As an early theorist of cyberfeminism – a discourse coalescing in the late 1980s and early 1990s around feminist reexaminations of information and communication technologies – Canadian artist Nancy Paterson’s practice took shape within and against the commercialization of the internet, a situation she addressed explicitly in her scholarly work in information policy studies toward the end of her life. This paper analyzes her 1990s networked installation Stock Market Skirt as shaped by Paterson’s understanding of the political commitments and possibilities of cyberfeminism, set against an archetypical image of the “cyberfemme”: seductive, uncanny, and doll-like, though technologically adept and adaptable. Stock Market Skirt links the movements of a motorized dress with real-time stock data mined from financial websites, critiquing feminism’s altered relationship to contemporary capitalism. The work manifests a feminized “flexible personality,” an image of neoliberalism’s decentralization of power from the state to the network, presenting it as the flip side of cyberfeminism’s attempt to liberate subjectivity from static conceptions of identity. In this way, Stock Market Skirt connects flows of capital with attributes of gender performance, prefiguring algorithmic, image-based reinforcement of contemporary gender ideals, effects of the tech industry’s efficiency in linking behavioral data to ad targeting.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the talented British photographers Dora and Agnes Bulwer travelled to sites of historical significance throughout Italy. Their photographs reveal their fascination with the Italian countryside, its people, and the remains of Italy’s past. As members of the British and American Archaeological Society of Rome and friends of leading archaeologists Rodolfo Lanciani and Thomas Ashby, the sisters photographed landscapes, towns, archaeological remains, and historic monuments. Many of these sites have since been irrevocably transformed, primarily due to development in post-unitarian Italy. As such, the photographs are now significant cultural, environmental, and archaeological heritage records. This article investigates the working relationship between Ashby, Lanciani, and the Bulwer sisters (particularly Dora), and demonstrates the high regard these prominent archaeologists had for the sisters and their photographs. It argues that Dora and Agnes intended to create visual documentary records of Italy’s urban, rural, and archaeological landscapes, and highlights the vital photographic fieldwork conducted by women in Italy during the Victorian era. The article addresses the fact that, despite Dora and Agnes’ important visual contribution to archaeological and cultural landscape studies in post-unitarian Italy, their photographs have been largely, and unjustly, underexplored by subsequent archaeologists and cultural landscape historians.

In this paper, we revisit Johanna Drucker’s question, “Is there a digital art history?” – posed a decade ago in this journal – in the light of the emergence of large-scale, transformer-based vision models. While more traditional forms of neural network have long been part of digital art history, and digital humanities projects have recently begun to use transformer models, their epistemic implications and methodological affordances have not yet been systematically understood. We focus our analysis on two main aspects that, together, seem to suggest a coming paradigm shift towards a “digital” art history in Drucker’s sense. The visual-cultural repertoire newly encoded in large-scale vision models has an outsized effect on digital art history. The inclusion of significant numbers of non-photographic images allows for the extraction and automation of a much wider gamut of visual logics. Large-scale vision models have “seen” huge swathes of online visual culture, biased towards an exclusionary visual canon; they continuously solidify and concretize this canon through their already widespread application in all aspects of digital life. We use a large-scale vision model to propose a new critical methodology that acknowledges the epistemic entanglement of neural network and dataset. We propose that, in reading a corpus of visual culture through a neural network, we are always also doing the reverse. Digital art history is here, but not in the way we expected: rather, it has emerged as a crucial route to understanding, exposing, and critiquing the visual ideology of contemporary AI models.

Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence have made photographic manipulation easy and seamless. In thinking about the ways in which artificial intelligence has altered the truth-value of photography, this article explores the importance of situating the current debates over fake news and photographic manipulation in a larger historical context. More specifically, it suggests that it is equally important to understand both the inner workings of artificial intelligence as well as the foundations of indexicality that warrant the truth-value of both analog film and video. In the era of analog flexible film then, the negative was often seen as a source of truth, whereas the positive was understood as being manipulatable and manipulated. In the age of digital photography, the idea of a digital negative has come to articulate yet another attempt to anchor the visual in a regime of truth. RAW formats are now seen as comparable to an analog negative. These RAW formats are developed in an Adobe software application called Lightroom rather than in a physical darkroom which facilitated the making of an analog positive image out of an analog negative. The article concludes with an appeal for the importance of teaching both current and obsolete methods of media making in order to foster critical visual literacy and argues that the darkroom has become yet again a crucial place for rediscovering the power of photography to expose both its authenticity and its malleability.

The multi-media research collective, The Preserving Machine, was initiated through collaborative discussion in response to Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story of the same name. This article considers Dick’s story in light of current forms of image-making apparatus, specifically in relation to photogrammetry. Dick’s protagonist, Doc. Labyrinth’s design and ambitions of The Preserving Machine to safeguard cultural heritage in the light of ecological catastrophe resonates with the application of 3D imaging technologies in cultural heritage industries. However, his positionality is problematic as it both highlights the nature of preservation as being potentially extractive and does not account for the agency of the machine in the process. The text foregrounds the ways in which current computational forms of photogrammetry are conceived in the humanities, with reference to the language of post-cinema, gaming and, most importantly, photography. The argument is structured to mirror the digital production pipeline of photogrammetric processes to highlight the problematic industry rhetoric claiming objectivity, accuracy and automation. This methodology thus deals with issues surrounding the choice and capture of data input, consideration of the black-boxed processing and mutative automation and expectations surrounding reproducibility. The authors propose that current forms of conceptualising photogrammetry are insufficient to account for these hybridised digital image forms solely through the language of index, likeness and simulacrum associated with photographic theoretical dialogue. Instead, these 3D images need to be considered relationally to wider assemblages of meanings that are less readily understood through singular, coherent theoretical readings.

Early forms of photography play a unique role in establishing an Anthropocenean consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century that witnesses human relationships with nature as exclusively transactional, by centring its focus on the violent displacement of people from their contexts simultaneous to the violent displacement of objects from their contexts. Such practices of perception were co-constituted with other forms of excessive violence that eventually became unique to the geography of the American West. By photographing Native Americans as objects, white American male photographers were able to transform them into relics, and in so doing, cast the Indigenous cultures from which they were drawn as fundamentally dead, turning the enemy figuratively into the past, and practically into oblivion to the degree that it is possible for institutions to confine them to ‘natural’ history through the twinned force of taking both object and image from them. It was, therefore, not so much a case of designating colonised populations, as designing them aesthetically so that they fit in a material sense of belonging to an order greater than themselves. Violence in this sense becomes a relational project to how we understand mankind itself and its origins in a racial science that allowed for this living body of photography to enter in and make itself known as both a witness and a trace of the past generating whole environments through which such systems of knowledge could and did endure to our present moment.

This paper is a practical and theoretical look at the notion of “emojis as civic duty.” I frame the discussion in terms of an “emoji code” that goes beyond an evolution of natural languages to integrate more fundamentally into specific experiences, particular communities, and a networked regime of images. I introduce Stuart Hall’s “circuit of culture” as an alternative theoretical frame to prevailing linguistic research that investigates only the form and function of emojis. Hall endures because he helps us to recognize a politics of the image beyond form and function, signaling an interplay between consumption and production through live-streaming media. I make theoretical connections to others who have thought about media as essentially political communication. Finally, I offer a preliminary analysis of “emojis as civic duty” in the case of an esports champion. I conclude by suggesting where future study is necessary for a more robust notion of a “Gamer Citizen” to take shape.

As part of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries in London, ethnographic photographs of non-Western objects were taken at the British Museum and interspersed amongst Surrealist artwork. Ten photographs in total were used, spanning Solomon Island Fish Coffins to Congolese Nail Fetishes. The article analyses these photographs as sculptures and in terms of their significance to the 1936 exhibition display and their wider impact upon the Surrealist movement. It reveals that Paul Nash and Hugh Sykes Davies were responsible for the selection of the non-Western objects to be photographed. At the exhibition opening André Breton gave a transformative lecture, ‘Limites Non-Frontières du Surréalisme [Borderless limits of Surrealism]’ which conjoined notions of cosmopolitanism and the spirit. The inclusion of the British Museum photographs was clearly intended to aesthetically mirror the content of Breton’s speech. This article thus postulates that the Surrealists intended to propagate a cosmopolitan method of curation through a transcendence of taxonomic display mechanisms common to ethnographic museum environments, such as the very one the photographs were taken in. Moreover, the British Museum photographs chosen by the Surrealists all have religious and spiritual connotations. Such embodied manifestations are a particular brand of border crossing that should also be considered an element of a burgeoning discourse surrounding international Surrealism. Consequently, the oft-cited impact of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) upon Surrealist ethnography, which denounces the totem as a precursor to religious belief and madness, is marginalised.

There is still no consensus on what (or when and where) the periphery is/has been. The centre–periphery opposition, criticised for its hierarchical and binary nature, has frequently been mapped onto the West–East divide, and scholars have questioned the applicability of the term from what it seems like a Eurocentric point of view. These notes reflect on the concept of periphery and its historiography, seeking to disentangle the periphery from its exclusive (and primarily geographical) association with the centre(s), using it instead to undercut the categories that have variously shaped and constrained the art historical discipline. It proposes the re-imagining of the study of the periphery as a fluid set of practices, with a strong association to fundamentally unequal power configurations, while assuming a wide range of methodological and theoretical positions.