The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution

This essay suggests the digital as counter-revolution. Within the question of technology and labour (productive and reproductive), the realities of the so-called digital revolution invite a reflection on the extractive and oppressive logic of the fantasy of automation. In this context, technology is positioned as an assault on the social. Taking up a variety of digital devices and applications that have come to be known as machine vision, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, algorithmic serials, uncanny valley and others, this essay explores their genealogy within the history of art in the early modern period; a time of immense extractive racialisation and colonisation which provided vast machinic development in the field of image-making. This essay will draw parallels between the archaeology of various media and art history, in order to assess our neo-colonial digital frontiers.