SITUATION #130

In today’s network of seeing machines, which includes CCTV cameras, drone media and satellite imaging devices, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and vision. Yet from its very beginning, the photographic medium has relied on the execution of a nonhuman, mechanical element. In her video essay commissioned for SITUATIONS/Posthuman, artist and writer Joanna Zylinska explores the eponymous concept from her recent monograph, Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). Her essayistic montage combines video footage shot with her Samsung Galaxy phone camera worn on her neck in densely populated urban locations with the stills taken with an Autographer, an automated ‘intelligent’ wearable camera. Experimenting with immersive forms of image capture and embodied perception, Zylinska’s concept of nonhuman vision provides an alternative vantage point, allowing us to unsee ourselves from our species-based parochialism.

More by Joanna Zylinska: joannazylinska.net