Mathew Fuller
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of a number of books including, ATM (2000); Behind the Blip: essays on the culture of software (2003); Media Ecologies: materialist energies in art and technoculture (2005), from which ‘The Camera That Ate Itself’ is an excerpted chapter; and he is editor of the forthcoming Software Studies, a lexicon.
Articles of Mathew Fuller
The Camera That Ate Itself
This text starts from Flusser’s description of the camera as an ‘apparatus’. Working with John Hilliard’s series of photographs A Camera Recording Its Own Condition (7 apertures, 10 speeds, 2 mirrors) a number of developments of the idea of the apparatus are made. The text discusses medial will to power, Marxist theories of the machinic, and conceptual art’s exploration of the materiality of informational systems. It draws upon reflexivity in Flusser’s formulation of the apparatus, in cybernetics, and in Foucault’s Nietzschean theories of knowledge.