Overview

These essays address the epistemological, aesthetic and political implications of scale in both scholarly and artistic work. From the mass image in vernacular culture to transformations of photography in contexts of big data and artificial intelligence, they explore the massification of photography.

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9781474478823

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Among the many fundamental changes taking place in contemporary photography and media culture, probably the most important are changes in scale. The new magnitude of image production, the instant global dissemination of billions of new images, and the adoption of AI that turns these images into big data are only some examples of how the visual has been 'scaled up' in the 21st century. Now we finally have a first book that rethinks the history and theory of photography through the lens of scale - and connects this concept to a range of others including measure, politics, gender, subjectivity and aesthetics.--Lev Manovich, City University of New York Someone takes a picture somewhere in the world. Such a trivial action is multiplied by a trillion. Or much more, since the majority of pictures today are produced by machines for machines. This collection of essays brilliantly explores the unheard-of effects of scale on the ontology of photography and it touches upon the sublime of the infinity of digital images.--Peter Szendy, Brown University The breadth of the research is extraordinary. The contributors to the book scrutinise the mundane and the exceptional, the terrestrial and the vernacular, the obsolete and the futuristic. Photography Off the Scale made me revisit everything I thought I knew about big data, digital culture, automated systems, data visualisation and new forms of creativity.-- ""We Make Money Not Art"" This book's refreshing and much needed take on photography cuts through the infoglut and explores the apparatus, infrastructure, and operations of contemporary pictures. Addressing everything from snapshots to machine vision, Photography Off the Scale unfurls a vital field of technology, politics and aesthetics reshaping the world.--Lisa Parks, University of California-Santa Barbara

"Among the many fundamental changes taking place in contemporary photography and media culture, probably the most important are changes in scale. The new magnitude of image production, the instant global dissemination of billions of new images, and the adoption of AI that turns these images into big data are only some examples of how the visual has been 'scaled up' in the 21st century. Now we finally have a first book that rethinks the history and theory of photography through the lens of scale - and connects this concept to a range of others including measure, politics, gender, subjectivity and aesthetics.--Lev Manovich, City University of New York Someone takes a picture somewhere in the world. Such a trivial action is multiplied by a trillion. Or much more, since the majority of pictures today are produced by machines for machines. This collection of essays brilliantly explores the unheard-of effects of scale on the ontology of photography and it touches upon the sublime of the infinity of digital images.--Peter Szendy, Brown University The breadth of the research is extraordinary. The contributors to the book scrutinise the mundane and the exceptional, the terrestrial and the vernacular, the obsolete and the futuristic. Photography Off the Scale made me revisit everything I thought I knew about big data, digital culture, automated systems, data visualisation and new forms of creativity.-- ""We Make Money Not Art"" This book's refreshing and much needed take on photography cuts through the infoglut and explores the apparatus, infrastructure, and operations of contemporary pictures. Addressing everything from snapshots to machine vision, Photography Off the Scale unfurls a vital field of technology, politics and aesthetics reshaping the world.--Lisa Parks, University of California-Santa Barbara"

Author Information

Tomás Dvořák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague. He studied philosophy, art history, media studies and sociology at Charles University in Prague and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on philosophy and history of media and philosophy and history of science, and the interrelations between these fields, especially media archaeology of science and knowledge. He has authored or co-authored a number of books in Czech: Epistemology of (New) Media(NAMU 2018), Photography, Sculpture, Object(NAMU 2017), Temporality of (New) Media (NAMU 2016), Contemporary Approaches in Historical Epistemology (Filosofia 2013), Chapters from the History and Theory of Media (AVU 2010), and Waste Management: Texts, Images and Sounds of Recent History (Filosofia 2009). Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University. He is also Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture. He is the series co-editor with Ryan Bishop for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press). His co-edited volume Photography off the Scale (2021) was also published by Edinburgh University Press. Parikka is the research director for the project Operative Images (2019-2023), funded by Czech Science Academy.

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