The Post-photographic Apparatus
International Conference
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
14–15 Nov 2019
Post-photographic discourses have primarily focused on the transformations of photographic images. But if we understand photography also as an entanglement with a specific kind of apparatus, the question one has to ask is: How this apparatus as much as our conception of it has changed?
The conference addresses this question from three perspectives: technologically, the digitization of cameras has turned them into computers with attached sensors, and former functions of the hardware are increasingly simulated by software. The construction of a camera nowadays requires less domain knowledge, which has enabled companies from different fields to introduce new camera models and disrupt a previously relatively stable ecosystem. At the same time, many artists have questioned the tool of their photographic practices by turning self-created cameras into artworks in their own rights. Finally, a theoretical critique of modernism (of which traditional photography has been an integral part), along with posthumanistic understandings of agency and technology, have helped to blur what used to be the separate concepts of the camera, photographer and image. Hence, cameras can no longer be understood as black boxes/cameras obscuras. We need to re-assess them as nodes in larger media ecological networks.
745 Viscosistadt
Room 745_055
Nylsuisseplatz 1
CH-6020 Luzern-Emmenbrücke
14 Nov 2019
10:30–11:00
Welcome and Introduction
11:00–11:30
Paul Wombell: “The Speculative Camera”
11:30–12:00
Ana Peraica: “Photograph for the Photograph’s Sake: Deliberation from Obligation to Represent in the Unhuman Photography”
12:00–12:30
Paul Proctor: “Virtually Actual”
12:30–13:00
Luke Skrebowski: “Seeing the Seeing Machines: The Politics of Machine Vision in Trevor Paglen’s Recent Work”
14:30–15:00
Birk Weiberg: “Cameras on the Sunset Strip: Intra-actions in Ed Ruscha’s Street Photography”
15:00–15:30
Yanai Toister: “Horizontal Against Vertical”
15:30–16:00
Catherine M. Weir: “Writing Images as Programs: Coding as a Challenge to the Program of the Camera Apparatus”
16:30–17:00
Elke Rentemeister: “Touching Desire”
17:00–17:30
Michal Šimůnek: “A Machine for Making Authenticity: Family Photography and Nonhuman Operators”
17:30–18:00
Annette Urban: “Screen Capturing and Tactile Manoeuvres: Artistic Post-Photographic Practices within the Virtual”
15 Nov 2019
9:30–10:00
Asko Lehmuskallio: “The Camera as a Focusing Medium”
10:00–10:30
Franz Hefele: “How to Shoot on iPhone: New Devices, (Un)familiar Challenges”
10:30–11:00
Rowan Lear: “In the Residue of Photography: Leaky Bodies and Polluted Waters”
11:30–12:00
Nancy Ann Roth: “Three Terms in Transition: Photography, Post-Photography and the Apparatus”
12:00–12:30
Cristina Moraru: “The Photographic Camera as a Disobedient Object in a ‘Parliament Of Things’”
12:30-13:00
Andrew Fisher: “The Post-photographic Apparatus: A ‘colossal and labyrinthine phototheque in whose depths stalks […] the prodigious image of our strangeness’”