Professor Andrew Dewdney

I am Andrew Dewdney, a research professor and Phd supervisor in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University. My research focuses upon visual culture and how digital technologies and computing are changing cultural value in the public realm. This has led to two specific, but related aspect of research. Firstly how photography and the photographic image are being transformed by computing and what impact this is having upon ways of seeing. Secondly, how the digitisation of collections and their online circulation has impacted the museum and heritage Culture.

I have been active in externally funded research since 2006 to the present. In 2006 I was the Principal Investigator for a major AHRC award for a collaborative, three year project with Tate Britain, entitled Tae Encounters; Britishness and Visual Cultures. I led a team of seven researchers in investigating how Tate conceptualised its audiences in respect of cultural barriers to access. This resulted in a major report to the Tate Trustees, an archive of research material on the Tate Website and the book, Critical Museology:Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (2013) published by Routledge. As a result of the research I have been invited to speak Internationally and contribute chapters on the subject to several books.
Tate Encounters led to two AHRC collaborative doctoral awards, one investigating Tate's understanding of audience in marketing terms, the other investigating Tate's understanding of online media, through its BMW sponsored 'Live' programme.
In 2012 I was the CI on a further AHRC funded project with Tate entitled, 'Modelling Cultural Value within New Media Cultures and Network Participation', which ran a public programme of specialist invited panels and produced an AHRC funded report in 2014.
As co-director of The Centre for the Study of the Networked Image I supervise collaborative PhDs, with the following organisations; Serpentine Galleries, The Photographers' Gallery, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Rhizome and Gasworks.
I have published two recent books. 'Forget Photography', with Goldsmiths/MIT Press in 2021. This book investigates post photography arguing that if we wish to understand the politics of representation in the post-photographic era, or more accurately, the image under the conditions of capitalist, computational reproduction, there is a necessary prerequisite, and that is the need to ‘forget photography’. The book is intended for a research and educational readership. The second title, 'The Networked Image in Post Digital Culture, is a co-authored an edited volume, with Routledge Press, published in 2022. The book brings together new research perspectives upon the networked image, looking at digitisation, machine vision, in-game photography, online curating, interfaces to digital born archives as focal points for understanding automation and its new world of operations. The book is concerned to understand how established habits of seeing, together with their assumptions about knowing, are challenged by computational culture. I am currently working with Professor Victoria Walsh at the Royal College of Art on a review of Tate Modern in the context of British Cultural Policy since 2000.