The Virtualisation of Digital Photography

Abstract

How do humans relate to their technology? This is not a new question, many have struggled with it. What we want to do here is to make it visible through another vocabulary, the virtual. We are going to unpack this vocabulary by reconfiguring the traditional moves that start with distinct categories of human things and technical things and seek to explain one category in terms of the activities of the other. Through the Actor Network Theory (ANT) we will opt for Allegoresis as another register or vocabulary that makes technology and people visible. Through Latours's recent work we find our way to Walter Benjamin and his take on Leibniz's Monadology as a way of understanding the Kantian symbolic mode in historical terms. Benjamin asks for an account of stability from historical change and reinterpretation. The relationship between movement and moments is what we want to describe as that between the virtual and the actual. Moreover, it is this vocabulary that helps us understand or make visible the constant rewriting that any technology goes through as it is configured and reconfigured as humans and non-humans are arranged in historically contingent ways. We are then going to play out the virtual or arrive at it as we look to notice the arrangements of people and technology in a photographic club where members are beginning to use digital technologies.