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.

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.

A 3D model depicting a hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib, was the starting point for a discussion between the artist Alan Warburton and the art historian and curator Julian Stallabrass.

Andrew Dewdney interviews Joanna Zylinska on the occasion of her recent publication ‘Nonhuman Photography’ (MIT Press, 2017). We are publishing here two excerpts from the conversation while the full interview is available to download as a pdf. In this first part, the discussion unpacks the notion of the nonhuman in image culture.

"I am trying to develop sets of relations between images and practices across time, across species, across technologies, and identify certain old tropes that are returning today. I would like to think that my mode of looking, which involves placing images along those deep-historical lines, is also a way of showing why photography matters".

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 and Morehshin Allahyari discuss digital colonialism as a core concept in Allahyari's 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.

Nicolas Malevé interviews the artist Sebastian Schmieg on image annotation, immaterial labour and his TPG commission 'Decision Space'.