unthinking
photography

On 19 September 2021, Mailchimp’s content manager algorithm categorised the Flash Fictions email publication as in conflict with their Acceptable Use Policy. The following conversation between Sam Mercer and artist Shelby Shaw reflects on the flaws of the automated content management black box.

Our video installation for the Photographers’ Gallery Media Wall, "Basic Necessities", documents the vibrant social dynamics []

Joana Moll and Marloes de Valk discuss Joana’s project 4004, commissioned in 2021. Digging into the infrastructures at the heart of today’s digital technology, they discuss the role of art in the transition to a less polluting society.

Tamiko Thiel talks with curator Prof. Sarah Cook about deepfakes, identity and user agency across a brief history of participatory networked art projects, political incitement.

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 Wi-Fi mesh network run by gamers.

This is part two of a conversation between Nestor Siré and Marloes de Valk.

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 …

This article weaves a thread between two commissions, historically through Virginia Woolf, technologically by computational juxtaposition, as well as poetically in the viewer’s experience through a speculative remix.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

In 2019 The Photographers' Gallery digital programme launched 'Data / Set / Match', a year-long programme that explores new ways to present, visualise and interrogate contemporary image datasets. This introductory essay presents some key concepts and questions that make the computer vision dataset an object of concern for artists, photographers, …

"Use of capture technology involves a level of selective resolution; an emphasis of certain elements over others. As the image production process isn’t a linear hermetic process, decisions are taken in it’s production that will be visible in the rendered outcome..."

"While the capacity to intervene in the production of urban space or formulate an effective vision of what’s to come has appeared increasingly cut off to the general population, long-term development projects and real-estate schemes continue to dictate city transformation well into the future. And we are increasingly inundated with the …

"The idea that an architectural rendering can be ‘real’ or ‘fake’ involves a transference of the logic of one medium—building—to the logic of another—drawing. Architectural rendering has always exploited the potentials of the page or canvas where money, knowledge, taste or gravity proved prohibitive..."

The artist and designer Tobias Revell has been invited by The Photographers' Gallery digital programme to curate a strand for Unthinking Photography on the theme of photography, rendering and CGI and their effect in architecture and the built environment. In this text the curator of the series introduces the topic through a short history of image …