EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED: Current Concepts for Photography

 Kunstmuseum, Bonn

 February 16th – April 30th, 2023

 Banz & Bowinkel, Tim Berresheim, darktaxa-project, Beate Gütschow, Philipp Goldbach, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil, Baron Lanteigne, Oliver Laric, Simon Lehner, Achim Mohné, Susan Morris, Victoria Pidust, Johannes Post, Jon Rafman, Michael Reisch, Anna Ridler, Adrian Sauer, Tamás Waliczky. 

The exhibition Expect the Unexpected – Current Concepts for Photography discusses the new visual worlds which are product of the digital transformation and how current technological developments affect artistic photography. It does so by presenting exemplary artistic positions of the last ten years who have been significantly involved in the expansion and redefinition of artistic photography. In addition to the well-known photographic tools, these artists work with new, photography- based tools such as photogrammetry, 3D scanning, 3D printing, augmented reality, CGI and machine learning.

Both the exploration of extended photography itself and its exponentially increased possibilities play a role for these artists as well as the question of how digital, networked photography is embedded in socio-political, global contexts and what impact it has on our everyday lives. The interaction between humans and machines becomes the focus: Who is in control, who is the author, the artist or the computer program? Who can claim power of interpretation over the new digital image worlds: The human eye or image recognition algorithms? What new ideas does the tension between reality and virtuality, materiality and immateriality produce? And how do previous image and exhibition concepts relate to the new technical possibilities? Do our expectations of photography still match the reality of a globally networked life dominated by photographs which deepfakes and facial recognition are an inherent part of?

All these questions will be discussed in the exhibition. Photography is understood as a matrix for contemporary ways of working with digital imaging processes and is challenged and examined in the works shown.

With works by Banz & Bowinkel, Tim Berresheim, darktaxa-project, Beate Gütschow, Philipp Goldbach, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil, Baron Lanteigne, Oliver Laric, Simon Lehner, Achim Mohné, Susan Morris, Victoria Pidust, Johannes Post, Jon Rafman, Michael Reisch, Anna Ridler, Adrian Sauer, Tamás Waliczky, and others.

MR: You were one of the very first artists working with what we now call “self-quantifying”, which has since arrived on every smart-phone. What was your initial interest regarding this body-and-digital-technology-constellation? What about the “self” under digital conditions?

I first started using medico-scientific devices in 2005, when I was able to obtain an ‘Actiwatch’ from Chronobiologists then working at Imperial College, London. Like many devices available today, it was worn on the wrist and tracked my sleep/wake patterns. At the time, I was interested in periodicity and coincidence, with this aimed at ideas about the self: Who am “I”? What's going on with “me”? Prior to using the Actiwatch, I was already tracking various activities connected to my ‘self’, by marking up commercially available year planners and transcribing the resulting, gridded, patterns into screen prints. When I first heard about the existence of the Actiwatch I was immediately attracted to what I thought of as a certain purity of the digitally recorded trace – a mark uncontaminated by any aesthetically-driven decisions that I may have made myself about how an activity was recorded or output. At the same time, I was very interested in the failure of these charts or diagrams to really reveal anything conclusive about ourselves. Given that technology has penetrated so deeply into our bodies and minds it's hard now to think in terms of system failure but I hope that there still remain pockets of meaninglessness connected to – or generated by – the self, that cannot be translated, decoded or read by either man or machine. So, although the current conditions didn’t exist when I first started using recording devices – neither the iPhone or the FitBit existed before 2007 and it was not possible to connect the Actiwatch to the internet for example, I was – and remain – preoccupied by the question of what defines a self when selfhood is intrinsically bound up with the technologies and language of observation and control.

 

MR: In the darktaxa-project noManifesto (2020) you say: “Digital technology has allowed me to explore and develop the legacy of the Surrealists and their ideas about automaticity, without repeating their methodologies”. Would you explain the sort of interaction of the human unconscious and digital technology you are referring to here?

My feeling is that digital technology might allow us to access and trace something connected to a bodily unconscious and that is certainly what drove my interest in using it.

 

MR: In analogue, chemical, photography the idea of indexicality historically played an outstanding role. I am referring to Sander Peirce’s definition of indexicality here. What happened to the “index” under digital conditions?

An indexical sign is classified as such because it has a direct, physical link to the thing that caused it. ‘Shadows’, as Rosalind Krauss reminds us, are ‘the indexical sign of the objects’ that cast them.[i] Likewise, every photograph records the physical imprint of its object. Digital technology is often blamed for breaking this direct, unadulterated link between an object and its analogue. But digital technology is interesting to me precisely because it allows me to make direct recordings of things that don’t have a specific location: orphan shadows, in other words; shadows thrown by an invisible object, rather like the ‘smoke without fire’ that Walter Benjamin recognises in a photograph, when ‘a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious’.[ii] In other words, digital technology makes it possible to record something that is connected directly to the body, but in a much more remote, complex and mysterious way than photography might. For instance, if my heart is beating excessively fast at a certain moment, and is recorded as doing so in the data converted into one of my tapestries, there’s often no way of knowing exactly why it’s behaving in that way. It is a sign with a referent that remains enigmatic, elusive. But we encounter these sorts of signs everyday. So digital technology provides a more direct version of the mark I am interested in, in that it can give form to – make manifest – phenomena that are invisible or appear to come from nowhere. Digital recording produces ‘Real’ marks, not imaginary constructions or representations. So rather than encoding reality I can imprint it.

 

MR: For your work Motion Capture Drawing [ERSD]: View From Above mathematically maximally exact digital, spatial recordings of your body-movements over a certain period of time were recorded in a motion capture studio, giving very precise metrical information in a digital XYZ-coordinate system. In your eyes, could this be regarded an “indexical” recording-process?

Absolutely – see above! I believe the same applies to the tapestry work.

MR:  Another of your quotes from darktaxa-project noManifesto: “The ‘artist’s touch’, in terms of the handmade or authentic gesture, is something I aim at eliminating as much as possible”. Is the disbelieve in the “authentic gesture” a first motivation to work with technical working-methods?

I come from a generation of women that turned against, for example, abstract expressionist work made generally by (white) men, which was so dominant at the time I was at art school. Authentic implies mastery, the word stems from ‘self’, a ‘doer’. Finger prints are not ‘authentic’ in that sense. My work is informed by psychoanalytic theory that distrusts the “I” and by photography theory that explores ideas around the first person as ‘empty shifter’. How to make a mark do what Virginia Woolf attempts to do with her sentences, especially in her novel The Waves, and ‘describe the world seen without a self’? [iii]

[i] Rosalind Krauss ‘Notes on the Index’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, Massachusetts, Cambridge, 1986), 198. In this essay Krauss also explores the ‘collapsed’ or ‘empty’ shifter - “I”.

[ii] Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One Way Street (London, Verso, 1997), 243 (my italics on ‘without’)

[iii] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (London, Penguin Books), 221

Extract from catalogue Expect the Unexpected, Kunst Museum Bonn, 2025.

Edited by Michael Reisch & Barbara J. Scheuermann
Designed by Uta Kopp