Photomediations: A Reader

edited by Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska

Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept of photomediations that unites the twenty scholarly and curatorial essays collected here cuts across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. It also explores photography’s kinship with other media – and with us, humans, as media.

The term ‘photomediations’ brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘photomedia’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of data that produce photographic objects.

Photomediations: A Reader is part of a larger editorial and curatorial project called Photomediations: An Open Book, whose goal is to redesign a coffee-table book as an online experience. A version of this Reader also exists online in an open ‘living’ format, which means it can be altered, added to, mashed-up, re-versioned and customized. The Reader is published in collaboration with Europeana Space, and in association with Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney and Michael Wamposzyc.

Editor Bios

Kamila Kuc is Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also a curator and an experimental filmmaker. Co-editor (with Michael O’Pray) of The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film 1916-1989 (2014), Kuc has curated programmes of experimental film for international film festivals and venues (New Horizons Film Festival, Poland; Experiments in Cinema, US). Her short films have been screened widely.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist, curator, and – according to the ImageNet Roulette’s algorithm – a ‘mediatrix’. She is currently Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. The author of a number of books on art, philosophy and technology – including The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017) and Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014) and AIArt (Open Humanities Press, 2020) – she is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects, such as Photomediations (2016). Her own art practice engages with different kinds of image-based media.