Conference abstract · 2022

Spin Into Being: The Body as Redemptive Tool in Our Engagement With the Digital

Anne Scott Wilson, Deakin University

Expanded Visualities: Photography & Emerging Technologies. 6th International Conference of Photography and Theory (ICPT2022), CYENS, Nicosia, Cyprus, 17–19 November 2022. Session 11: On Virtual, Augmented and Extended Reality.

My paper will investigate unique human qualities present in the act of taking a photo, addressing what happens between the event and the artefact using 3 new artworks as a prism for analysis (Spin into Being, 2022, Five Walls Melbourne). My practice seeks to identify and recognise human-ness within the digital condition. This concern emerges from a need to challenge the ways that subjectivity is manipulated by new technologies through data harvesting; and power imbalances brought about by algorithmic thinking. While we witness an unprecedented amount of imagery it is proposed that rather than the visual referent being the photograph, its uniqueness today is within the meta data, the information about when, how and what technology has been used. It is within this environment of being that the body and all that it is, re-emerges as the lynchpin of photography, a conjoined mechanism of the human and non-human apparatus through which we can start to analyse the new frontiers we are facing, drawing attention back to what cannot be measured in humans or harvested as data.

References

• Steyerl, Hito. 2009. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux, no. 10 (November): 1–9.
• Steyerl, Hito. 2019. “The Language of Broken Glass.” HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, as part of ‘Stop Making Sense’.
• Rubinstein, D., Golding, J. and Fisher, A. (eds). 2013. On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation.
• Stalder, F. 2018. The Digital Condition. John Wiley & Sons.

See the work: Spin into Being