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25 Years! Shared Histories, Shared Stories
 
From The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff, Filmstill, 2011 © Zoe Beloff
 

SITUATIONS/To look is to labor

 
SITUATIONS Cluster #150 - #159
 

Jonathan Beller #153   Zoe Beloff #152   Saskia Groneberg #155   Silvio Lorusso #151   Joana Moll #158   Sebastian Schmieg #154   Indre Urbonaite#157   Andrew Norman Wilson #150  

 
8 December 2018 – 17 February 2019
 

Image Net/Works

 
» photography’s changing role in the context of contemporary political­economic systems «
 
Conference SITUATION #156: Saturday 8 December 2018, 10:00 - 18:00
 
Opening of SITUATIONS/To look is to labor: Friday, 7 December from 6 to 9 p.m.
Join some of the artists and speakers of the conference «Image Net/Works» for drinks and snacks.
 
 

Fotomuseum Winterthur

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

situations.fotomuseum.ch
Tue-Sun 11am-6pm, Wed 11am-8pm
Fotomuseum Winterthur
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SITUATIONS/To look is to labor
 
From The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff, Filmstill, 2011 © Zoe Beloff
 

SITUATIONS/To look is to labor

 
SITUATIONS Cluster #150 - #159
 

Jonathan Beller #153   Zoe Beloff #152   Saskia Groneberg #155   Silvio Lorusso #151   Joana Moll #158   Sebastian Schmieg #154   Indre Urbonaite#157   Andrew Norman Wilson #150  

 
8 December 2018 – 17 February 2019
 
The photographic industry not only introduced new fields and practices of work, but was furthermore instrumental in the optimisation of industrialised forms of labour. Photographic images, in turn, became crucial in re-organising our perception by capitalising on our gazes. In today's digital systems, the viewer’s gaze is tracked and analysed to perfect the “harvesting of eyeballs”, turning every spectator into a worker.
 
 
SITUATIONS/To look is to labor
 
The Dating Brokers: An Autopsy of Online Love
screenshot, website, 2018 © Joana Moll, Ramin Soleymani and Tactical Tech
 
 
In the production models of our so-called attention economy, digitally networked technologies and photographic media play a fundamental role. Photographic images on major social media platforms are accompanied by metrics that suggest their value, giving rise to new forms of labour, with influencers, cloud workers and crowdfunding campaigns being some of the – more or less visible – agents in the global production tied to the networked image. The current cluster investigates these increasingly complex modes of production and the relations between photographers, the image network, as well as images and their viewers.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Image Net/Works
 
 

Image Net/Works

 
» photography’s changing role in the context of contemporary political­economic systems «
 
Conference SITUATION #156: Saturday 8 December 2018, 10:00 - 18:00
 
Image Net/Works is a conference organised by Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur to tackle issues related to photography’s changing role in the context of contemporary political­economic systems.

Photographic media have become central to the productive activities of today’s digital economy. Discourses around immaterial and digital labour have attempted to develop new models to address increasingly complex modes of production tied to global digital networks. Various approaches in media theory have explored new forms of photographic production, describing new relations between photographers and the apparatus, as well as images and viewers. The discourse on the changing nature of labour is tightly connected to the role that photographic media, in their algorithmic and networked form, play in a society where information technology has become a dominant force. So far photography has received little attention beyond wider and more general reflections about media’s role as digital commodities and the internet as a playground for cognitive labour.

Image Net/Works will attempt to connect these separate but overlapping discourses. The conference will specifically focus on images and the associated economies of looking, producing and sharing. It will investigate contemporary and historical modes of photographic production and forms of labour that are connected to the computational exchange of pictures, the harvesting of attention, new kinds of image value and photography’s various roles in the current economic system.

The conference is an integral part of the SITUATIONS programme at Fotomuseum Winterthur and part of the HSLU Post­Photography research project. It will take place in the context of the exhibition SITUATIONS/To look is to labor (opening 7 December at 6 pm).

Programme:
10:00–10:15 Welcome and introduction  

10:15–11:00   Nicolas Malevé, “Machine Glancing”
11:00–11:45   Olga Moskatova, “Living Photographs: On Parasitic GIF(t) Economies”
11:45–12:30   Yanai Toister, “Photography: Love’s Labour’s Lost”

12:30–13:45 Lunch break  

13:45–14:30   Rowan Lear, “A Profitable Habit: Photographing as Second Nature and Reproductive Labour”
14:30–15:15   Marco De Mutiis, “The Photographer as Player as Worker”

15:15–15:45 Coffee break  

15:45–16:30   Jonathan Beller, “The Derivative Condition”
16:30–17:15   Ingrid Hölzl, “IMAGE­TRANSACTION: The Image as a Lure”
17:15–18:00   Sebastian Schmieg, “Humans As Software Extension”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SITUATIONS 90-99 / Cluster: Immersive
 
 
 
SITUATIONS statement

situations.fotomuseum.ch

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.

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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