Research on the transformation of the photographic image affected by digital culture. Creation of a new series of contemporary artworks based on historical techniques

One of the essential tasks of PHELETYPIA will be to make use of the gained findings to tackle the questions modern society is facing in the age of the digital. There, the distinction between original and copy has become obsolete. By exploring these questions, the artistic research approach expands PHELETYPIA’s horizon to include the humanities. More precisely, it connects the practical know how that the project sets out with questions of cultural history. These questions concern the meaning of the first chapter in the history of photography for the latest one that is currently being written, that is the connection of digital photography with the digital so-called social media. In other words, the artistic research addresses the societal dimension of the project, asking how the historical findings may be interpreted and what they can teach us about our times.

This part of PHELETYPIA aims to create artefacts that not only serve as examples through which to discuss these issues, but to stimulate such discourse on the role of digital photography in contemporary society. The theoretical backdrop for this is Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and the pictorial or iconic turn already proclaimed in the 1990s by W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm. Some of the issues to be addressed are the nature of networked photography, developments in vernacular photography and social media, photography and the digital archive, and the curation and exhibition of networked photography.