Tailoring Authenticity: A Media Post-Mortem of the Daguerreotype through the NFT

Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published. This essay attempts to test the ways 19th century spectatorship is viewed and interpreted in contemporary artistic practices by exploring the impact of the early decades of photography through the lens of ongoing developments in contemporary visual technology. The central question is: how might a contemporaneous object like the NFT, or non-fungible token, allow us to think through a historical object such as the daguerreotype? The first half of the essay outlines the conceptual grounds for this analysis, through a critical reading of Errki Huhtamo’s ‘symptomatic’ approach to the practice of media archeology. In the second half of the essay, a new methodology – based on Slavoj Žižek’s ‘short-circuit’ comparative model – is proposed and applied as what I term a “media postmortem” and its supporting concept of “symptomatic plasticity”. The broader aims of the essay are twofold: (1) propose a new approach to the study of art historical phenomenon that, going further than media archeology, interrogates a chronological chain of events with a view to identifying repeated structural patterns, symptomatic eruptions that open up a circular rather than linear conception of (art historical) time; (2) map a new direction for the study of images by way of a more intense, diagnostically acute, focus on the question of materiality.