25/09/2024
Call for Papers: “Placial” (Journal Issue) 
(Membrana Journal)
Abstract deadline: November 11th, 2024

“Placial” signals our connection, as well as our preoccupation, with places. It draws attention to how we relate to places in order to position ourselves in the world. Like “spatial”, which encapsulates the characteristics of space, “placial” unfolds place-bound qualities and place-based experiences. It is as much about our rootedness and embeddedness in places as it is about their deterritorialization and dematerialization. In other words, “placial” underscores how we make places and how places, in turn, shape us; it marks our individual relationality and collective positionality in a placeworld.”

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03/09/2024
Published: Co-edited book 
Virtual Photography: Artificial Intelligence, In-game, and Extended Reality (Transcript Publishing) 

While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualizations of photography, this book proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework, defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.

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03/09/2024
Published: Book Chapter 
‘Larval Memories: Spectralizing the Past through AI Photography’  (in Virtual Photography) 

Thanks to the virtualization of photography enabled by AI, we can now actualize a memory that has never existed factually. Previously, it was the indexicality of photography that authorized the reality of recollection; today, AI photography is erasing the boundary between the present and (memories of) the past. By feeding AI software with existing photographs, one can materialize a memory that is simultaneously authentic and inauthentic, and thus both legitimate and illegitimate in its embodiment of the past. This paradigm shift challenges not only our conception of recollection but also our very perception of photographic representation. It raises the question whether AI-generated photographs can present us with possible memories of the past. If so, what is the ontological status of an AI-generated memory whose nature is synthetic? Simply put, can we assign any mnemonic value to memories actualized through AI photography? To answer these questions, I will draw on the conjunction of memory and photography in the AI-generated photos of visual artist Alexey Yurenev.

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04/07/2024
Published: Journal Article
‘The Afloat Photographer: Corporeal Immersivity as an Instance of Sheer Inactivity‘ (Image & Narrative)

By discussing the bodily aspects of undersea immersion, this paper investigates the lived experiences of the photographer’s body in space. To do this, it draws on the work of phenomenological philosophers who have theorized the body, such as Edmund Husserl, Edward S. Casey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gaston Bachelard, showing how the body is simultaneously active and passive in its environs. To make this point tangible, it examines a recent photographic work by contemporary Dutch artist Roosmarijn Pallandt, who attempts to capture her bodily sensations by submerging herself underwater while taking photographs. The paper argues that her photographic practice augments the bilaterality of the phenomenal body: being both a physical body (Körper) that needs to hold together kinesthetically and a lived body (Leib) that can go further proprioceptively. Consequently, by employing phenomenology vis-à-vis Pallandt’s photographic practice, the author defines immersivity as being concurrently still and moving, static and dynamic, passive and active, that is: as being inactive in space. Following this line of argument, he puts forward that the bodily immersivity is an instance of sheer inactivity.

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09/11/2023
Published: Journal Article
‘Gesturality: An Ethico-Aesthetic of Anxiety in Late Photography’
(Literature & Aesthetics)

By examining the iconised photographs of the COVID-19 pandemic, published under the heading of The Great Empty by the New York Times in March 2020, this article explores the aesthetic operations and ethical implications of representing anxiety through photographing desolate landscapes. To do so, it situates these images within the genre of late photography, also known as aftermath photography, to discuss how emptiness can function as a surrogate for anxiety. First, by foregrounding the unique temporality of the landscape genre in photography, it examines the aesthetic dimension of seeing deserted places in photographs. By shifting its focus from the image to its caption, it then discusses how the caption of such photographs can interpolate an ethical dimension onto them. Finally, by drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of “gesture,” the article puts forward that the combination of aestheticized photographs with ethicised captions in The Great Empty expresses anxiety as a mode of gesturality: a sui generis communicational mode that simultaneously galvanizes and paralyzes the viewer.

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25/07/2023
Published: Journal Article 
‘Photography and Memory’
(The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Memory Studies)

The affinity between photography and memory is rather axiomatic: We take photos to preserve our memories. This formulation considers photographs as aide-mémoire and photography as a mnemotechnique. Such a basic analogy, however, falls short in explaining the spatiotemporality and materiality of photography and overlooks the mediated aspects of memory in narrating the past. The difficulty with describing the conjunction of memory and photography lies in the fact that neither of them has a static essence: Both remembering and photography are inherently dynamic processes.