La virtualización de la fotografía digital

Jonathan Woodrow

doi:10.5565/rev/athenead/v1n1.31

The virtualisation of digital photography

Authors

Jonathan Woodrow

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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.

Keywords

Technology, Actor Network Theory /ANT), Virtualisation, Digital photography

References

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Author Biography

Jonathan Woodrow

Dept. of Human Sciences. Loughborough University