitro' world of organic samples and the 'in silico' world of information processing.

The bag-like eyes of this animal -the protagonist of Philippe Parreno's digital film Anywhen (2016) -are  nothing  like  mine. She is a cephalopod and is also distinguished by the fact that her  mental  images -thoughts  and  feelings -show  up  directly on her skin, as if this skin was simply a digital interface layer whose shifting expressions indicate real-time operations in some underlying computer layer. But then again, her brain is not a centralized organ, but distributed across the body in a way that makes it possible to suggest that each of her arms has a mind of its own. In fact, it may keep functioning, searching for food, even when severed from the main body. Her brain is, in other words, evocative of the type of distributed digital networks that we now depend on for  rapid  communication  and  organization.  In  the half-century that has passed between the (re)discovery of Copilia and the exhibition of Anywhen, the storyline has shifted. Where image technologies once allowed us to discover what animals might be like, animals, today, are given the task of telling us what our images might be.

INA BLOM is an art historian and writer affiliated with the University of Oslo and the University of Chicago. She is, among other, the author of The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016).

- 1 R.L. Gregory, H.E. Ross and N. Moray, 'The Curious Eye of Copilia,' Nature 201 (1964): 1166-1168. The story of Copilia and its relation to new concepts of video life and video ecology is discussed in Chapter 4 of my 2016 book The Autobiography of Video (Berlin: Sternberg).
- 2 R. L. Gregory, 'See Naples and Live,' in Odd Perceptions (London: Routledge, 1986), 162.