Thoughts on the viewer

The “imag(in)ing apparatus” discussed here, with which the jpeg imag(in)ing apparatus is enfolded, includes the ‘window’ the screen and frame (Friedberg 2006) component ‘through’ which the jpeg imag(in)ings appear visible and the RAW imag(in)ings remain unvisible. This window component is perhaps best thought of as a viewer, paralleling the screen on the back of the …

Paper proposal… in process: photography and ontology

This paper seeks to approach the philosophical questions around digital photography through the lens of ‘speculative realism’. Taking Graham Harman’s reading of Bruno Latour’s Irreductions as a starting point and developments characterised as the “speculative turn” in continental philosophy as a framework, I seek to account for the enfolded position of the digital image and …

James Burke’s Connections and media archaeology

In the 1970s James Burke hosted a TV series, Connections where the audience was taken on a journey from one technological object to another (Burke 1978). The programme started with Burke presenting an unlikely partnership: the manorial system and the carburettor for instance. What could be the connection, the audience was asked and then the …

Zielinski: geographies, biographies, archaeologies

Siegfried Zielinski’s exploration of “hearing and seeing” through an archaeology of scopic and sonic apparatuses (2006) includes the sort of engravings and diagrams of gadgets and devices that pepper Crary and Jay’s work. Here too the apparatuses for investigating seeing and hearing open up questions of subjectivity and biopower that Zielinski argues resonate in contemporary …