The Networked Audience : Algorithms, affordances, and why digital photographs are only a small part of digital photography
(2025)
author(s): Will Boase
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
As photographers we make, sell and consume digital images, and the digital space and its audiences are growing exponentially. But every conversation on circulating photography centres on the object, about books or exhibitions. It seemed like there are images, and there is photography. Why are the two diverging? Radio evolved into podcasts. TV turned into TikTok. This thesis, then, sets out to ask what it is that photography says it does, or thinks it does, and what it actually does in the age of the smartphone. Critics love to tell their readers that photography is dead, but for some reason you can find all those same critics cheerfully posting their lunch on Instagram. This thesis is an invitation and a challenge to photography, to admit that things have changed and to embrace this as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Playing against the camera
(2020)
author(s): Erik Friis Reitan
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.
The mass-reproduction and dissemination of digital images in the age of Covid-19
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Mengxuan Zhao
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The pandemic has dragged us all into a world of social distancing and isolation. The physical absence of art is substituted by the virtual experience online. The mass-reproduction and mass-consumption of online images arrived at an unprecedented scale, which requires us to reflect on the question of originality, adaptability and dissemination of art. Many museums launched their online touring programs as well as art organizations' educational and exhibition projects on the internet. This research will discuss the impact of digital art especially in the time of the pandemic.
