Through a genealogy of photosensitive elements in media devices and artworks, this book investigates three dichotomies that impoverish debates and proposals in media art: material/immaterial, organic/machinic, and theory/practice. It combines historical and analytical approaches, through new materialism, media archaeology, cultural techniques and second-order cybernetics. Known media stories are reframed from an alternative perspective, elucidating photosensitivity as a metonymy to provide guidelines to art students, artists, curators and theoreticians - especially those who are committed to critical views of scientific and technological knowledge in aesthetic experimentations.

Graziele Lautenschlaeger, born in 1983, is a Brazilian media artist and researcher, who conducted her PhD at the Humboldt University in Berlin. As a multi-skilled agent in the field, she acts upon the challenges of grasping the symbolic, poetic and critical dimensions of technological devices. Her artistic and academic practice has been exhibited and acknowledged in Europe, South and North America.