speculative photography an attempt (essay) of making visible (manifesto)
Article Sidebar
Google Scholar citations
Main Article Content
This essay and manifesto define speculative photography from a historical perspective and through practical poetics, as photography that integrates fantastic and experimental elements in both its subjects and processes. Such photography is even more urgent at a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) and computational photography are driving photography to an impasse of fabricated yet all-pervasive realism. The text defines speculative photography in its semiotic and information-theory aspects, outlines a taxonomy of speculative qualities in photography alongside examples of photographers and photographic communities practicing them, and pays particular attention to contemporary subcultures of early-2000s digital camera (digicam) reuse and internet pop-cultural redefinitions of “aesthetics”. While theories and definitions of speculative photography have existed since the 1970s, they are scattered and cover only select aspects of the broader concept proposed here. This paper argues that speculative photography rejects empiricism and notions of truth while practicing an art of the “medium” in its most literal – physical, artistic and spiritual – meanings.
Keywords:
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
(c) Florian Cramer, 2024
Copyright
For all articles published in Artnodes that are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, copyright is retained by the author(s). The complete text the license can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, provided you attribute it (authorship, journal name, publisher) in the manner specified by the author(s) or licensor(s).
Authors are responsible for obtaining the necessary licences for the images that are subject to copyright.
Assignment of intellectual property rights
The author non exclusively transfers the rights to use (reproduce, distribute, publicly broadcast or transform) and market the work, in full or part, to the journal’s editors in all present and future formats and modalities, in all languages, for the lifetime of the work and worldwide.
I hereby declare that I am the original author of the work. The editors shall thus not be held responsible for any obligation or legal action that may derive from the work submitted in terms of violation of third parties’ rights, whether intellectual property, trade secret or any other right.
Florian Cramer, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences
Practice-oriented research professor at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. He studied Comparative and Art History in Berlin, Konstanz and Amherst/Massachusetts, was a lecturer in Comparative Literature 1998-2004, and has been an art school research professor and tutor in Rotterdam since 2004. Recent publications include: Lumbung, Commons and Community Art, co-authored with Simon Kentgens, Rotterdam: HumDrumPress, 2023, A Near-sighted Falling into Technology: Through the Looking Glass of Art Practice as Human Self-Experimentation, Accidents and Coincidence, with Elaine W. Ho, in: Joke Brouwer & Sjoerd van Tuinen (eds.), Technological Accidents, Accidental Technologies, Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2023; Making Matters. A Vocabulary for Collective Arts, edited with Janneke Wesseling, Anja Groten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Marie-José Sondeijker, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2022; on speculative computational poetics: Words Made Flesh, Piet Zwart Institute, 2005.
References
ALG. “2002.12 cONVENIENCE, tENTATIVELY a, 2002.12 tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE interviewed by aundre-g (Aundre Gandy) for his ‘Strike’ zine”. Idioideo. (n.d.). http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/InterviewStrike.html. [Accessed: 3 May 2024].
Anonymous. “FAQ”. Aesthetics Wiki. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki:FAQ. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Anonymous. “Fotonight Web”. Aesthetics Wiki. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Fotonight_Web. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Anonymous. “Frutiger Aero”. Aesthetics Wiki. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Anonymous. “List of Aesthetics”. Aesthetics Wiki. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Aesthetics. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill & Wang Pub, 1990 [1953].
Buzzo, Daniel. “The Volca project: a sensory experiment in collaborative visualisation”. Transimage 2018. Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference. (2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3177767
Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. London: Routledge, 2022 [1923]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429284922
Chokkattu, Julian. “The Evolution of Smartphone Night Photography”. Video, 10:31. YouTube (2022). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk-26lSbIMk. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, The. CARI | the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. (2024). https://cari.institute/. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Cristofovici, Anca. Touching surfaces: Photographic aesthetics, temporality, aging. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401206693
Digicam.love. digicam.love. (2024). http://digicam.love. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Software as Culture. New York: Autonomedia, 2003.
Greenway, John L. “The Photograph as Esthetic Norm in Fin-de-Siècle Scandinavia.” Fin(s) de Siècle in Scandinavian Perspective: Studies in Honor of Harald S. Naess, (1993):141-149.
Lachmann, Renate. Erzählte Phantastik. Zu Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik phantastischer Texte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002.
Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020 [1927].
Saguaro, William. Aesthetic Shit. Apple Music. (2022). https://music.apple.com/us/album/william-saguaro/1645907228. [Accessed: 3 February 2024].
Thomas, Lew. Structural(Ism) and Photography. San Francisco: NFS Press, 1978.
Trachtenberg, Alan. “Camera Work: Notes toward an Investigation”. The Massachusetts Review, vol. 19, no. 4, (1978): 834-858.
Similar Articles
- Jordi Alberich, In progress 7.0: Notes on an aesthetics for new media , Artnodes: No. 2 (2003): NODE 2. Art and New Media
- Paolo Patelli, Jussi Parikka, Frameless scans: on unimages circa 1753 and 2024 , Artnodes: No. 34: (July 2024). NODE 34. Materiology and variantology: invitation to dialogue (guest editors: Siegfried Zielinski & Daniel Irrgang)
- Santiago Morilla, Towards a post-locative art , Artnodes: No. 31: (January 2023). NODE 31. Possibles II (Editors: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano)
- Miguel Alfonso Bouhaben, Eurocentric artistic research and the epistemic-aesthetic decolonization , Artnodes: No. 21: (June 2018). NODE 21. Media Archaeology (Editors: Pau Alsina, Ana Rodríguez, Vanina Hofman)
- Sandra Cuevas, Reynaldo Thompson, Tirtha Mukhopadhyay, Aesthetics of hallucination: ontology of visual kaleidoscopes from the Age of Myth to virtual reality , Artnodes: No. 32: (July 2023). NODE 32. Possibles III (Editors: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano)
- Tin Wilke, Summoning the ghosts of the AnArchive , Artnodes: No. 34: (July 2024). NODE 34. Materiology and variantology: invitation to dialogue (guest editors: Siegfried Zielinski & Daniel Irrgang)
- Umberto Luigi Roncoroni Osio, Aesthetic and epistemological issues of art-based research , Artnodes: No. 30
- Laura Apolonio, The journey in situ. How walking in confined spaces can boost imagination , Artnodes: No. 27: (January 2021). Node 27. Arts in the Time of Pandemic (Guest Editors: Laura Benítez & Erich Berger)
- Marc Downie, Creación de sonido por criaturas virtuales , Artnodes: No. 5: (September 2006). NODE 5. Interviews (Editors: Pau Alsina, Pau Waelder)
- Víctor Murillo Lígorred, Agent, images and índex Gerhard Richter photo-paintings: paintings as visual devices , Artnodes: No. 21: (June 2018). NODE 21. Media Archaeology (Editors: Pau Alsina, Ana Rodríguez, Vanina Hofman)
<< < 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 > >>
You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.