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Unthinking Photography is an online resource that explores photography's increasingly automated, networked life.

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3D object in a rocky, asteroid formation, on a blurry background displaying the word “abundance” on its surface.

Abundance
Mónica Alcázar-Duarte
2023-10
Mónica Alcázar-Duarte reflects on how abundance in indigenous culture is in contrast with ideas of aspiration and eternal growth.
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World Imagining Game
Benjamin Hall Frances Lingard
2023-06
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Small File Photo Festival
TPG
2023-01
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A·kin
Aarati Akkapeddi
2022-10
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Nightshade
TPG
2023-11
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Wonder3D
TPG
2023-11
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Glance Back
TPG
2023-10
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surveillance image culture photographer extinction ecology alternative networks artists projects environment acceleration hack artificial intelligence image economy algorithms camera capture computation future geographies machine vision screen walks
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The amorphous feed

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3D object in a rocky, asteroid formation, on a blurry background displaying the word “abundance” on its surface.

Activism
Yung Au
2023-10
Yung Au considers the term Activism through a retrospective lens, and how it claims to bring possible futures
activism glossaries future
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3D object in a rocky, asteroid formation, on a blurry background displaying the word “abundance” on its surface.

Communities
Srujana Katta
2023-10
Srujana Katta considers how Community artefacts as shown through an ephemeral piece of daily life: the screenshot
communities glossaries labour screenshot
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3D object in a rocky, asteroid formation, on a blurry background displaying the word “history” on its surface.

History
Dhruv Jani
2023-10
Dhruv Jani reflects on the term History, using a little-known album of seventeen images from the town of Itihasnagar
history glossaries archive
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The Performativity of Ground-Truth Data
Milagros Miceli Tianling Yang
2023-09
Images are the fuel of computer vision. In this text, the sociologists and computer science researchers Miceli Milagros and Tianling Yang, discuss the performativity of ground truth data that are produced in image labeling processes.
data labour computer vision annotation
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The Kodak DC25 digital camera

History and environmental impact of digital image formats
Jon Sneyers
2023-08
Per photo, digital photography is undeniably more eco-friendly than analogue film photography. However, we make orders of magnitude more photos now than in the analogue times. This article discusses the history of digital image formats and their ecological footprint.
ecology formats history environment
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Blurry image of a room with a bed, windows, posters on the wall

“You can’t look into my eyes.” The Aesthetics of Small-File Cinema
Yani Kong Laura Marks
2023-05
Yani Kong and Laura Marks discuss the genre and aesthetics of small file cinema that inspired The Photographers' Gallery "Small File Photo Festival" in 2023.
ecology consumption image files formats
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A meme of cartoon taking a selfie on a bathroom mirror "might delete soon but I felt cute in this pic"

Delete By Default
Jon Uriarte
2023-04
This article speculates how photography could evolve to face the challenges that the networked image and the environmental emergency has brought forward. It suggests a radical change in the visual cultures developed along with the adoption of a new file format.
ecology Social media abundance networked image photography
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When I image the earth, I imagine another
open-weather
2021-11
On the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world will capture a collective snapshot of the Earth.
ecology network culture artists projects satellite imagery communities geographies
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Seeing Infrastructure
TPG
2023-10
Nikki Stevens and and OS Keyes situate FRT as an infrastructural assemblage and focus on the history of four facial recognition datasets
face recognition dataset research discrimination bias race
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A collection of nine images in a grid that all include aliens

Aesthetics Wiki
TPG
2023-09
This wiki is a comprehensive encyclopedia of online and offline aesthetics! Made by a community dedicated to the identification, observation, and documentation of visual schemata. This page is for …
aesthetics archive communities image culture image analysis visual culture
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A render of an avatar of the artist in a room. Text appears in the front of the image stating "Your Time is Up"

Nouf.io
TPG
2023-08
Nouf.io is a simulated 3D scanned avatar of the artist Noug Aljowaysir. She exists in a virtual environment that was constructed using her scraped online data points.
prediction tracking artists projects virtuality scraping panopticon
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DOT cam
TPG
2023-08
Rebecca Uliasz uses the concept of "bad" algorithms to re-render images of power in the form of New York State Department of Transportation (DOT) infrared traffic security cameras.
algorithms cartography policing artists projects reverse surveillance
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Atlas of the Cloud
TPG
2023-08
A visual panorama of... "the invisible matrix of human labor, energy consumption, and resource extraction that underlies digital networks and artificial intelligence."
artists projects architecture consumption labour networked image artificial intelligence
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New Images: The Ecological Footprint Of Photography
TPG
2023-08
New critical writing that sheds light on photography’s environmental impact in its various aspects through newly commissioned articles written by international authors
photography ecology digital culture institutions anthropocene
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Candy-Glazed Eyes of Haunted Machines
TPG
2023-08
A project by Rosalie Yu that considers coin-operated children’s rides, which arrived in Taiwan in the form of Mickey Mouse and Pikachu characters from colonial powers in relation to labour, ownership …
artists projects labour data aesthetics
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Machine Unlearning
TPG
2023-08
Machine unlearning is an emergent subfield of machine learning that aims to remove the influence of a specific subset of training examples — the "forget set" — from a trained model
google artificial intelligence machine learning research
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Classifying Humans
TPG
2023-07
An article by Linda Kronman that "analyses the cybernetic loop between human and machine classification by examining artworks that depict instances of bias when machine vision is classifying humans …
classification unthinking photography machine learning image datasets research
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Inside the AI factory
TPG
2023-07
A deep dive into annotation for machine learning, with an increasing focus on emotional content and contexts
crowd sourcing crowdwork annotation artificial intelligence labour
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An illustration of a woman working with a computer

First generation women workers in Indian towns and villages employed as annotators
TPG
2023-07
Artificial intelligence may make some jobs obsolete but it has given a new life to a group of people who play an unglamorous but critical role in machine learning: first generation women workers in …
annotation labour crowdwork artificial intelligence machine learning machine vision
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Self-driving cars are here and they’re watching you
TPG
2023-07
This is not the self-driving future we were promised – but it is the one that surveillance and privacy experts have warned about.
self driving cars artificial intelligence future panopticon privacy surveillance
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