ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the camera is a central but unstable non-human actor in contemporary political protest. It shows the material and semiotic networks enabled and inhibited by the camera as the key semiotic inscription device that connects the corporeal materiality of political protest to the digital materiality of media content. Images of political conflicts have, in the past decade, been portrayed as increasingly essential to the logic and meaning of conflict. The chapter suggests that the camera, viewed as an inscription device, is central as it translates the 'reality' of the conflict into fragmented video-bites and snapshots, and makes it possible for these to traverse by digital media. The last aspect of the agency of the camera in relation to political protest that the chapter wish to points here is the indirect agency that stems from the anticipation of visual translations of political conflict.
