Conférence "Dispositifs"

After its technical formation, photography passed through three historical phases: the snapshot, the cinematograph, and the database. These moments reflect distinct passages of the relation between image and world that can be summed up in the distinction between continuum and discrete objects. Eco-criticism intends to break down the discrete by insisting on the mutual connectivity of everything. But does this network model represent the imposition of a universal identity on the contingent non-identity of the world? The encounter with texts and practices on which criticism depends may be impossible in a time when the database begins to match the inexhaustible complexity and scale of the real world. An enquiry into landscape, as formed in the interaction of human and natural forces and as genre of media art, may offer a portal into the dialectic of universal and particular at work in the history of the photographic image.