unthinking
photography

In the age of ubiquitous connectivity and seemingly limitless cloud-based storage capabilities, all photographers, whether as amateurs, artists, or professionals, face new and difficult questions regarding their work’s afterlife, which have continued to gain in importance over the last years: what becomes of digital photographs once they begin to circulate online, how can the rights of their creators be protected, and how should the constant churn of online photographs be controlled? In early 2018, Eastman Kodak Company announced that it was about to provide a solution to these difficult issues.

At the northern end of London’s Tottenham Court Road, a state of the art proton beam therapy centre is being built by University College London Hospitals. The hoardings around the site feature familiar images of patients and medical staff; but this most intimate and molecular life-saving technology itself is represented by a graphic of a glowing orb shot through with the kind of blue plasma that wouldn’t look out of place in Star Wars. Danny Birchall questions, has the sublime returned from technology to nature, through technology’s ability to show us what cannot otherwise be seen inside ourselves?

..In recent years, thanks to inexpensive, lightweight digital cameras that can be fastened to a collar and programmed to take photographs at regular intervals, a number of ‘photographer cats’ have even attained minor-celebrity status. Two of the most famous, Cooper, an American Shorthair living in Seattle, and Nancy Bean, a three-legged puss from Devon, have held successful exhibitions of their work in art galleries and attracted significant mainstream media attention.

LOLcats here are the digital people’s fairy tales on the subject of animals, and, more precisely, cats, following a formulaic structure in their making. LOLcats, as natively digitally born aesthetic, acts exhibit features that are shaped in their succinct coherence by their processes of coming into being, by the ways in which LOLcats emerge and live on the networks.

"Like many viral phenomena, the Somebody else's cat group began by accident in the context of a specific online community, the image hosting site Flickr". This text by Dr Loplop explores the emergence of the internet cat meme and the influence of online communities in the development of this protohistory.

TPG Digital Curator Katrina Sluis interviews the pioneering artist Wendy McMurdo about the trajectory of her work since the 1990s and how debates around photography and digital culture have shifted.

"People are now more acutely aware of the way in which ideas can transform and mutate through the (inter)net, and have their own “life”, so to speak. I personally think of the internet itself as a complex entity, like a living organism, expanding and contracting. Its territories are as far-reaching as they are controlled".

Maria Rosario Montero interviews Morehshin Allahyari on the occasion of the latter's commission 'She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya'Jooj Ma'Jooj' at The Photographers' Gallery Media Wall (2017). Allahyari discusses digital colonialism as a core concept in her work as well as the agency of feminist and activist practices using 3D scanning, 3D printing and storytelling.

The second part of the interview between Sebastian Schmieg and Nicolas Malevé. Schmieg reflects on his project 'Search by Image' and further discusses machine learning and intelligence as well the politics of image annotation.

Information asymmetry is power asymmetry. If “data is the new oil” in the 21st Century, then internet users are the raw earth from which this oil is extracted; a commodity to be exploited for the benefit of the oil barons. In this, there is at least some equity amongst users around the world: the parity of the powerless. Except that isn’t accurate either.