Between Camera & Network: Art and Documentation in Post-Photographic Culture

Published on March 14th, 2021


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The programme presents a series of case studies which reflect on the work of art in an age of photographic hyper-circulation. At a time where art selfies mix with installation shots on Instagram, how are practices of audience documentation changing the status and meaning of art? How can institutions engage with this expanded field of documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory? How is the pandemic changing the cultural value of documentation? How do contemporary practices of photographic reproduction intersect with critical discourses of authorship, ethics and control in new media platforms?

4 – 18 March 2021
The Photographers’ Gallery, London
curated by Katrina Sluis and Annet Dekker

A series of events exploring new approaches to documentation both inside and outside the museum.

From the Google Art Project to the screenshot, from the JPG to the Gigapixel image, photographic technologies continue to mediate our experience of art and culture. Between Camera & Network: Art and Documentation in Post-Photographic Culture is a series of talks at The Photographers’ Gallery over three weeks in March involving artists, curators, photographers, conservators, educators, technologists and museum professionals. Each talk explores a different aspect of the changing role of photography in art and digital culture, focusing on a range of approaches to documentation both inside and outside the museum.

The programme presents a series of case studies which reflect on the work of art in an age of photographic hyper-circulation. At a time where art selfies mix with installation shots on Instagram, how are practices of audience documentation changing the status and meaning of art? How can institutions engage with this expanded field of documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory? How is the pandemic changing the cultural value of documentation? How do contemporary practices of photographic reproduction intersect with critical discourses of authorship, ethics and control in new media platforms?

Events

With and Without Walls: Photographic Reproduction and the Art Museum
Thursday 4 March, 18.00 GMT
Michelle Henning & Ben St. John

Michelle Henning is Professor in Photography and Media in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. She write on photography, museums, digital media, cultural history and is the author of Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018), Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (2006) and the edited collection Museum Media (2015)

Ben St. John is a Canadian software engineer from who’s lived the last twenty years in Munich. He currently leads the small digitization group at Google Arts & Culture, responsible for the Art Camera and Tabletop scanner. These programs have helped bring thousands of artworks and photographs (and documents, kimonos, stained glass, tapestries and more) to the internet, in very high resolution.

Collecting Social Media
Thursday 11 March, 18.00 GMT
Natalie Kane & Anni Wallenius

Natalie Kane is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in digital design, art and technology. She is presently Curator of Digital Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK) within the Design, Architecture and Digital Department.

How can a museum collect the design of Instagram? As museums and cultural institutions, we can somewhat rely on social accounts and oral and written histories to understand how Instagram and other social networks used photography, but what do we lose from not having the interaction or inter- face design to analyse alongside? What new curatorial strategies must be considered when collecting networked, user-depend- ant, closed-source design? Where are the barriers to access and are new relationships necessary?

Anni Wallenius works as Chief Collections Curator at The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland. Her background lies in art history and museology. From 2017-2020 she was part of #collectingsocialphoto, a research project hosted by Nordiska museet exploring the challenges for museums and archives in collecting social digital photography.

Never before have so many people photographed so much of their everyday lives. Billions of photographs are shared online every year, primarily in social media. This development has presented a significant challenge, but also an exciting possibility, for museums and archives aiming to build heritage collections by documenting and collecting contemporary culture and art. This talk will share the experiences and conclusions of The Nordic research project Collecting Social Photo (2017-2020). Through empirical case studies and analysis the project explored how museums´ and archives´ roles, motivations and methods should change to better accommodate the networked, fluid, ephemeral and communicative nature of the social digital photograph.

Documenting the Ruins of the Web
Thursday 18 March, 18.00 GMT
Olia Lialina & Ofri Cnaani

Olia Lialina is a pioneering net artist and theorist. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.

Dealing every day with old, outdated, broken, dead websites for two decades now, I can’t stop wondering how easily things get ruined online, how relative our picture of ruins is, and how fast preservation and restoration efforts get obsolete.

Ofri Cnaani is an artist who works in performance and digital media. Cnaani is currently a PhD researcher at and Associate Lecturer at the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths, UoL.

In 2018 a fatal fire brought to an end two centuries’ worth of treasures in Brazil’s national museum. It seems almost unimaginable that so many valuable objects were simply wiped off the earth without leaving any digital trace. Among the digital remains is a sporadic collection that was contributed by users via WikiCommons and a full virtual tour, a product of Google Arts & Culture, where one can easily visit the no-longer-existing museum. Cnaani is looking at the “digital residues” to observe new documenting entities.

 

Between Camera & Network: Art and Documentation in Post-Photographic Culture forms part of Documenting Digital Art, an AHRC funded research project and partnership between University of Exeter, London South Bank University, Australian National University, LIMA (Amsterdam) and The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

 

Image credit: Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenscheid, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age


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