Katier is very happy to be part of this months’ selection of the
Photomediations Machine!
Photomediations Machine is a curated online space where the dynamic relations of mediation as performed in photography and other media can be encountered, experienced and engaged.
Photomediations Machine adopts a process-based approach to image making by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of mediation that produce photographic objects.
Showcasing theoretical and practical work at the intersections of art and mainstream practices, Photomediations Machine is both an archive of mediations past and a site of production of media as-we-do-not-know-them-yet.
Photomediations Machine is non-commercial, non-profit and fully open access. Copyright remains with the original holders. Please do not reuse or republish any material from this site without obtaining permission first.
Curator
Professor Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Associate Curator
Ting Ting Cheng, artist, UK/Taiwan
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Photomediations Machine is a sister project to the online open access journal Culture Machine, established in 1999. In trying to redraw the boundaries between media, technology, philosophy, culture and art, Culture Machine’s agenda has been explicitly ‘open-ended, non-goal orientated, exploratory and experimental’. Its machinic mode of operation indicates that its agencies and actions have not always been just human. It is this aspect of non-human production, both on the level of concepts and on the level of matter, that Photomediations Machine borrows from its older sibling.
The concept of mediation embedded in the idea of ‘photomediations’ points to the more processual understanding of media that has recently been taken up by scholars and artists alike. It suggests that the photograph as such does not exist. Instead, there are only multiple and ongoing processes of photomediation. Seen in this light, photography names an active practice of cutting through the flow of photomediation, where the cut operates on a number of levels: perceptive, material, technical, and conceptual. In other words, photography can be described as a practice of making good cuts. Performed by human and nonhuman agents alike, these cuts participate in the wider process of imagining the world. What we conventionally understand as ‘photographic practice’ is therefore only a part of Photomediations Machine’s wider focus.