The prototype: presencing the immaterial

Abstract

This article explores the social effects and materiality of the prototype. Three diverse cultural contexts and prototyping technologies are examined: the early Christian prototype in the Byzantine iconographic tradition; the rise of rapid prototyping in 20th-century industry; and the emergence of rapid manufacturing in the 21st century. Despite evident technological differences and complexities and divergent cultural contexts, the author argues that all three technologies work in a similar way through varying concepts of the prototype to produce and presence the immaterial and thereby create novel forms of social and material life. He shows how the prototype, as a concept, functions to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles of time, space and the material, whether through the creation of the Christian subject and the ancestor of Euro-American notions of the universalizing humanist subject or through the radically disruptive effects of rapid manufacturing (or three-dimensional printing) within late capitalism and with it the fraught emergence of the neo-liberal subject.