The Aesthetics of Posthuman Experience: The Presence of Journalistic, Citizen-generated and Drone Imagery

Abstract

In this article I argue that the meaning of presence in journalism is taking on new forms as the photographer, bystander or citizen journalist may be absent in body but remains present in digital form and interconnected with that technology.  Using the reference point of new materialist concepts this entanglement is shown through what I will call the aesthetics of posthuman experience. It then proceeds to undertake a posthuman reading of three videos posted online between 2009 and 2012 of demonstrations in Greece, Iran and Poland arguing these make manifest two key lines of thinking in new materialist theories: the nature-culture continuum and the material-semiotic.  Technology, hereby, is endowed with subjectivity in continuous relation with the viewer. Employed by citizens, such drone or digital aesthetics of posthuman experience use a more nuanced mediascape beyond ‘objectivity’ and ‘journalistic truth’ for their frame of reference and for defining knowledge and reality.