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SITUATIONS 90-99 / Cluster: Immersive
 
Hasan Elahi, Prism v2.0.5, 2017, Courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery © Hasan Elahi
 
 

SITUATIONS #90 - #100 / Cluster: Immersive

 

Aram Bartholl » Hassan Elahi » Adrian Flury »
Noémie Goudal » Brenna Murphy » Ed Ruscha » ...

 
until 26 November 2017
 
 
 

Fotomuseum Winterthur

Grüzenstr. 44+45, CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Tel: +41 52 234 10 60

www.fotomuseum.ch
situations.fotomuseum.ch
Tue-Sun 11am-6pm, Wed 11am-8pm
Wed 5-8pm free admission
Fotomuseum Winterthur
 
 
SITUATIONS 90-99 / Cluster: Immersive
 
Adrian Flury, A Place I've Never Been, film still, HD-video, 4:40 min., 2015 © Adrian Flury
 
 
This current cluster SITUATIONS/Immersive (SITUATION #90 to #100) is devoted to the cross-media phenomenon of immersion. Photographs, films and virtual realities can absorb our perceptions and at the same time curtail our awareness of the real environment. Today, we have digital networks and multi-layered, interwoven visual worlds through which we constantly navigate with our smartphones and touchscreens. The immersive expansion of photographic media and practices, but also the state of the immersive in itself, became a central form of perception in our mediatized world. We live in data clouds. Our identities are constantly morphing into profiles made up of preferences, searches and links, which are increasingly eluding our control.

With works by MSHR, Aram Bartholl, Alan Bogana, Hasan Elahi, Adrian Flury, Noémie Goudal, Kamilia Kard, Ed Ruscha and a workshop by Karim Ben Khelifa in cooperation with Hochschule Luzern.

In 2002, American media artist Hasan Elahi was detained and interrogated by the FBI on his return flight to the USA. The reason? Suspected of terrorism. For more than six months, he was repeatedly called in by the authorities. Any foreign travel had to be notified in advance. This sparked the idea of undertaking a self-surveillance project, which he named Tracking Transience (2003–) and in which he has been documenting his life online over the past 14 years. Years before the flood of images via smartphone, flickr and instagram began to inundate the web, Elahi set about consistently photographing all the places he visited. He uploads his pictures to his website, where his current location can always be pinpointed via GPS. In Elahi’s wall-spanning photomontage Prism v2.0.5 (2017) a variety of immersive systems clash. Huge black and white aerial images show the NSA headquarters – one of the world’s hubs of international surveillance. These are contrasted by a small-scale mosaic of photographs featuring Elahi’s own self-surveillance.

 

More by Hasan Elahi: elahi.org/

The images in Adrian Flury’s A Place I've Never Been seem flickering and wobble. The effect is reminsicent of some late nineteenth century proto-cinematic devices in which single, static images are condensed to create motion sequences. This basic principle of cinematographic illusion lies at the heart of Flury’s photomontage video. The experimental filmmaker trawled hundreds of online holiday snaps shared on image hosting sites and travel blogs featuring the sights of Athens. He then animated this digital archive to create a visual flow that blurs the boundaries between photographic image and cinematic aesthetic. A finely attuned soundtrack accentuates the perspectival and temporal shifts between the individual images. A Place I've Never Been transfigures places into a new, media-driven reality that lures the viewer into its very core.

 

More by Adrian Flury: adrianflury.com

Kindly supported by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and Temperatio Foundation.

 
 
SITUATIONS 90-99 / Cluster: Immersive
 
SITUATION #22: Experimental Jetset, Lost Formats Preservation Society, 2000/2015
 
 
SITUATIONS statement

As every citizen with a smartphone, laptop or tablet knows, photography is becoming increasingly ‘distributed’. Driven by the vast replicative power of digital algorithms, photographs now move with tremendous speed across a wide variety of devices and platforms. The distinction between the still and the moving image is becoming increasingly blurred. At the same time, digital vision is now profoundly social, implicated in many areas of human activity. Certainly, this is having an impact on practice as younger artists in particular work with a range of media and no longer easily describe themselves as photographers.

In our daily work we find ourselves speaking more of the photographic than photography, of photographic media, rather than the medium. This poses a challenge for a photography museum with a distinctive, but significantly analogue history. We are convinced that Fotomuseum Winterthur needs to react decisively and that this means far more than simply re-embracing a rather out-dated ‘digital turn’.

On 10 April 2015 Fotomuseum Winterthur launched a new exhibition format titled SITUATIONS, which allows us to react more quickly to developments within photographic culture. The role of SITUATIONS is to define Fotomuseum Winterthur’s vision of what photography is becoming, at the same time offering an innovative integration of physical exhibition space and virtual forum. Using tags and clusters as a mode of curatorial classification the aim is to integrate the real and the virtual in relation to exhibition in a new way.

Numbered consecutively, a SITUATION may last a few hours, or two months, and might be photographic imagery, a film, a text, an on-line interview, a screenshot, a photo-book presentation, a projection, a Skype lecture, a performance etc. It might take place in Winterthur or perhaps in São Paulo or Berlin and be streamed on our website. The idea is to construct a constantly growing archive of SITUATIONS, reframing the idea of exhibition in relation to new technologies and both our local and global audiences.

The SITUATIONS programme is organised around key clusters: the first was

 

Relations (SITUATIONS #1 to #8), examining the changing social ontology of photography in relation to digital culture.

 

Seeing Machines (SITUATION #9 to #19) explored the way that technologies of seeing are increasingly devoid of human agency, the unprecedented power of algorithmic vision developing a new mode of ‘seeing’.

 

Formats (SITUATION #20 to #22), the third cluster, dealt with lost and changing visual formats and the implications of these medial transformations for an examination of art and photography.

 

Vanishing (SITUATION #23 to #27), explored the transitional moments inherent in the act of vanishing and asked how, and in what way, these moments are marked by the dynamics of (re-)configuration and (re-)appearance. Witnessing radical transformations in the production, distribution and consumption of images that migrate across mobile and interactive displays, the fifth cluster,

 

(in)stability (SITUATION #28 to #31), revolved around moments of (in)stability in the history and contemporary experience of photography and film.

 

Play (SITUATION #32 to #38) looked at new play practices and platforms – artistic game modifications, the gamification of photography, or new forms of social online interaction – that have emerged in the digital realm, questioning, in turn, how new parameters of game/play challenge the agency of the players.

 

Proletariats (SITUATION #39 to #41) examined the potential of artistic strategies of representation to deconstruct the complex imbrications of labour, subjectivity, gender, and social positioning. The eight cluster,

 

Filter (SITUATION #42 to #53), examined the politics of images, questioning the hierarchies of social power and value systems that are inscribed into their production, selection and circulation and that are deeply embedded in media technologies and their representations. The

 

Re-enactment cluster (SITUATION #54 to #58) exposed the photographic representation as a process of creation rather than of reproduction of reality. Revolving around the theme of

 

Flesh, the tenth cluster (SITUATION #59 to #67) looked at the interfaces where the gaze meets the body, where they both intersect to question their transforming nature. The cluster 

 

Placeholder (SITUATION #68 to #79) dealt with photography as an object of information and exchange, entangled in circulatory processes, cultural semantics and social structures that determine its understanding. This was followed by the cluster 

 

Fact (SITUATION #80 bis #89), which set out to inquire photography's crucial role in the current debate around a 'post-truth condition'. What are we to make of photography's claim for the factual in a time when images and information circulate uncontrollably across digital networks and social media platforms, reproduced, manipulated and put in new contexts in an ever-increasing pace?

Each cluster can be searched and reordered by visitors in the SITUATIONS online archive using a system of tags. Over time, new clusters and combinations – and new virtual exhibitions – will emerge.

 
 
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