Click, Whirr, Jam: Architecture in and through the Photographic Slide-Lecture

Before PowerPoint, before Keynote, the 35mm photographic slide was the technology de rigueur for the didactic transmission and reception of architecture. As teaching institutions decommission their analogue slide collections, we face an interregnum in which slides are not quite junk but
still not quite precious. This is a critical moment to explore the distinctive qualities of the medium and the social practices it has been a part of. In this essay we loosely apply the notion of ‘affordances’ as described by sociologist
Jenny L. Davis, to consider how analogue and digital slide-lectures differently ‘request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse and allow particular lines of action and social dynamics’.1 In doing so we speculate on what has been lost and what gained in the socio-technical shift from analogue to digital slide-lectures in architecture.