The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture

This collection examines how the networked image establishes new social practices for the user and presents new challenges for cultural practitioners engaged in making, curating, teaching, exhibiting, archiving and preserving born-digital objects.

The mode of vision and imaging, established through photography over the previous two centuries, has and continues to be radically reconfigured by a hybrid of algorithms, computing, programmed capture and display devices, and an array of online platforms. The image under these new conditions is filtered, fluid, fleeting, permeable, mobile and distributed and is changing our ways of seeing. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of research conducted at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) and its collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery over the last ten years. The book's contributors investigate radical changes in the meanings and values of hybridised media in socio-technical networks and speak to the creeping automation of culture through applications of AI, social media platforms and the financialisation of data.

This interdisciplinary collection draws upon media and cultural studies, art history, art practice, photographic theory, user design, animation, museology and computer science as a way of making sense of the specific cultural consequences of the rapid succession of changes in image technologies and to bring the story up to date. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of visual culture, media studies and photography.

Andrew Dewdney is Co-director and Co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, and Professor of Educational Media at London South Bank University. He has written and lectured widely on new media and museology. His most recent book Forget Photography was published in 2021.

Katrina Sluis is Associate Professor and Head of Photography & Media Arts at the School of Art & Design, Australian National University. She is a founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image and was previously Senior Curator (Digital Programmes) at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.