School of Social Science and Innovation

The digitalisation of photography has often been interpreted as a process of dematerialization. However, empirical studies show that the material dimension is still fundamental to digital photographic practices. By accepting the argument that digitalisation prompted a reconfiguration of photography's materiality, rather than its disappearance, this article examines a phenomenon that has developed on the periphery of, but relating to, digital photography: the reappropriation of analogue technology in the context of " serious " amateurism. By using data collected during a study on the reappropriation of Polaroid technology, this contribution traces some patterns in the reintegration of materiality within amateur practice, showing how photographers have redefined the role of objects as a reaction to the spread of digital photography.

The article focuses on the reconfiguration of analogue instant photography (Polaroid-like) in the digital age. Drawing on STS literature on the mutual shaping of users and technology, and on anthropology and the history of photography, it adopts the concept of " photo-object " to discuss how the digitalization of photography stimulated a change in the cultural significance of materiality in the context of aspirational amateur photography , thus showing how this triggered a redefinition of instant photography as a more authentic form of aspirational practice. The article is based on empirical data collected during a multi-sited ethnography conducted in Italy between 2014 and 2015. By focusing on Polaroid's " objectness " and its dialectical tension with the immateriality of digital photography, the paper highlights an increasingly common process of circulation between analogue and digital photographic environments and argues that this process of circulation can be conceived in terms of a " remediation " process between analogue and digital practices.

“Critical making” is an umbrella term for various distinctive practices that link traditional scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to forms of material engagement in order to explore new ways of studying the relationship between technologies and social life by bridging the gap between physical and conceptual exploration (Ratto, 2011). The aim of critical making is “to articulate and develop novel modes of intervention into dominant systems of information exchange and knowledge generation” that “focus on assembling rather than deconstructing within the modern technological society” (Ratto, Wilie and Jalbert, 2014: 85). In order to reach this goal, critical making practices “theoretically and pragmatically connect two modes of engagement with the world that are often held separate - critical thinking, typically understood as conceptually and linguistically based, and physical “making,” goal-based material work” (Ratto, 2011: 253). Such practices can thus be conceived as engagements between design and social research, implying the exploration of societal issues and social theories through the fabrication of material, interactive prototypes.
Drawing upon the critical making approach, we have developed a project called “Game of ANT”, which focuses on the fabrication of a series of Arduino-based interactive devices reproducing the behaviour of actor-networks within the socio-technical world.  “Game of ANT” adopts the Latourian vision of technoscience as war (Latour, 1987) and physically embodies this idea by proposing a sort of war game during which participants play the roles of human or non-human actors engaging with the dynamics of socio-technical life. Using pre-assembled and coded components, participants construct and play with simple, electronic actors/actants that are able to associate and dissociate with each other, thus forming multiple actor-networks that compete for gaining power within an imagined socio-technical world. To win the game, an actor-network needs to crystallize and become a “black box”. The working of the game thus reproduces the basic principles of actor-network theory (ANT) and “translates” the sociology of translation into a gaming experience through which scholars and students can conceptually-materially engage with ANT, hence exploring and approaching it from novel points of view.

Bibliography

Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Ratto, M. (2011) “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life”, The Information Society, 27: 252–260.

Ratto, M., Wilie, S.A. and Jalbert, K. (2014) “Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program”, The Information Society, 30: 85–95.

The article aims at investigating the persistence and comeback of old media technologies (phenomena we define, in short, ‘retromedia’) by developing a distinctive theoretical approach named retromedia-in-practice and based on practice theory. Far from being abandoned and forgotten, many old media devices and artefacts (such as vinyl records, cassette tapes, analogue photographic cameras, early videogames and brick mobile phones, to mention just a few notable examples) are nowadays readopted by young generations and niche media subcultures. However, most of the existing literature focusing on these cases has limits and shortfalls, resulting in a partial and misleading understanding of these phenomena: scholars and theorists often put at the centre the cultural fascination for vintage objects and the nostalgia effect; other studies rely on a taken-for-granted distinction between old and new media; the relational and processual nature of media change is rarely addressed; and in general, research lacks a framework capable of adequately integrating symbolic processes with material and technological features. In order to cope with these shortfalls, the article adopts the approach of practice theory, which enables to focus not on the media themselves, but on the practices associated with them. After presenting the distinctive framework of analysis, we exemplify our approach by analysing three different cases coming from music (vinyl records), photography (Polaroid-like instant photography) and videogaming (the ‘consolization’ of old arcade games). These case studies rely on original empirical data coming from authors’ qualitative research. The article concludes by arguing that a shift from considering retromedia as objects or discourses to retromedia-in-practice allows to both address the processual nature of retromedia and propose an interpretation that keeps together media materiality, their meanings and also the embodied activities and behaviours that are attached to them.

Over the last years, we have seen an increasing interest in the overlapping areas of STS and Media Studies towards examining the multifaceted vulnerabilities of technical objects. Within STS, research on maintenance and repair practices has been attracting growing attention since the works of Susan Leigh Star (1999) and Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000), which set the ground for the study of the vulnerability of sociotechnical networks. A number of contributions have then addressed issues relating to obsolescence and fragility, durability and tinkering, adaptation and re-use, to the extent that a distinctive interdisciplinary field of inquiry-Maintenance and repair studies (MRS)-has emerged. Among the valuable insights offered by this field of inquiry is the transformative power of moments of vulnerability, which becomes evident when we consider how innovation emerges from obsolescence, maintenance and repair, and how new sociomaterial, ethical and political orders, as well as new geographies of responsibility are established through the practices that deal with technical vulnerability. Similarly, in Media Studies, growing attention has been paid to the to the ever-shifting relations between "old" and "new" media, to the suppressed, the outmoded and the technological dead ends in media history-see, for instance, Huhtamo and Parikka's Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011)-to how "old" media may survive in residual conditions and be reactivated or reinvented in multiple ways (see Acland's Residual Media [2007]), and to how allegedly "dead media" can be materially revived by a politically infomed art method which Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz notoriously described as "hardware hacking" (2012). Way beyond the strictly historiographic level, the discussion on these topics raised new social concerns, problematising the effects of the planned obsolescence pursued by commercial industry as well as the material aspects of mass-produced technology-which enhanced a focus on the conditions of hardware circulation, accumulation, disposal, decomposition, recycling and renewal also from an ecological angle. This growing awareness that the study of media change should include their life cycles as material objects, reflects a more general interest in taking into account the moments of transformation in the social biographies of media technologies which often correspond to their critical moments of vulnerability. We aim to enable a fruitful discussion between exponents from the fields of STS and Media Studies concerning the manifold processes of transformation fostered by or related to the vulnerabilities of technical objects over the course of their biographies. Thus, we call for papers which address, among others, questions about differences in understandings and vocabularies as well as explorations of empirical, methodological, and theoretical overlappings.