An­toine Prévost-Balga is de­vel­op­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on the his­tory and tech­nol­ogy of high-speed pho­tog­ra­phy with an em­pha­sis on sci­en­tific ap­pli­ca­tions. From the first ex­per­i­ments with spark-light sources made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the early 1850s to the recent de­vel­op­ment of femto-pho­tog­ra­phy, high-speed pho­tog­ra­phy has in­volved dif­fer­ent tech­niques and ap­pli­ca­tions in am­a­teur as well as sci­en­tific spheres from bal­lis­tics to fluid me­chan­ics, from bi­ol­ogy to mi­cro-physics. De­spite these het­ero­ge­neous en­sem­bles and prac­tices, some very spe­cific ob­jects are re­cur­rently used in high-speed pho­tog­ra­phy ex­per­i­ments. Flying birds and in­sects, burst­ing bub­bles, splash­ing drops, gun­shots and bul­lets, ex­plod­ing bombs – these are some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing ex­am­ples. These “epis­temic ob­jects” pro­duce new forms of visual knowl­edge and con­fig­ure cin­e­matic “ex­per­i­men­tal cul­tures” (Rhein­berger 1997). By look­ing at high-speed pho­tog­ra­phy through these ob­jects, the over­all goal of the pro­ject is to study arrange­ments and images of non-hu­man tem­po­ral­ity (ex­treme speed, ex­treme format, ex­treme vision) as well as the dif­fer­ent roles they play in the pro­duc­tion of visual knowl­edge.