I, too, sometimes thought I saw, moving in ripples on the surface of a long-cold coffee cup or in the close-up choreography of dust-flecks jumping on an unwiped tabletop, or even on the fleshy insides of my own drooped eyelids, the plan, formula, solution – not only to the problem with which I was currently grappling, but to it all, the whole caboodle -before waking with a jolt, I watched it all evaporate.

The image disputes the presence of the thing. In the image, the thing is not content simply to be; the image shows that the thing is and how it is. This is not a presence 'for a subject' (it is not 'representation' in the ordinary, mimetic sense of the word). It is, on the contrary, if one can put it this way, 'presence as subject'. The thing presents itself.

As an ongoing series "Surrounded by the Promises of the Whatever" tries to encircle the concept of images being autonomous objects on their own. Once it exists, the life of an image reaches far beyond the human ability of fully understanding it. Our parochial belief in the correlation between
subjective perception and perceived objects is thus drastically limited. We don't really know what we are looking at.