The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture


Book Description

This collection examines how the networked image establishes new social practices for the user and presents new challenges for cultural practitioners engaged in making, curating, teaching, exhibiting, archiving and preserving born-digital objects. The mode of vision and imaging, established through photography over the previous two centuries, has and continues to be radically reconfigured by a hybrid of algorithms, computing, programmed capture and display devices, and an array of online platforms. The image under these new conditions is filtered, fluid, fleeting, permeable, mobile and distributed and is changing our ways of seeing. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of research conducted at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) and its collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery over the last ten years. The book's contributors investigate radical changes in the meanings and values of hybridised media in socio-technical networks and speak to the creeping automation of culture through applications of AI, social media platforms and the financialisation of data. This interdisciplinary collection draws upon media and cultural studies, art history, art practice, photographic theory, user design, animation, museology and computer science as a way of making sense of the specific cultural consequences of the rapid succession of changes in image technologies and to bring the story up to date. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of visual culture, media studies and photography.




The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture


Book Description

This collection examines how the networked image establishes new social practices for the user and presents new challenges for cultural practitioners engaged in making, curating, teaching, exhibiting, archiving and preserving born-digital objects. The mode of vision and imaging, established through photography over the previous two centuries, has and continues to be radically reconfigured by a hybrid of algorithms, computing, programmed capture and display devices, and an array of online platforms. The image under these new conditions is filtered, fluid, fleeting, permeable, mobile and distributed and is changing our ways of seeing. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of research conducted at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) and its collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery over the last ten years. The book's contributors investigate radical changes in the meanings and values of hybridised media in socio-technical networks and speak to the creeping automation of culture through applications of AI, social media platforms and the financialisation of data. This interdisciplinary collection draws upon media and cultural studies, art history, art practice, photographic theory, user design, animation, museology and computer science as a way of making sense of the specific cultural consequences of the rapid succession of changes in image technologies and to bring the story up to date. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of visual culture, media studies and photography.




The Photographic Image in Digital Culture


Book Description

This new edition of The Photographic Image in Digital Culture explores the condition of photography after some 20 years of remediation and transformation by digital technology. Through ten especially commissioned essays, by some of the leading scholars in the field of contemporary photography studies, a range of key topics are discussed including: the meaning of software in the production of photograph; the nature of networked photographs; the screen as the site of photographic display; the simulation of photography in the videogame; photography, ubiquitous computing and technologies of ambient intelligence; developments in vernacular photography and social media; the photograph and the digital archive; the curation and exhibition of the networked photograph; the dominance of the image bank in commercial and advertising photography; the complexities of citizen photojournalism. A recurring theme addressed throughout is the nature of ‘photography after photography’ and the paradoxical nature of the medium in the 21st century; a time when the traditional technology of photography has become defunct while there is more ‘photography’ than ever. This is an ideal book for students studying photography and digital media.




Post-Digital, Post-Internet Art and Education


Book Description

This open access edited volume provides theoretical, practical, and historical perspectives on art and education in a post-digital, post-internet era. Recently, these terms have been attached to artworks, artists, exhibitions, and educational practices that deal with the relationships between online and offline, digital and physical, and material and immaterial. By taking the current socio-technological conditions of the post-digital and the post-internet seriously, contributors challenge fixed narratives and field-specific ownership of these terms, as well as explore their potential and possible shortcomings when discussing art and education. Chapters also recognize historical forebears of digital art and education while critically assessing art, media, and other realms of engagement. This book encourages readers to explore what kind of educational futures might a post-digital, post-internet era engender.




Documentation as Art


Book Description

Documentation as Art presents documentation as an expanded practice that is radically changing the ways in which to look at, participate in, and generate art. Bringing together expertise from different disciplines, the book provides an in-depth investigation of the development of documentation as a set of production, circulation, and preservation strategies. Illustrating how these are often led by artists, audiences, and museums, the contributions offer new insights into digital art and its history, curation, and preservation, through documentation. Considering documentation as the main method of preserving these art forms, the book analyses how it can address the inherent challenges of capturing live events, visitor experiences, and evolving artworks. Showing how documentation itself can become (part of) an original artwork, the book discusses ways in which these expanded practices can impact the value and experience of the documented event or artwork, giving consideration to how this might affect the traditional authority of the museum as creator of documentation used for future reference, historical relevance, or cultural memory. Documentation as Art demonstrates how the curation and preservation of documentation and the introduction of audience-generated documentation are radically changing exhibition and visiting practices in which documentation is becoming a significant and emergent cultural form in its own right. The book will appeal to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums and curation, art and art history, performance, new media and digital art, library and information science, and conservation.




Boundary Images


Book Description

How are images made, and how should we understand their limits, capacities, and forces in digital media? While functioning as representations or mediations of the political, images also act through the technologies and social processes that they claim only to represent. In both capacities, images can be innovative, but they can also reproduce harmful phenomena such as racism, misogyny, and conspiracy. Boundary Images investigates the political, material, and visual work that images do to cross and blur the boundaries between the technological and biological and between humans, machines, and nature. Exploring the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, Boundary Images posits these boundaries as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world.




Operational Images


Book Description

An in-depth look into the transformation of visual culture and digital aesthetics First introduced by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, the term operational images defines the expanding field of machine vision. In this study, media theorist Jussi Parikka develops Farocki’s initial concept by considering the extent to which operational images have pervaded today’s visual culture, outlining how data technologies continue to develop and disrupt our understanding of images beyond representation. Charting the ways that operational images have been employed throughout a variety of fields and historical epochs, Parikka details their many roles as technologies of analysis, capture, measurement, diagramming, laboring, (machine) learning, identification, tracking, and destruction. He demonstrates how, though inextricable from issues of power and control, operational images extend their reach far beyond militaristic and colonial violence and into the realms of artificial intelligence, data, and numerous aspects of art, media, and everyday visual culture. Serving as an extensive guide to a key concept in contemporary art, design, and media theory, Operational Images explores the implications of machine vision and the limits of human agency. Through a wealth of case studies highlighting the areas where imagery and data intersect, this book gives us unprecedented insight into the ever-evolving world of posthuman visuality. Cover alt text: Satellite photo on which white title words appear in yellow boxes. Yellow lines connect the boxes.




Materialities in Dance and Performance


Book Description

What is »materiality« in dance and performance? What role does »the material« play in the formation for the cultural memory of ephemeral arts? The contributors to this volume examine concepts of materiality in dance and performance, the use of materials in artistic practices and the role of social media in changing the perception of time-based artefacts. The volume shows how the focus on materiality transforms contemporary artistic work and challenges established concepts of dance and performance research.




Ethics of Contemporary Collecting


Book Description

Ethics of Contemporary Collecting addresses pressing and pertinent issues around ethical contemporary collecting, reflecting on how practices are evolving or in flux. Across three sections, each containing live sector subjects from the climate crisis to digital collecting to centring communities, this book collates a combination of case studies and in-depth chapters by leading practitioners working in the field. These pieces are instructive and provide practical, transferable examples of how people have approached these challenges. It highlights examples of leading practice in the field and illustrates ethical approaches to contemporary collecting as work in this area progresses and our conversations about it advance. To reflect this ongoing growth, the book closes with an ‘Activations’ section of discussion prompts intended to keep the conversations and progress – on individual, institutional and societal levels – going. Ethics of Contemporary Collecting is an indispensable tool for informing, training and educating the next generation of curators and collection professionals, and inspiring future collecting projects.




Forget Photography


Book Description

Why we must forget photography and reject the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates. The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of photography's replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography, residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography is a strategy to reveal the redundant historicity of the photographic constellation and the cultural immobility of its epicenter. It attempts to liberate the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates, and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies, times, events, materials, memory, representation and the image. Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography, which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography and go beyond it in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as the reality or world it shows. Forgetting photography will require a different way of organizing knowledge about the visual in culture that involves crossing different knowledges of visual culture, technologies, and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and creative labor and its knowledge practices within the institutions and organization of visual reproduction.