An exploration of the virtual, material, and ethical reverberations of digital capture through the lens of new materialist rhetoric.

Through case studies spanning volumetric video in documentaries, motion capture in videogames, in-game photography, and pro-social deepfakes, Cindy Poremba reveals unique negotiations between epistemic cultures, materialities, and capture’s own rhetorical agency.

The holographic recording, the mocap performance, the in-game photograph, the deepfake—all involve elements that appear “captured” from the actual world. But they are complicated images—combining capture, creation, and computational processes that are often understood as distinct. Create and capture modes are rapidly converging, mutating into hybrid forms where it is impossible to untangle recorded and constructed elements. But despite this destabilization, capture, as a recognizable mode of technology-infused representation, persists. Creators maintain a vested interest in the affordances of capture, and emerging practices take advantage of capture’s new transformability. Capture matters, because of the ways it is entangled with articulations of realities and the ways it is used to understand media practices. But capture is increasingly assembled in diffuse contexts, drawing upon different agencies, histories, technologies, epistemologies, and practices. We might view an animation vivified by motion data, a face generated from an array of captured faces, or a photographer taking pictures within videogames: and in each case, see capture assembled and understood in distinct ways.

Ultimately, Capture Matters advocates for tactical envisioning that expands who gets to shape capture technologies and practices, arguing that by critically engaging these entanglements, we might radically renew our relationship with captured images.