ABSTRACT
Once apparently marginal, the ramifications of questions of mobility in the conceptualisation, analysis and evaluation of visual culture continue to multiply. Across the disciplines that concern themselves with what is viewed and what is made to be viewed—from the history of art, media studies, photography, film and video studies to anthropology, ethnology and ethnography—the range of questions concerning activities of viewing continues to extend, with questions of the mobility of spectators playing a significant part. It might be thought that this range of questions is fundamentally affected if not conditioned by the recent emergence of mobile viewing technologies, and it is part of the interest of this collection that it aims to respond to this sort of speculation. There is a growing literature that answers to Nikos Papastergiadis’ observation that the “multiple effects” of new technologies have been “an under-researched field in migration studies”, for instance. 1 This collection responds by suggesting that, with the evident pluralisation of modes of transmission and reception of images offered by such mobile technologies, there is an opportunity and, more, a need to rethink the implications of mobility in viewing. As many have suggested, across the syncopated fields of the study of visual culture, if also in the so-called hard sciences, viewing is not to be taken simply as an ideal, stable and distanced observing of ideal, stable and distanced objects, but is rather a series of activities, differently undertaken and differently motivated, that is implicated in what it views. If viewing is not this sort of objectivist observing, which is rather a theoreticist fantasy of immobility of subject and/or object, the relations between mobility and viewing are in need of better axioms.
