When We Were Digital: Critical Archaeology of the First Digital Turn

The forceful spread in recent years of an “Algorithmic regime” (Uricchio 2020) in almost every aspect of our daily lives has sparked a lively debate, often marked by alarmist and nostalgic positions, but also by a certain eagerness to label new “turns,” provide definitions, and predict future scenarios. Yet beneath the “futuristic” veneer of terminology and scenarios, the most common arguments used to describe this supposed “Second Digital Turn” (Carpo 2017) are, upon closer inspection (Langdon Winner 1977), the same arguments that accompanied the social, cultural, psychological, and emotional processing of all the major twentieth-century shifts in scientific knowledge and technological development—especially when driven by more or less intelligent forms of automation of the “machine.” And as in the past, today too the fields of visual and audiovisual creation and production, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of our relationship with images, are particularly apt to bear witness to change in especially eloquent ways.

This special issue arises, in some respects, as a “reaction” against the discursive practices that daily surround the presence, uses, and products of “artificial intelligence” (an extremely ambiguous term which, as Hito Steyerl suggests, should rather be replaced with the phrase “machine learning-based tools,” 2025). It reacts in particular by proposing a return to the first Digital Turn—the one that, in the early 1990s, globally marked a radical change of paradigm—not simply to distinguish between forms of continuity or rupture, fragmentation or reorganization (or to question the very hypothesis of a first and a second turn), but rather to recover and reread, in all its complexity, the debate triggered by that crucial transition. We are convinced that this debate may prove valuable in helping us better focus on the present, enrich our understanding of the key issues that shape it, and avoid overestimating what is new.

After all, just as the digital did in the 1990s (Elsaesser 2016), artificial intelligence today seems to represent, more than a mere technology, a “cultural metaphor” for talking more broadly about the present and the future (crises, ruptures, transitions). And as in that earlier case, the domain of visual and audiovisual production appears, from many perspectives, the most exposed and problematic—and for this very reason the most strategic: “It is only when digitization generates images that something akin to a cultural crisis appears to occur, with exaggerated claims being made by some, and acute anxieties being voiced by others” (ibid.). If this special issue orients itself toward visuality—in all its dimensions: cultural, social, anthropological, technological, creative—it is therefore not merely for disciplinary reasons. Let’s instead use the visual “as a conduit for asking bigger questions about our own situation in the world” (Zylinska 2023).

With regard to the first Digital Turn—understood therefore also as a Pictorial Turn—and to the complex, contradictory debate that accompanied the spread of new images and a new visual culture (technologies, devices, forms of knowledge, languages, forms, practices, and media environments), it seems particularly promising today to reconsider certain key nodes. First among them—once again invoking Elsaesser’s contribution—is the profound crisis of the “indexical status of (moving) images” and the consequent crisis this triggered in “held beliefs about representation and visualization, and many of the discourses—critical, scientific, or aesthetic—based on or formulated in the name of the indexical in our culture.” Equally crucial, problematic, and unprecedented was the rearticulation of the relationship between scientific visualization, artistic imagination, social representation, media history, and technical vision (one need only think, for example, of the spread of a culture—not merely a technology—of the “virtual” and the “augmented”), as well as that between visual production and political, military, and financial power (exemplified by W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of the biopicture and Harun Farocki’s operational images). But from the early 1990s onward, it was above all the fields of cinema and photography—at a time when “personal” and “social” visuality was still far from being established, though already foreshadowed—that prompted the most original and (still today) productive reflections. These were divided between those who viewed the digital transition as the end of an era (Casetti, Batchen), as a “false revolution” (Belton, Marra), or as an inevitable and revealing passage (Aumont). In particular, it was in relation to the nature, production, circulation, and consumption of cinematic and photographic images that primacies (especially cultural and aesthetic ones), orthodoxies, and values (such as realism and truth) were first called into question, while new keywords (convergence, remediation, relocation…) took hold and suffixes (post-cinema, post-photography) proliferated, collectively suggesting the entry of images into a new regime of instability, vitality, and above all autonomy (Fontcuberta, Mitchell).

This issue aims to promote a reflection/reconstruction of the complexity of the first Digital Turn, understood as a metaphor for an anthropological and epistemological transformation of which the current “algorithmic condition” appears at once as continuation, deviation, extreme development, intensification, contraction, and epilogue. The goal, however, is not comparison per se, but rather a rethinking and rereading of the set of discourses, interpretations, hypotheses, and definitions through which the first disruptive process of digitization was elaborated, as well as the very idea of a “turn,” its scope, and its impact.

Accordingly, the issue seeks to collect contributions primarily, though not exclusively, focused on the following themes:

• Cultural history of the notion of the digital.
• Analysis of advertising communication around new technologies (computers, data and image-processing software, digital video cameras and cameras, etc.).
• History of digital technology, companies, and brands.
• Debate in specialist journals and the general press.
• Rhetorics and philosophies of the “new,” with particular reference to media.
• The social and cultural repositioning of cinema and photography.
• Theoretical debate on the image, photographic and cinematic.
• Digital remediations of analog culture and technology.
• Debate regarding the question of realism.
• Film and photography theory.
• Digital cinema and cinema in digital form.
• Reflection on the notions of the post-photographic, live action, and animation.
• The inclusion of computer science in debates on cinema and visual culture.
• Analysis of “post-” culture.
• High and low definition between technology and aesthetics.

 

Bibliographical References

Aumont, Jacques (2012). Que reste-t-il du cinéma ? Paris: Vrin.

Balbi, Gabriele (2022). L’ultima ideologia. Breve storia della rivoluzione digitale. Bari–Roma: Laterza.

Batchen, Geoffrey (2001). Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Baudrillard, Jean (1987). The Evil Demon of Images. Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney.

Belton, John (2002). “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution.” October, 100: 98–114.

Boehm, Gottfried (2009). La svolta iconica. Roma: Meltemi.

Carpo, Mario (2017). The Second Digital Turn. Design Beyond Intelligence. Cambridge–London: The MIT Press.

Elsaesser, Thomas (2016). Film History as Media Archaeology. Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Fontcuberta, Joan (2018). La furia delle immagini. Note sulla postfotografia. Torino: Einaudi.

Friedberg, Anne (2000). “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change.” In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 438–452. London: Arnold.

Gaudreault, André and Philippe Marion (2013). La fin du cinéma ? Un média en crise à l’ère du numérique. Paris: Armand Colin.

Grusin, Richard (2017). Radical Mediation. Cinema, estetica e tecnologie digitali. Cosenza: Luigi Pellegrini Editore.

Lewis, Jon (ed.) (2001). The End of Cinema As We Know It. American Film in the Nineties. New York–London: New York University Press.

Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge–London: The MIT Press.

Marra, Claudio (2006). L’immagine infedele. La falsa rivoluzione della fotografia digitale. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.

Mitchell, W.J. Thomas (2017). Pictorial Turn. Saggi di cultura visuale. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.

Mitchell, William J. (1992). The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Negroponte, Nicholas (1995). Being Digital. New York: Knopf.

Quintana, Àngel (2008). Virtuel? À l’ère du numérique, le cinéma est toujours le plus réaliste des arts. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma.

Winner, Langdon (1977). Autonomous Technology. Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge–London: The MIT Press.

 

Deadlines and Instructions

An abstract of 300–500 words (together with a short biography – max 100 words – of the author) should be submitted by April 15, 2026 to luca.malavasi@unige.it [subject: Cinergie].

Notification of acceptance will be sent by April 20, 2026

If the proposal is accepted, the article must be submitted by July 15, 2026, must not exceed 6,000 words in length, and may include images (max 6) and links.

Authors are required to clarify permissions and publication rights for any iconographic or archival documents included in the publication.

Articles will be subject to double-blind peer review.

Publication of issue: December 2026