Exploring the networked image in ‘post’ art practices (original) (raw)
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Image? The Power of the Visual
2022
Studies, for providing general oversight on the content of the exhibition. In addition, Thomas Lentz provided sage feedback on catalogue and exhibition texts, while Qamar Adamjee, Ladan Akbarnia, Mika Natif, and Fahmida Suleman were kind enough to discuss earlier versions of the structure. Without Stefano Carboni's original proposal, we would not have planned an exhibition on this theme. A debt is due to him, and we look forward to seeing his exploration of the topic come to fruition. I would also like to express gratitude to the artists, colleagues, and private collectors who provided support for loans and images, originally on a very tight deadline:
June e technical developments of the last two decades have changed our relationships with photographic images -may they be moving or still, situated in artistic or non-artistic contexts. While in most cases the increased ease of production and distribution was met with enthusiasm, for artists the shear amount and fast pace of digital images presents a challenge. To illustrate this point Dutch art director, collector, curator, and artist Erik Kessels has allegedly printed each photo uploaded to Flickr within a single day for his installation Hrs in Photos. e spectacular installation was shown several times since its rst instantiation in -usually at photography venues or festivals -and we can imagine how photographers encounter it with both compulsion and despair. In another reaction to the lost value of photographic prints Kelley Walker decided to o er his piece Chess Players from as a digital le and concedes the owner the right to modify, print, and display it in any desired form. In a recent gallery show in Berlin the work hence was simply crumpled up on the oor. Images are disappearing as it seems -at least for artists. One strategy to face this situation is what some call the 'networked image, ' that is the assembly of images and people in social media as demonstrated by Amalia Ulman in her Instagram performance Excellences & Perfections. Over a period of several months Ulman blended her artist persona with a stereotyped social media addict who pretended to optimize her photographic appearance also by use of plastic surgery. She thus showed how the border between image and body has blurred. ese are just three more or less arbitrarily chosen examples that demonstrate the precarious state of photographic images or the medium of photography in ne arts as it is debated in post-photography discourses. Of course, artists did not need to wait for digital photography and the internet to reject the production of new images in view of those that already exist. But when Rosalind Krauss described the destructive energy of photography as a 'theoretical object' -i.e. the in ltration of ne arts with photography's logic of reproduction etc. -she did not yet imply the possibility that this would nally also strike back on photography as an artistic medium.
New Turnings of a Networked Age: Reconsidering Photographic Actions in Light of Curatorial Practice
We are approaching the end of an age dominated by the lens—that is, by ways of knowing informed by the lens—and entering a new age informed by distributed network architectures. A result of this transition is the culture-wide shift away from the certainties of our past seven or eight centuries, and a movement toward more fluid and immanent ways of knowing and acting. One characteristic of this change is the gradual disappearance of the ossified single-point perspective and its replacement by a more multi-dimensional and immersive point of view, which is marked by participation and real-time talk-back, among other things. Photographic practice is evolving in response to these changes. In fact, the word photography no longer means what it once did. To put it more strongly, looked at historically, the notion of photography that we all grew up with is proving so ephemeral that we might argue that photography itself never really existed; rather, as a set of culturally determined actions, it marked a fuzzy slide through the final two centuries of one way of knowing (dominated by the lens), and a turning toward a far older way of knowing (dominated by networks of human relations). This paper considers these redefinitions of photography in the light of curatorial practice, a way of knowing and making that has deep cultural affinities with traditional notions of photographic practice.
FEELING AND FORM. POST DIGITAL ART PRACTICE: REDEFINING CONCEPTS OF AUTHOR, AUDIENCE AND ARTWORK
For more than two decades a strong influence of digitalization has brought structural changes in immediacy and proximity to the arts and new formal propositions in production through open access to various media and the acceleration of information. Concepts stating a medial turn have already attracted attention to these changes in perception and the understanding of art evolving from digital culture. The purpose of this essay, initially written for a lecture following the question in what way art might evolve in the future, is to give an insight into participatory and experimental art production, exemplifying a contemporary understanding and handling of media and art. In order to do this I have chosen to review the audio-visual performances and projects of Los Angeles based artist duo Lucky Dragons, Luke Fishbeck and Sara Anderson (Sara Rara), who, though working with a digitally highly evolved set, have developed a playful and decidedly humanistic body of work. A mixture of multi media experiments involving digital processing of analogue recordings, sonic transmissions of graphic images and participatory moments in the creation of synthesized sounds define central elements in the work of these two creative minds. Collaborating since 2000, Luke Fishbeck’s and Sara Anderson’s artistic novelty is to provide creative space for the audience - blurring the lines between audio and visual material through digital processing - and to question classical paths of distribution and author- and ownership by releasing all pictorial works resulting from collective practice through a creative-commons-license. These structural elements grow from digital culture and are communicated through sonic experience and participation. Addressing in particular the idea of post-digitalism in my approach, an idea that had first been brought up by Nicholas Negroponte in the article Beyond Digital, published as early as in 1998 in the magazine Wired , my interest lies in the development that this movement has taken, labeled as un-territorial, equal, fluid and global, in the discourse of media reflection, the implementation of digital process into everyday life and the creative conversation of errors.
Changing the way in which we produce, store and share images, new technologies have modified our ways of relating to and addressing the visual field. The importance of these changes resides not so much in the increased speed and size of production and distribution of images around the world, but rather on the practices that are emerging in parallel to this. Alongside with the spread of new technologies, the last decades have witnessed the growth of new image-making practices that are more attentive to context, social relations and materiality, and hence to the world surrounding the frame. The present paper aims to explore this topic by addressing two separate fields of contemporary image-making practices. It will first address the world of interactive (or multilinear) documentaries and discuss the capacity of this new filmic genre to push viewers, against conventional stereotypes, away from the screens and into the material and social contingencies of everyday life. The second example, instead, will offer reflections on digital images’ growing embeddedness in spatial networks and relations. Because of their ever-increasing entanglements with geolocative media, images today contain new (invisible) layers of information which are interesting not only from an epistemological and ontological point of view, but also from a methodological one. Overall this article constitutes an invitation to further integrate, in our understanding of images today, the field of visual culture with that of digital culture.