In our image-saturated world, where real images can win an AI image award and fake images are believed to be true, how is the photographic medium surpassing our sense of reality? And how is the medium going beyond its own ‘reality’, its traditional, two-dimensional forms? The final event of the series explores the variety of photographic expressions that emerge from the internet, embracing the changing medium in all its weirdness and surreality.
Traditionally, the photographic medium has held a certain claim on the truth. From its invention, a photo was seen as the ultimate document of reality, even though early on manipulation and framing were part of the medium. Fueled by digital technologies, the possibilities to edit, alter and construct images grew exponentially and embedded itself within internet cultures. Manipulating, appropriating, and even generating visual material is very much part of the language of the internet, diverging more and more from any original meaning or reality. What is the impact of such imagery, that is increasingly harder to connect to something that exists in the world?
Tonight we’ll be joined by five artists, researchers, and makers who’ll take us through the surreal dimensions of photography.
📅 Date: Wednesday 11 December 2024
🕗 Time: 20.00 – 21.15 CET
📍 Location: The Hmm’s online livestream platform
🎟 Tickets: €5, available via Foam
Photography is…
“Photography is…” is a series of online events by Foam and The Hmm that delve into the ways in which internet culture permeates and alters the field of photography—expanding and extending it exponentially. How does our relationship with the photographic image shift and change to the internet’s cultural and technological developments? Designed for everyone curious about the medium’s evolution in the digital age and for anyone intrigued by the future of visual culture online. Join us as we examine photography’s changing face in our image-saturated world.
Speakers
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Linda Dounia Rebeiz
Linda Dounia Rebeiz is an artist, designer, and writer, based in Dakar, Senegal, who is interested in the philosophical and environmental implications of technocapitalism. Her work mediates her memories as alternative realities and evidence of excluded ways of being and doing. It is formed through the dialogue and tensions between lived experience, code, and AI. Tonight she will be speaking about her project ‘Once Upon a Garden’, which uses Artificial Intelligence to create a speculative archive of critically endangered and extinct flora that we have little to no photographic records of. Link
Sarah Amrani
Sarah is a visual artist based in Rotterdam with an ongoing fascination for beauty standards, female cultural identity and its representation. Using photography, film and found footage she questions to what extent social media and new technologies shape our perception of beauty. Sarah will be joining us to speak about the artificiality of beauty and how the online visual world is surpassing reality in terms of the female body and identity. Link
Silvia Dal Dosso
How can we survive in a world where everything might be fake? Where realities has entered our deepest fantasies? These are some questions artist Silvia Dal Dosso explores in her video essay, The Future is Going to Be Weird AF (2024). Silvia, a multidisciplinary artist and researcher of digital technologies and web subcultures, is also a co-founder of Clusterduck, an art collective that works across research, design, and transmedia. Tonight, she will lead us on a speculative journey into just how weird our future might become. Link
Francesco Luzzana
The screenshot offers a surreal twist on photography, capturing moments without a camera. Media artist Francesco Luzzana (kamo) expands on this idea, reimagining the concept of the screenshot in an analog form. Through the project Smartphone Camera Obscura, he bridges digital technology with the traditional pinhole camera, treating the screenshot as both a digital landscape and an active reconstruction of daily life. Link
Jason Koebler
Just like ’spam’ is flooding our inboxes, ‘slop’—low-quality and unwanted AI generated content—is flooding the internet and its platforms. Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media and was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He’ll be joining us tonight to talk about the rise of AI slop and how it’s created a kind of ‘zombie internet’ where, as he puts it, “a mix of bots, humans and accounts that were once humans but aren’t any more mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.” Link
