Make It Real. Re-Enacting Indexicality

Vortrag | Lecture
im Rahmen der Konferenz | in the framework of the conference
"Fictions abound. Subversion, parody and the celebration of the documentary in current photographic practice"
Ffotogallery & the Centre for Photographic Research at the University of Wales Newport
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 03./04.03.2006 | March 3-4, 2006

As we've learned from critical histories of photography, reality is never captured within the photographic image, but generated by it; it is not depicted, but kept within the index. Hence, a stable index will be in what we trust.

While digitalization has often been discussed as the final dawn of photography-as-we-thought-we-knew-it, respectively of its indexicality, a closer view on the way digital(ized) photography is used within its most prominent medium of presentation and multiplication may open up a different perspective. Not only for the World Wide Web is a mighty tool for spreading peer-to-peer live media coverage and a gigantic arena of representation generously hosting a daily growing flood of amateur photography flick(e)r(s). Probably even more important is the indexicality of the World Wide Web as such.

The lecture will discuss web based projects that propose strategies of re-enacting indexicality as means to critically engage with the ghost of a stable index that is still haunting our perception of photographic images up till today. Special attention will be paid, of cause, to the role of photography-as-we-thought-we-knew-it within the framework of a media system that does not only foster re-enactments of indexicality, but also invites to use its structure to make the index itself become a shifter, a powerful tool for generating and processing realities.

tags: analogital, archive, archives, art & media, bild & imagination, cultural history, digital culture, digitale kultur, displays, erinnerung, erzählen, fotografie, geschichten & geschichte, image & imagination, invisibility, kulturgeschichte, kunst & medien, media history, media studies, media theory, mediengeschichte, medientheorie, medienwissenschaft, memory, perception, performance, photography, repräsentation, representation, stories & histories, storytelling, time, topologien, topologies, unsichtbarkeit, wahrnehmung, zeit