‘I am not data’ has been produced in collaboration with a creative coder from the Netherlands. Over a period of six months around 4600 images were chosen from approximately 20,000 images of LatinX femmes. The images were then fed into a generative adversarial network (GAN) simulation that produced this film. The resulting work seeks to elucidate a process of lumping together foreign bodies as a method of amalgamation that works to create ‘new’ information. It exists in tandem with ‘Second Nature’, (...) a body of work on Mexican femme bodies and algorithmic web searches, from which some images are included in this article. The process behind the GAN used for this film becomes a mere reference to a human shape. Its processes of synthesis work as a metaphor for systems of human classification in which the bodies of foreigners become fuel for monstrous stereotypes. There is a sense of history repeating itself through the ways that these technological tools are used in artificial intelligence (AI) which launches questions regarding equality and progress in pursuit of social justice. (shrink)

Landscapes and atmospheric processes are rapidly changing, and so are the technologies we use to depict and detect them. How to ponder these transformations through artistic thinking and making? In the artwork On Thunderclouds, I examine the thundercloud as aesthetic motif, meteorological phenomenon, and as an ominous sign of climate change. In the making of the work, the tension between prediction and unpredictability on a larger level is mirrored in my working process, a balancing act between setting up systems and (...) allowing elements of chance, even chaos. In the work various predictions, speculations and uncertainties thus vibrate. (shrink)

This article explores the properties of glitch within practices of in-game photography. It argues that capturing the breaking of game textures and graphics reveals the process of creation of photorealism and the remediation of traditional photography within digital and playable spaces. On the other hand, it proposes that screenshotting game glitches acts as an involuntary bug report and part of an economy of ever-optimizing networked images.

Rosa Menkman proposed that the concept of glitch should be considered a tipping point, a momentum, that can be seized, in which the power of subjectivity and the collaborative efforts of creators and the active spectators take centre stage. This article will discuss how in the last decades the glitch as noise and techne has shifted towards glitch as precarious aesthetics and how it has become associated with decolonial and feminist modes of critique. While the glitch is still seen as (...) a material, a techne, there is a resistant aesthetics of mutiny, a tactical revolt of the material that is confronting systemic standardization, bias and institutionalization. As presented in the exhibition VJ Um Amel, Beit Um Amel (2020), the technologically induced phenomena are analogous with the crises and states of emergency in various global infrastructures, systems and information channels. (shrink)

In a number of works of art, I have taken an interest in insects, bookworms that eat books, electronics as anatomy and clever robots whose actions in a way resemble the apparently primitive abilities of insects. This text has its starting point in two works of art, Eaten Books and Atlas of AInsects. In the artworks, I am interested in insect anatomy and insects as symbols of decay, survival, extinction, death and post humanity. The text is originally from an artistic (...) lecture about my work with insects and coding, and is based on a reading from within the computer program Eaten Books. A performance where the software is letting insects erase the text. (shrink)

This article aims to analyse how a photographic interaction, complicated by technical and bodily disruption, entails a productive glitch in the form of systemic friction. The analysis is grounded in artist Lisa Tan’s exhibition Dodge and/or Burn in Stockholm (2023–24), with a focus on a central video work. The exhibition’s theme of crisis and transformation guides the analysis within a qualitative framework informed by an art historical methodology of semiotics and phenomenology combined with media and disability studies. This interdisciplinary perspective (...) organizes an account anchored in the artwork’s initial capture and exhibition display. As the glitch is redefined, from a technical error to an embodied experience of systemic friction, the article offers an innovative take on how both photography and glitch can be conceptualized and deployed. As a result, the glitch emerges as a tool to address today’s dominant sociotechnical systems and their visual underpinnings. (shrink)

Within the last decade, a growing number of artists, media activists and theorists have been engaged with the potential of the glitch – with processes and aesthetics that arise from visual errors in digital technologies. But glitches also offer clues to understanding normative knowledge and power systems, and to challenge these. This is relevant in critical approaches to photography and its historical role in forming, controlling and colonizing systems as well as conventional understandings of the medium as a transparent window (...) onto the world/reality. In this introduction we outline our approach to the glitch in the artistic and curatorial research project ‘Photography and the Glitch’, to which the contributors to this issue have contributed in various ways. (shrink)

Among one of the main inspirations for the research behind this Special Issue is Jussi Parikka’s 2010 book Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. In this interview, the guest editors, Nina Mangalanayagam and Louise Wolthers, ask Professor Parikka to revisit some of the book’s core issues in relation to digital photography and the current media landscape in general. The conversation also revolves around artificial intelligence (AI), bugs, mimicry, contemporary art as well as scale and operational images, which reflect (...) Parikka’s recent research. (shrink)

This article proposes to reconceptualize the Hungarian photographer, artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy’s (1895–1946) inter-war call for a ‘new vision’ in order to grasp how artists presently experiment with photography and adjacent new technologies to explore the environmental, ecological and elemental dimension of media themselves. For Moholy-Nagy, photography represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the increasingly industrialized and automated world and a means of expanding our sensory perception. Drawing on recent scholarship of elemental media theory, I adapt Moholy-Nagy’s (...) interest in the materiality of photography and the atmospheric and medial dimensions of light itself to an environmentally attuned notion of ‘new visions’. Exemplified with discussion of recent works by Emilija Škarnulytė, Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag, I show how a number of contemporary artists likewise scrutinize photography’s (understood in an expanded way) material basis and atmospheric qualities to explore new forms of image-making, including CGI and synthetic aperture radar images, fitted to reflect the accelerated automation and ecological precarity that mark the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

In response to calls to forget and unthink photography this article considers the computational environment and its consequences for the image making. What is there to know about images that are networked and generated with data processing techniques rather than with light and chemistry? How to analyse images and read what they are and what they represent, beyond what is visible in the picture? The article argues that glitches while aesthetically capturing errors in the machine point to broader conditions of (...) image making revealing systemic errors and not only its momentary technical failures. To explore digital images as affective phenomena to be sensed, the article looks at how glitch and its operations have been used by artists to generate digital images, and most importantly how they reveal computational systems as technical objects and affective infrastructures where discrimination is not an error but part of the system. (shrink)

Review of: Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, Kevin Coleman and Daniel James (eds) (2021) London and New York: Verso, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-83976-080-8, p/bk, GBP 19.99.

Photographs of violence carry an implicit critique of the social order from which they emerge. This necessitates the systemic management of their affect. Recognition of the experience carried by these signals has the potential to catalyse and contribute to emancipatory thought and action. The apparatus of epistemic control – characterized here as the Archive – has evolved to neutralize their affective potential. Certain artworks that reconfigure photographs of violence illuminate the nature of this neutralizing mechanism. They mimic and subvert the (...) forms of representational archivization and suggest a counter-Archive – a repository of traumatic representation which serves to release affective trauma from its epistemic suppression. One example of this counter-archival practice is – War Primer 2. A body of work from 2011 by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, which uses Bertolt Brecht’s Kreigsfibel or War Primer (1955) as a point of departure for examining the representation of twenty-first century violence. (shrink)

This article follows the history of the idea of adventure in the Soviet Union, which started as a dream of the great communist adventure but two decades into the revolution turned into the nightmare of the Great Terror. Adventure was implicated in the violent realities of Stalinism through tropes of the adventure genre, such as the loneliness of the adventurer in a precarious world impenetrable by reason. Understanding this situation requires a focus on philosophies of both adventure and terror. For (...) instance, Hegel’s philosophy of adventure will help us to reveal features of the lived experience in times of terror, whilst Mikhail Ryklin’s philosophy of terror sheds light on the significance of the adventure genre in the Soviet 1930s. This double focus allows articulation of a primary feature of violence that is often overlooked, namely, the fundamental reciprocity that structures it. In the Soviet context, we find historically neglected but critically important reflections on the relation between violence and adventure in the life and works of Lev Kopelev. We also find a unique deliberation on the dialectics of violence (and counter-violence) in Evgeni Shvarc’s adventure tale The Dragon (1943) which can be fruitfully read in dialogue with Arendt’s vital distinction between violence and power. Reconsidering these sources is an important task for today given that Russian politics has once again, 30 years after perestroika, regressed into mass violence. (shrink)

This publication presents a selection of photographic work by Hilde Honerud, made in collaboration with Yoga and Sports with Refugees (YSR) in Lesbos, Greece. It is introduced by a text coauthored with Jon Honerud. In order to engage with the experiences and the vulnerable position of the refugees involved, this project used increasingly apparent formal manipulations to convey an experience beyond the documentary image and to push observers to question the objectivity of images; to move from representation to immediate experience. (...) This entailed a kind of violence to the images that could only be done after spending a long time getting to know the organization and its context. The process raised a number of ethical questions, which we attempt to address in the text accompanying these images. The selection of images published here were part of the exhibition Reality Slipped into a Symbol, at the Vestfold Art Centre, Tonsberg, Norway (9 June–10 July 2022). (shrink)

Review of: How Photography Changed Philosophy, Daniel Rubinstein (2023) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 122 pp., ISBN 978-0-36769-422-7, h/bk, GBP 130.00.

This article sets out to draft a preliminary sketch of an environmental history of photography, as opposed to a history of environmental photography. It shows that such a history should be rooted in a conceptualization of our geological epoch as the Capitalocene: the age of capital. Seen in this light, photography can be understood as part of a longer history of what the article describes – building on the work of activist and journalist Raj Patel and environmental historian Jason W. (...) Moore (2018) – as the ‘cheap image’. In this way, photography is shown to offer a succinct expression of the Cartesian dualism that Patel and Moore see as being at the heart of the Capitalocene: the externalized image of capital N nature that this world ecology necessitated. The article considers Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2022) a recent exhibition and catalogue that attempted to narrate in exhibition form a history of photography from such a perspective. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the work of several artists from this exhibition who are seen as exemplifying ‘metabolic realism’, a new critical photo-based artistic approach. (shrink)

‘The portraits of disease’ explores the link between the symbolic use of diseases and the propagation of ideologies. It traces the origins of the term ‘Sick Man of Asia’ back to British newspapers in the mid-eighteenth century and its development into a metaphor for actual pathogens. The author contends that coloniality and pathogens share similarities, as both are highly transmissible and cannot be seen with the naked eye. The text also examines the influence of German-influenced microbiological research in the Japanese (...) Empire on the expansion of public health methods and institutions in Taiwan, Korea and north-eastern China. This study calls for a broader conversation about the intersections between science, ideology and power in our contemporary global context. (shrink)

Review of: Lyotard and Critical Practice, Kiff Bamford and Margaret Grebowicz (eds) (2023) London: Bloomsbury, 238 pp., ISBN 978-1-35019-202-7, h/bk, GBP 85.00.

How is violence conventionally portrayed and where does violence lie in representation? How does photography mediate the relationships between different forms and ideas, moments and experiences of violence? These were some of the questions addressed in a conversation between artist Harri Pälviranta and philosopher Stefanie Baumann organized by Alexandra Athanasiadou, founder and director of the online platform Philosophy & Photography Lab (PHLSPH), during the international Photography Festival, Imago Lisboa, in Lisbon during October 2022. The discussion presented here is edited from (...) a transcript by Athanasiadou. It took place at Lusófona University in Lisbon on the occasion of Pälviranta’s exhibition at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea (MNAC) (6 October 2021–8 January 2023) and focuses on two series of works in the exhibition, News Portraits and Choreography of Violence. (shrink)

This interview with media anthropologist, Rebecca L. Stein, conducted by Noa Levin and Andrew Fisher in Spring 2023, takes her recent book Screenshots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021) as its starting point in order to explore issues of state violence and the militarization of social media in Israel/Palestine. This book marks the culmination of a decade-long research project into the camera dreams introduced by digital imaging technologies and the fraught histories of their disillusionment. Stein discusses the (...) way her research has critically conceptualized the recent history of hopes invested in the digital image in this geopolitical context, by the occupier as much as the occupied, and charts the failures and mistakes, obstructions and appropriations that characterize the conflicted visual cultures of Israel/Palestine. (shrink)