part of The Photographers' Gallery

unthinking
photography

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.

Image courtesy Shelby Shaw, 2021

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 []

Careful Networks is a project that follows the principles of coding to care and coding carefully from the Distributed Web of Care initiative.

Collage of messages and images posted by telegran users in the channel dondehayenlahabana by nestor sire and steffen kohn

This website documents Basic Necessities, an online commission by Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn on view on the Media Wall and unthinking.photography from 14 October 2021 to 10 January 2022.

This publication aims to playfully explore the potential of fiction to create a wide range of responses to real and imagined networks.

Alternative interfaces for editing and creating images and text.

Today, we’re sharing the first in a series of posts that will shed more light on how Instagram’s technology works and how it impacts the experiences that people have across the app.

Synthetic Messenger Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne. A botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. Everyday it searches the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 …

This unique map provides an in-depth snapshot of the state of the world wide web, highlighting the most popular websites on the internet.

With contributions by Arul Prakkash Also available in Burmese (pdf), Arabic and Spanish Last reviewed: 31 January 2020 In June 2019, as human rights abuses and a humanitarian crisis w...

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.

Calm Technology IMPAKT Festival 2019 Panel discussion: Calm Technology Speakers: Olia Lialina, David Benqué & Cristina Cochior. Moderator: Annet Dekker In the 90s the concept of calm technology …

The trouble comes when we rely, as we increasingly do, on digital representation for most – or even all – of our knowledge about art. This deepens the ‘googlification’ of contemporary life, the …

“After Dark” brought people together from all over the world to experience the forbidden pleasure of sneaking around Tate Britain, one of the world’s best-known art galleries, late at night. The live …

Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. …

Report from February 2020: “Only 11% of the organisations surveyed were using social media to attract younger audiences”. I wonder how #CovidCulture affects this research? …

Simon Weckert - Google Maps Hacks Performance & Installation, 2020 “ 99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this …

To be preoccupied with the aesthetic properties of digital imagery, as are many theorists and critics, is to evade the subordination of the image to a broad field of non-visual operations and …

Poetic research & archival unit

video documentation of a live desktop performance given at Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Science, attempting to present some of the evolutions and transformations…

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 …

Cat Photography/

"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.

Cat Photography/

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 …

"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".

This is "Tabita Rezaire, AFRO CYBER RESISTANCE, 2014" by Goodman Gallery on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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 …

from Katrina Sluis, Future Semantic Web in How To Run Faster 1, published by @arcadiamissa, 2011

This short text is the result of an attempt to understand photographic theory by YouTube, which took the shape of an online errand of forking paths, full of interesting digressions, leading of course everywhere and nowhere.