under categories already established in advance. There have been attempts at making images retrievable by purely visual criteria, without language. Have you ever concerned yourself with that?

Sasse: When I was still convinced my sketches had to be in the Internet, I experimented with assessing how images related. In order to do that, I had two images appear on the display and then requested that each tester assess them, and decide whether the images worked together or not. This functioned on a purely visual level, without language. Amazing, though, was that, while evaluating the data – I compiled 4000 to 5000 assessments – what became visible was a kind of ‹common sense›, or at least a tendency, inspired by totally different people. Had this idea been developed, at some point it could have led to the conclusion of there being a collective visual sense that unites us all as comrades.

Holschbach: Have you ever thought of applying an interactive intervention to your categories? So that viewers can create their own compilations or form new categories?

Sasse: Technically, that wouldn’t be a problem.

But, for me, these categories are meanwhile a sly game played with terms and not meant to expoit my work. One could expand on them, though, and observe in which area hierarchies establish themselves; or which categories are abstract, purely visual, or descriptive, and so on. When one speaks about photography, one nears an incredibly huge trap: speaking about what exists before the camera, and not about what one sees in the photograph, what exists before a viewer. And these are worlds apart.