1st Edition
The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture
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.
Introduction
Andrew Dewdney and Katrina Sluis
Part One: The condition of the networked image
1. The politics of the networked image: representation and reproduction
Andrew Dewdney
2. The networked image after Web 2.0: Flickr and the ‘real-world’ photography of the dataset
Katrina Sluis
3. Post-capitalist photography
Ben Burbridge
Part Two: Computation, software, learning
4. The computer vision lab: the epistemic configuration of machine vision
Nicolas Malevé
5. Ways of machine seeing as a problem of invisual literacy
Geoff Cox
6, Soft subjects: hybrid labour in media software
Alan Warburton
Part Three: Curating the networked image
7. The paradoxes of curating the networked image: aesthetic currents, flows and flaws
Gaia Tedone
8. Internet liveness and the art museum
Ioanna Zouli
9. Screenshot Situations: imaginary realities of networked images
Magda Tyżlik-Carver
Part Four: Digitisation and the reconfiguration of the archive
10. Networks of care
Annet Dekker
11. Beyond the screenshot: interface design and data protocols in the net art archive
Lozana Rossenova
Biography
Andrew Dewdney is Co-director and Co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, and Professor of Educational Media at London South Bank University. He has written and lectured widely on new media and museology. His most recent book Forget Photography was published in 2021.
Katrina Sluis is Associate Professor and Head of Photography & Media Arts at the School of Art & Design, Australian National University. She is a founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image and was previously Senior Curator (Digital Programmes) at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
