ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an analysis of how our phone cameras produce “photographs” by stacking and combining pre-recorded pictures and how they enter the stream of networked images. From Yuk Hui’s “protensive machines” via Zizek’s famous toilet metaphor to the black hole, this chapter speaks about the role of technology and science in image making and how this role can never be mistaken for innocent. According to Wooldridge, pre-capture embodies what the philosopher Yuk Hui calls protention: a term used by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl to describe the mind's capacity to anticipate, project and sense what is to come. During a period of several decades after the German physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895, radiation evolved from a source of public fascination and scientific acclaim to a source of widespread public fear and scientific controversy.
