Paper short abstract:

Less literature takes up the aspect that technologies become body extension and participate in the embodied engagement of tourist places. In this paper, I identify the ways in which digital photography become crucial in connecting food, its taste and its relationships with the knowledge of a place.

Paper long abstract:

The development of mobile media technologies has prompted rhizomatic networking of technologies and tourists and in turn brought about the knowing of a place with embodied imagination through various photographic practices.

Although more literature has been focusing on how photography is related to sociality through memory, less literature has taken up the aspect that technologies become body extension and participate in the embodied engagement of tourist places. Therefore, in this paper, I identify the ways in which media technologies become crucial in connecting food, its taste and its relationships with the knowledge of a place in Taiwanese context.

The rhizomatic interconnections between the human and nonhuman is enabled firstly by the technological designs and strengthened by technological practices which aim to overcome the gap between technological development and ordinary lives. Such kind of interconnections is best exemplified in the companionship of cameras and tourists. They perform a mutual embeddedness so that cameras become the body extension of tourists and join in tasting tourist places.

Photography should then be understood more with embodied imagination than the crystallisation of tourist experiences. Photography no longer is a distilled reflection upon journeys but involves, food, various elements that influence the experiences of tasting food, the knowledge of documenting food tasting process and various ways to present the photos. Such photographic practice distances tourist photos from viewers as on the one hand the proximity that photography obtains through homogenising tourist experiences is challenged by the heterogeneous process of tasting and photographing foods. On the other, to grasp the delightfulness or disgust of toured and photographed foods requires the working of embodied imagination to connect past experiences of tasting similar or that particular foods and the embodied process of approaching them.

The aforementioned hybrid of tourists and media technologies has therefore suggested that tourist photography nowadays does not only consist of visual appreciation and consumption but require the working of embodied imagination to connect absent, past experiences with the present.

Paper Download (588 KB)