The Feedback and Noise of Hiroko Komatsu's Photographic Materialities

Abstract

This article explores the dynamic forms of positive feedback found in Hiroko Komatsu's 2017 photography installation, The Execution of Personal Autonomy. This article details how Komatsu's installation generates an intensive interface among photographed materials and photochemical materialities that constitute a noise-like interface akin to the creative production of feedback in Noise music. As a redistribution of affective attunements that inhere within the urban landscape, this article discusses how Komatsu's photographic forms of feedback offer an evolving site for grasping, and potentially reimagining, the reproductive processes of capitalist society. Komatsu's photographic praxis reveals a novel understanding of photography's own role as a material and affective “infrastructure” critical to the reproductive relations of neoliberal and state capitalism.