Best regards to Yanai Toister - Head of The Unit of Histoty and Philosophy - for his new book "Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine" (Published by Intellect / University of Chicago Press)

This book introduces two conceptual models of photography: the Turin Shroud and the universal Turing machine. The Turin Shroud inspires a discussion on photography’s frequently acclaimed “ontological privilege”, which has conditioned an understanding of photographs as a sui-generis breed of images wherein pictorial representation is coextensive with human vision.

This is then contrasted with the discussion on the universal Turing machine, which integrates photography into a framework of media philosophy and algorithmic art. Here, photography becomes more than just the present-day sum of its depiction traditions, devices, and dissemination networks. Rather, it is archetypical of multiple systems of abstraction and classification, and various other symbolic processes of transformation.

Yanai Toister is an artist, writer and educator whose work focuses on re-conceptualizing photography within the broader contexts of media arts and computation.