unthinking
photography

Basic Necessities shows the increasing digitisation of the informal economy in Cuba, exposing the images and interactions between Cubans buying and selling goods through online chat groups. The scarcity of essential goods worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, led tens of thousands of Cubans to use platforms such as Telegram in order to access everyday products. This online extension of the work invites the visitors to search through products that are being shared live on hundreds of Telegram channels.

Joana Moll and Marloes de Valk discuss Joana’s new project 4004, exhibited online and on the Gallery’s Media Wall until the 14th of October 2021. Digging into the infrastructures which are at the heart of today’s digital technology, they discuss the role of artists and the art world in the transition to a less polluting society.

This publication aims to playfully explore the potential of fiction to create a wide range of responses to real and imagined networks. Each of the works that you will receive on your mailbox has been created through a collaborative human-machine process. Over two weeks you will receive 11 flash fictions to your email address. Some stories will be sent in just one email, others over a few. At the end of the publication you will receive a colophon email with further information on all the contributors, both human and automated. You will always be able to stop receiving the emails and once the publication is over, your contact details won't be reused.

4004 creates a link between the explosion of techno-capitalism, the acceleration of climate change and resulting decline of essential ecosystems. The title, 4004, is the name of the first commercial microprocessor created for the Intel Corporation in 1971. Joana Moll aims to establish a connection between the exponential growth of the microprocessor and the decline in both number and diversity of species – in particular insects. Over the duration of the exhibition, the insects were gradually and generatively superseded by microprocessors reflecting not only on the slow decimation of ecologies, but also the difficulty of visibly representing climate change. A gallery of screen captures documents the online exhibition.

What is allowed to be online, stay online and spread online? And, who decides what is harmful, and when that content should be removed? This expanded documentary project by Caroline Sinders explores harmful content, conspiracy theories, and hate videos on YouTube.

As Tamiko Thiel’s work Lend Me Your Face! is shown on The Photographers' Gallery website –waiting for the gallery's reopening for it to be shown on the Media Wall, she talks with curator Prof. Sarah Cook about deepfakes, identity and user agency across a brief history of participatory networked art projects, political incitement, and how we all instinctively react to facial expressions.

This is part two of a conversation between Nestor Siré and Marloes de Valk. In part one Nestor introduced himself, his artistic practice and his personal history with Cuba’s alternative networks, from book rental shops to El Paquete Semanal and SNET, the country-wide Wi-Fi mesh network run by gamers. In part two they talk about visual culture on SNET, as well as the social and physical aspect of digital networks.

Nestor Siré and Marloes de Valk discuss Nestor’s artistic practice and how he has engaged with the development of alternative networks that arose in Cuba, from book rental shops to El Paquete Semanal and SNET, the country-wide Wi-Fi mesh network run by gamers. This is part one of a two-part interview.

I proposed what would become Lacework in the Summer of 2019. In my proposal, I describe a cycle of videos curated from MIT's 'Moments In Time' dataset, each then slowed down, interpolated, and upscaled immensely into imagined detail, one flowing into another like a river...

I write this from my small New York apartment in my fourth month of isolation. The pandemic has required each of us to slow down and do less, and I keep thinking of a childhood friend who once told me, “We’re human beings, not human doings”. Even as a teenager, I knew this was an important paradigm shift: it meant that we could rethink how we define ourselves beyond endless production and consumption. Allowing oneself to be a human being seemed to resist the gig economy, workerism, the idea of “a calling”— all the ways that society has been structured to combine a person’s work into their core identity. The way busyness became a humblebrag. Human doings.

This article is an overview of the projects 'Epic Handwashing in a Time of Lost Narratives' and 'A Kitchen of One's Own' weaving a thread between the technical and the conceptual: the projects are linked historically by the writing and arguments put forth by Virginia Woolf, technologically by computational juxtapositions of text and image, as well as poetically in the viewer’s experience through a speculative remix.

When a computer vision algorithm recognises something in a picture, it soberly frames what it ‘sees’ in confetti-coloured rectangles, digital hues that contrast with the everyday shapes and colours that we see in a space with plain eye. Each neatly labelled with a single category, these annotations highlight answers but don't give explanations. To the uninitiated, it seems almost magical, or at least akin with some sort of intelligence.

The Future Is Here!, the title of Mimi Onuoha’s video project reflecting the human side of crowdsourced image labelling, is spot on. The stories I have been told by crowd workers from across the globe doing this work full-time indeed often have an eerily Gibsonian ring to them. Especially the stories from Venezuela.

I met with Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen on the press preview of their exhibition Training Humans in Milan at Osservatorio Prada. It was the morning of September 11th –not a neutral day to unthink photography and the power operations of vast populations of images. On the contrary, it was the most apt one to seriously consider Crawford and Paglen’s proposition that "images are no longer spectacle but they are in fact looking back at us, being actors in a process of massive value extraction".

In Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s artwork ‘How do you see me?’, commissioned for the Data/Set/Match programme at The Photographers’ Gallery, the artist explores how machines see us. A question that has been carefully slipping through several areas of production and research during the past couple of decades. At the same time an essential need has also emerged to understand the processes and internal mechanisms that are usually hidden from or mysterious to the user: commenting on those who code, train, build these mechanisms and how this translates into what happens outside of the screen.

In September 2019 the ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li gave a talk at The Photographers' Gallery talking through the events and key people that led to the creation of visual datasets.