Digital-Virtual-Real. Exhibitions 2019

I make photographs within fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases. The villages serve as a strange stations for people heading off to war and for those who have fled it. U.S. soldiers interact with pretend villagers who are often recent immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan, who have now found work in America playing a version of the lives they left behind. The villages are places of fantastic imagination. The actors continue playing their roles as police officers, gardeners, and café owners during the stretches of day between training exercises. Villagers plant crops that they harvest months later for food. Others pass their leisure time painting murals on the interior walls to beautify their surroundings, or making arts and crafts to trade with other villagers. The worlds that they have constructed are both Western and Islamic; convincingly accurate and comically misdirected; mundane and nightmarish.

Christopher Sims was born in Michigan and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina and a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and currently teaches and works at Duke University. His recent exhibitions were shown at Cambridge University, the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. His project featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire. He was selected as the recipient of many photographer’s awards. Awarded the Arte Laguna Prize in Photographic Art in 2015.

Mauthausen. In Austria, probably also in the rest of Europe, and possibly even all over the world, the name of this Upper Austrian town with a history of nearly 1000 years can never be heard neutrally again. Between 1938 and 1945, at least 90,000 people were killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp and its sub-camps. The chosen exhibition title could not be more objective M 48° 15’ 24.13’’ N, 14° 30’ 6.31’’ E, these are the coordinates of Mauthausen. Zink’s aim is not to document, but to irritate. He forces us to take a closer look and opens up a multi-faceted discussion. His goal is to make a dual disappearance visible: the extinction of people and the eradication of memories. An intensive critical examination of the past, that is not subject to the statute of limitations. The art form Marko Zink has chosen is analogue photography. He subjects the films to treatment before exposing them. He cooks or punches them, treats them with chlorine or ink eraser. With this delicate film material, he takes photos of selected places within or outside the former concentration camp. The photos are presented in a variety of media, for example as panorama images, as three-way pictures, where perspectives change erratically, as well as conceptual developments. In one of the works, Zink shows a room in which 500 prisoners were held, using a screen of 500 individual photos, each of them in a slightly shifted perspective symbolizing 500 pairs of eyes gazing through the window: “View into nothing”. At times, Zink’s photographs seem like historic objects, taken quickly and secretly, bleached by the sun, half destroyed by the impact of time. Sometimes the photos with their defects seem to give an account of the atrocities that took place here less than eight decades ago at a separate level. And sometimes they seem to make visible what only seemingly cannot be seen anymore. With his work, Marko Zink reminds us that it is possible: what is a reminder of the past and what is a warning of things to come. Everything could be seen. If only we wanted to see.” (Wolfgang Huber-Lang, 2018)

Born in 1975 in Gaschurn, Austria, Marko Zink received his first artistic education from Austrian artist Ingo Springenschmid. He then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he attended art and photography classes, as well as expanded pictorial space, art in public places and performance. He graduated from Friedl Kubelka’s School for Artistic Photography in Vienna and studied German philology, journalism and art history at the University of Vienna.

Photographer John Angerson has worked alongside historian Professor Ian McBride to compile a list of historic European events since 1900 where something extraordinary and transformative has occurred. These contemporary photographs have been made in the precise location and on the same day that the actual events took place. Archive images and artefacts from this period in history have been carefully researched to connect the past with the present. Even where the setting is seemingly unchanged - like the bridge in Sarajevo or the familiar doors and bricks of Downing Street - a different sort of contemplation is invited - bathos yields to pathos as the world goes about its insouciant business. The project titled “On This Day” acts as a memorial that urges us to respect the power of now. These events were both fleeting and eternal - over in an instant but whose consequences would change Europe forever.

John Angerson (b.1969 Bristol, England) started his career in the early 1990s, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the changing geopolitical landscape of Eastern Europe. Since then, his practice has continued to explore the different languages of documentary photography, focusing on how specific communities form, shift and develop. His personal projects have garnered critical acclaim and have been exhibited at major art institutions in the UK and overseas. His monograph - Love, Power, Sacrifice (published by Dewi Lewis, Manchester) documented the Jesus Army over a twenty-year period and peers into a microcosm of a fanatical religion. He now splits his time between shooting personal projects, holding University lectures and shooting features and portraiture for a range of magazines, charities, and design agencies.

Goodbye Pyongyang presents a disquieting reflection on the act of seeing and believing, through a fictional trip to North Korea. The republic is presented via a playfully coded visual game, which reflects on photography’s expressive privilege to make visible the hidden, to offer certainties that strengthen our desire to believe. Goodbye Pyongyang offers a singular enquiry that investigates precisely that force. According to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, the conquest of the world as picture constituted the fundamental event of the modern age. And yet, that fulcrum (which is offered to us) is not to be found in reality, but in its artificial reflection, in the symbolic reproduction of the image. The partnership between reality and truth, having lost its erstwhile hegemony, is intensely being questioned by photographers like Simão. This challenge to photography’s previous aspirations to objectivity, this offering of an illusion of reality that treats the world as fiction, is precisely one of the key issues that Simão addresses. Goodbye Pyonyang offers observers the possibility to reconsider their visual codes, and revives a playful complicity between the image and the viewer. And we witness how that fictional trip, thanks to photography, has become real.

Paulo Simão, born in Santarém in 1973, lives in Lisbon, Portugal. Studied Advertising in Lisbon. Works as graphic Designer. Studied photography from 2013 to 2017 at Ar.Co school in Lisbon. Nominated and awarded in numerous international competitions and projects. Personal and collective exhibitions have been exhibited in various photography galleries in Portugal and abroad, such as Spain, Germany, USA, India.Exhibition of the project Goodbye Pyongyang at the Albert Hall Museum, Jaipur, India andindividual exhibition at Fundação do Oriente Goa, Panjim, India; Selected for Discovery Awards 2016, participates in the session of projections, with the project Prozac, Braga, Portugal.

Fires are smoldering. Black toxic smoke contaminates the air. Smashed monitors, dismantled computers, and the skeletons of old TV sets pave the ground. In Agbogbloshie, the world's largest e-waste dumpsite, men and boys manually disassemble obsolete high tech equipment using rudimentary tools or their bare hands. They crash electronic appliances on the floor and take them apart to isolate metals from plastics. Kai Löffelbein followed the e-waste trails from Europe and the United States, to the post-apocalyptic scenery of Agbogbloshie in Ghana, to the e-waste city Guiyu in China, and to the backyard workshops of New Delhi, India. He documented the incredible conditions under which workers, even children, try to recover any valuable raw materials contained in our waste: waste that is illegally exported from western countries in order to avoid expensive recycling. In an increasingly digitized world, a life without electronic devices has become unimaginable for us. We are constantly surrounded by computers, cell phones, MP3 players, and tablets. As we strongly define ourselves through the products that we consume, we always need the latest smartphone, the fastest processor and the thinnest laptop. Our consumption allows the mountains of e-waste to inexorably grow every year.

Kai Löffelbein (born, 1981), is a freelance a documentary photographer based in Hannover and Berlin, Germany. He studied political science in Berlin and photojournalism and documentary photography at University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover. He has worked in various countries in Asia and Africacommitting himself to long-term projects. His work reflects his interest in the ways political and economic structures shape modern society. In 2018 he published his first book 'Ctrl-X, a topography of e-waste' at Steidl publishing house.His work has been published and exhibited internationally in numerous shows and festivals and has rated by many international photo awards.

Due to some of the most divisive family immigration policies in the world, thousands of British families are forcibly separated by the Home Office. As a result, they must communicate with each other via ‘modern means of communication’, leading to the rise of what are now being referred to as ‘Skype Families’. As a symbol, the chosen exhibition title “C-R92 / BY” is the post code of Croydon Service and Support Centre and indicates the location of a division of the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration that manages applications for people who want to visit, work, study or settle in the UK.

In part one, C-R92/BY seeks to investigate how one maintains a relationship with a family member who has been physically and geographically removed from one’s life and is reduced to a two-dimensional image; what does it mean to take the irrefutably unique and transfer it into the infinitely replicable? With the possibility of my own wife facing deportation in the coming year, a personal reflection of my own experience is weaved together with those of other families, using images, documents, testimonies and more to explore the hardships of detention, and the fight for family life. In part two, the negative is used as a symbol of infinite replicability. Furthermore, to view the images in positive, viewers are forced to mediate their experience via the inverted loupe function on their phones, a mediation all too well known by the affected families. Alternatively, viewers can experience the images in positive via optical illusion. By staring at the image for thirty seconds and then turning to a white surface and blinking rapidly, the positive image appears and rapidly fades from view. Are our ‘modern means of communication’ just an optical illusion after all? C-R92/BY gives voice to the suffering of families who find themselves in such circumstances, including potentially my own; we are the unwilling players in a painful game of politics. Furthermore, as Britain prepares to leave the EU, this work serves as a warning to the possible futures of many international families - and even, perhaps, to us all - as we transition ever further into a world in which we are defined by our online presence, and build relationships via images that appear on our screens.

Samuel Fordham is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, text, video and sound. Currently studying on the MA Photography programme at UWE Bristol, Fordham has developed a research-based practice focused on telling intimate and often hidden stories highlighting issues surrounding childhood, family welfare and equality. Fordham’s projects are produced across platforms as installations, books and web docs. His work has been shown internationally in the UK, USA, Canada, France, and in other countries. Over the last year his work has been selected for many international awards. Currently, Fordham is developing the next phase of his long-term project which documents the hostile environment and forcibly separated families in the United Kingdom.

"Simulation Centers" is a photographic documentation of recently organized, closed to the public spaces in hospitals, designed exclusively for practical training of medical students and staff. Simulation Center does not differ from any other part of a hospital, despite the fact that it is far better equipped whereas the patients’ place has been taken by human-like robots simulating life functions and reactions. Humanoids’ appearance is often rather grotesque than realistic. Nevertheless the unreal or even bizarre presence of the uncanny automatized effigies, simulation aims preparing the future medics to direct confrontation with real human patients. The practical skills that were earned by years of professional practice in the past, are now gained on the grounds of confrontation with the machines. Interestingly, interaction with a machine is supposed to teach the trainees not only the knowledge about human body, but also empathy. Each operating room neighbors with a small studio. The two spaces are separated with Venetian mirrors and connected with a loud-speaking system. During simulation, Center’s staff member located in the studio simulates patient’s verbal reactions. It is the unpredictable course of the training and precisely simulated reaction of the automatic bodies that force the trainees to engage emotionally in the strange theater. Although it does not involve a real human neither the horrific view of flesh and blood, the simulation are uncannily authentic and highly stressful.

Agata Wieczorek (b. 1992, PL) is based in Lodz, where she is currently completing her Masters at the National Film School. She previously graduated with honors from Strzeminski Art Academy in Lodz, where she studied graphic arts and painting. Wieczorek’s practice combines film, photography, and animation. She incorporates both documentary and studio-based approaches. For her work, she often enters hermetic environments and works with socially marginalized groups in order to explore uncommon understandings of identity, self, and gender. Her work has been exhibited and awarded internationally, including at Obscura Festival of Photography, Penang; Warsaw Photo Days; Organ Vida International Photography Festival, Zagreb, and GESTE Paris; among others. She is also a writer.

For the past 2 years, China has been conducting a massive crackdown against Muslim-minority communities in its vast western Xinjiang region. Some of the most advanced surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition and DNA collection are being massively deployed in the region so as to monitor every aspect of the inhabitant’s life. A major data leak from February 2019 has revealed that SenseNets, a Chinese facial recognition company, is constantly tracking the location of more than 2.5 million muslim people in Xinjiang, using 6.7 million trackers tagged with descriptions such as “mosque”, “hotel,” “internet cafe” and other places where surveillance cameras are likely to be found.

The series The Ministry of Privacy is exploring the mechanism of facial recognition technologies used by the Chinese government to monitor and oppress the inhabitants of the Xinjiang region. To do so, I travelled to Kashgar, one of the last bastions of the Uyghur culture in Xinjiang, and probably the most monitored city of the region, to try to document the way the government turned technologies into tools of repression. Prior to my departure, I developed a facial recognition software in collaboration with William Attache, a French IT engineer. The software we developed is similar to that used by the Chinese government, particularly in the Xinjiang region to track its inhabitants. We programmed the software to recognize the people in a photograph and to directly draw the biometric information about the faces of the people that appear in the photographs, exactly as it is happening inside the surveillance cameras. Depending on the technology, some are displayed using red dots — called facial landmarks — others using Delaunay diagrams, an efficient alternative for mapping faces. I then began to photograph the daily lives of the Uyghurs and the other minorities under threat, without having to focus on the surveillance system itself. Back in my hotel room, I uploaded the pictures into the facial recognition software, which automatically recognized and drew the respective biometric facial information of the citizens in the photographs. Through this creative process, The Ministry of Privacy reveals the intrusiveness and the danger of this invisible technology, while documenting and paying tribute to what remains of these communities’ vibrant culture, before its planned disappearance. The resulting photographs blur the borders between reality and virtuality, but also embody, in the same picture, a glimpse of the future and the ruins of the past.

Maxime Matthys (born in 1995 in Brussels, Belgium) is a visual artist and photographer. He studied photography at the Toulouse school of photography and design in 2015 and photojournalism in Paris in 2017. After working for the press industry, he realized he was more interested in including the viewer into a thinking process and allowing him to recreate his own story. His work focuses on the way technologies are affecting our daily life and are shifting our perception of reality. While exploring new forms of narrative in photography, he keeps documenting the important issues that are shaping our future. Winner of international awards, his work has notably been showcased at the European House of Photography (Paris), Camando Design school (Paris), at international festivals in Canada, Indonesia and France and published in Le Monde, Médiapart, Libération, Fisheye Magazine, amongst others.

The present collection of images is the result of carefully gathered different types of technological objects that were taken from a waste treatment station, shot in studio and returned to their original place, over a six-month period.

These items were chosen with the criteria of the different states of deterioration they presented themselves in, and their purpose of life as an object. Determining that there was a lifespan of utility. Even though some are clearly from a different time of production then others, their disassembly and total obliteration or “time of death” was very close in the end.

One of the purposes of this project was to question the durability of the objects, when resistance is still highly valued to us as consumers, in a time where environmental issues such as garbage disposal and resource consumptions are of main concern.

The other purpose is to demystify product advertising in what comes to product photography and the relation it has with us as human beings. Establishing a metaphor on how we perceive things, and our own destructive nature. A reflection on the value we place on objects, the impact this has in our lives, and how we deal with their existence and afterlife as a consequence of our own existence in a quick consumption society.

Diogo Carlos da Maia (Lisboa 81), BA in advertising and art direction by Thames Valley University, London; Instituto Português da fotografia (Lisbon): Basic course in photography about different photography components and techniques. Works as an antique product photographer for several clients and auctioneers and museums. Active collaborator in the production of different catalogues; has produced works for Sotheby’s London, the puppet museum in Lisbon, David Hockney Studio in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou of Paris, and works regularly as a real estate photographer.One of the exhibitions he organized was on display at the National Museum of Natural History and Science, in Lisbon.

My intention with this body of work is to manifest healing energy to our planet by imparting beauty and restoring harmony to areas severely impacted by human activity; the square yet circular Mandala composition with its crystalline structure and geometric balance establishes a sacred space to aid meditation and focus our energies.

As expressed by Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz: “The Mandala serves a conservative purpose - namely, to restore a previously existing order. But it also serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something that does not yet exist, something new and unique; The process is that of the ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point.”

The MFPE “corner-stone” image is a satellite photograph downloaded from the web, processed in Photoshop and then mirrored three times to create the perfect square. Currently the MFPE number in the 100s and although numbered sequentially are not meant to be viewed in any particular order. Each piece is also identified by location and the activity taking place.

Initially my investigations of Earth’s surface revolved around “hot” spots of military/nuclear weapons storage and disassembly but I quickly broadened my interests to include other area altered in significant ways by our unchecked extraction of minerals and ore; our ever expanding habitat and mega infrastructure projects; and our destructive wars and materialism indelibly marring our environment. My scouring “journeys” across the surface of the globe are most often launched by news articles and historical accounts as well as terrestrial images, which sets me on a search for its top-down appearance to better understand its graphic potential and emotional impact.

I have worked as a photographer (assignments and personal project) for 30+ years. I have worked and exhibited my work in San Francisco, Houston and other places for the past 20 years.

In rural small towns in the United States techno-anarchists are working on the fusion of the human and the machine. They develop devices and gadgets to implant into their own bodies, becoming guinea pigs of an envisioned ­transhuman future. Their risky experiments and strong faith into technology’s emancipatory ­potential challenge science, medicine and ethics equally.

The photographer has been following the US-americanbodyhacking community 2015-2019. His series, depicting makeshift arrangements and close-up surgeries, offers a counterproposal to the sleek visual iconography that commonly surrounds topics like 'enhancement' and 'future'.Hannes Wiedemann documents the ongoing merge of technology with the human body and biology at large. Employing reportage photography and working along the borders of the visible, he explores phenomena such as DIY cyborgs, plastic surgery and genetic engineering in all its immediacy.

Hannes Wiedemann is a Berlin-based photographer and Ostkreuz School of Photography graduate. His work is regularly exhibited and published in magazines. 'Grinders' and 'Bits and Pieces' were self-published as artist books.Recent Shows include: STRP, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Daegu Photography Biennial, South Korea; Riga Photography Biennial, Latvia; NEW CITIZENS, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia and others.

“I always had a problem with my name being so common. If you search my name on the web, the first thing you will find will be a belly dancer, following by all sorts of girls with cheesy smiles (or in explicit poses). At first I hated that. But if you have something that bothers you, you have to work with it, process it, and use it to create a work.”

Project The Incomplete Princess Book created by Russian-Dutch artist Irina Popova is a virtual journey to Russia: a new way of meeting people (through browsing their profiles) and a new way of photographing them (using the images found on the internet). For this project artist used the Russian version of Facebook – Vkontakte.

Social networks have not only become a substitutes for traditional family albums, but a major source of entertainment and a form of self-representation. It seems that in such a patriarchal country as Russia, women seriously struggle for male attention, and the most important factor for life success becomes a glamorous (and sometimes exaggerated) idea of beauty.

I organized these materials in the imaginary story-line of one fake princess, from birth to old age. The big question is: “what happens to a princess after marriage?” Do they disappear, while those shapeless, self-content, ageless ladies in colorful arrow and leopard print dresses appear by themselves, like aliens or asteroids?

In its original edit the project contains about 36 000 images. Irina worked with 3 assistants for 3 months to download these images, one by one. The project was first presented in the Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam in November 2013, in a group exhibition Russian Ateliers on Amstel, where the artist covered two walls with more than 1000 images. It took Irina another two years to make the final selection and to shape it into a book form.

The book is produced with hand-made covers (all are different, use of recycle female clothing).

Irina Popova (b. 1986 in Tver, Russia) is a documentary photographer and curator. A graduate of the Tver State University School of Journalism, Popova studied photography in St. Petersburg and documentary photography and mixed media in Moscow. In 2010, she moved to the Netherlands. Irina Popova has participated in numerous exhibitions and photography festivals in Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Burma, and Lisbon, including the Photoquai Biennale. Her work has been published by Russian Reporter; Ogoniok; the Guardian; Geo International; the New York Times; Gup Magazine; and Lens Culture. Popova’s work is included in the collections of the Russian State Museum; Musée du Quai Branly, and so on. She has received numerous awards and nominations, the UNICEF prize honorable mention, and others. She teaches photography in Moscow at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia.

“Workforce” is an ambitious documentary project that draws a composite picture of Italy’s current labour landscape, in the framework of the recent global economic recession.

It is articulated in nine chapters, often distant - not only geographically - but sometimes intertwined: Logistic Centres, Open Competitive Examinations, Bankruptcy Auctions, Call Centers, Industry 4.0, Migrant Agricultural Workers, Trade Union Pickets, Chinese Textile Industry, and Workers’ Buyouts. Different stories, ranging from the evidence of the scars of the crisis to the impact of globalization, from technological innovation to migration, from failures to rebirths.

It is an Italian journey, but we could recognize many of its places in other parts of the globalized world. Michele Borzoni presents Italy as a case study that illustrates not only the effects of the economic crisis on the labour system, but also the impact of longer processes, such as the technological revolution, globalization and migration. These include the increasing job insecurity, the deterioration of the old manufacturing sector, the rise of logistics services, automation, the first winning local productions, and the impact of intense migratory flows from developing countries.

Here two of these chapters – Call Centers and Logistic Centers –are exhibited.

“Call Centers”.After a boom between 2003 and 2008, and a relatively modest but steady rise in the early 2010’s, the call centre sector is now experiencing a severe crisis and many companies are outsourcing services to neighbouring countries, such as Albania, where labour is cheaper.

“Logistic Centers”.Amazon, Ikea and Ceva logistic are only but a few of the corporations which have based their logistics centres near Piacenza, a city in the North-east of Italy that is now dubbed the Italian capital of logistics. The Italian logistics sector has experienced the highest growth rate in Europe and is now worth 200 billion Euros, 13% of Italy’s GDP. In Piacenza, logistics centres occupy a total 2 million squared metres and employ 6,400 workers.

Michele Borzoni was born in 1979 in Florence, Italy. He graduated in 2006 at the International Center of Photography in the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program in New York. Attended the Eddie Adams Workshop, Barnstorm XIX. His work has been awarded with the First Prize Yann Geffroy Award 2007 with his work “Srebrenica, struggle for justice”, the New York Times Scholarship for ICP students, and in 2009 he received the Tierney Fellowship. From 2006 he has been working with Italian and international magazines among with Time, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, M Magazine, D, Vanity Fair, Elle, Io Donna, Marie Clair France, Internazionale, L’Espresso, Financial Times Magazine, Monocle, Geo and others.

Stemming from an interest in the way technology is influencing society, this project explores how pervasive technology impacts on everyday life. Once the preserve of researchers and technology junkies, self tracking has evolved into a mainstream trend. People are now able to use smartphones and wearable sensors to record an expanding range of data and make use of its analysis.

Many of the commonly tracked metrics relate to health and self-improvement, but almost anything can be tracked; sleep, exercise, mood, weight, the list is almost endless as are the individual motivations for tracking. This project looks at the stories of the people who self-track, the data they collect and their motivations for exploring The Quantified Self.

Travis Hodges is a British photographer specialising in portraiture and documentary storytelling. An ongoing fascination with technology has led Travis to document the way technological advancements impact everyday life. His projects are represented by INSTITUTE Artists and have been published and exhibited globally. Awards include The Observer Hodge Award, The Jerwood Awards and The Magenta Foundation Flash Forward.

Travis is currently based in Vietnam, creating work on the rapid social and economic changes taking place there.

On October 7th, 2011, the blogger and now United Russia Party member Vladimir Burmatov posted a rhyming couplet on Twitter - “Moscow is warm and sunny. Summer! #ThanksToPutinForThat” (VMoskve teplo i solntse. Leto! #spasiboputinuzaeto) - and encouraged others to follow with their own tweets using the hashtag. The invitation was accepted with more than 10,000 tweets that day alone and it became the first globally trending Cyrillic hashtag. The resulting Tweets were frequently sarcastic or critical of Putin’s political agenda.

For the last seven years, through our collaborative project Geolocation, we have used publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. In June 2016, we photographed sites linked to #ThanksPutinForThis in St. Petersburg and Moscow during a month long artist residency with CEC ArtsLink. As we began wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, the project grew. We spent the sunlit summer evenings with our translator who explained the nuances of Twitter speak, the political climate, and events that influenced the tweets. We also began to saw the parallels to the #ThanksObama hashtag in our own country.

We are currently completing the project with accompanying photographs tagged #ThanksObama in Chicago and Los Angeles. The full project illuminates the relationships between world leaders and their constituents, examines the tensions persisting after the end of the Cold War, and analyzes the use of the hashtag as a gathering point for ideas online.

We are grateful for curatorial guidance and translation by Iaroslav Volovod. This project is made possible, in part, by a funded residency with CEC Artslink.

Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman's collaborative practice investigates the data tracks amassed through networked communication. Solo exhibitions include the George Eastman Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, and the Contemporary Arts Center Las Vegas. Selections of their work have been shown at the Denver Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Portland Art Museum.  Numerous publications have featured their work including Wired, The Picture Show from NPR, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the British Journal of Photography. Flash Powder Projects released their first monograph, Geolocation, in January 2016.

The internet is everywhere – and yet it is invisible to our eyes. So what is the internet, really? It exists as a physical and administrative infrastructure that connects countries and continents, thus servers. A gigantic amount of data is transmitted every day – in the form of light signals in fibre optic cables. These submarine cables run across the ocean floor and meet at certain choke points, such as the Suez Channel in Egypt. Large-scale Data Centers and Internet Exchange Points are housing and distributing content. However, besides all these tangible structures, the internet remains one thing: A network of networks, an abstract object, a place of simultaneousness, visibility and invisibility, system and anarchy, billions of connections – and a lot of humor. Heinrich Holtgreve went to Egypt, Frankfurt am Main and the German coast to look for the internet. And to add a little bit of understanding to its workings.

Heinrich Holtgreve is a photographer based in Hamburg, Germany. As a part of Ostkreuz agency, he works for clients in both editorial and commercial contexts. His works are widely published in well-known photographic magazines, exhibitions have been featured in galleries worldwide and have been awarded numerous prestigious awards.

Every minute 1 920 000 photos are taken in the world.
Every minute 527 760 photos are shared on Snapchat.
Every minute 347 222 photos are shared on WhatsApp.
Every minute 243 055 photos are shared on Facebook.
Every minute 38 194 photos are shared on Instagram.
3.2 billion of internet users.

In 2014, according to Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, people uploaded an average of 1.8 billion digital images every single day.

Google estimated at 1 000 000 000 000 the number of images and photos available on the internet at the moment.

This project is focused on the impossibility of digesting the incredibly huge amount of photographs that we produce everyday since we can use digital cameras and devices, and we are daily flood by a nonstop flow of images. We scroll down continuously our smartphone, tablet, computer screens without dedicating the right time to the majority of the images we see, bypassing their contents and messages.

Born in Neuchâtel (CH) in 1987, Damien Berney graduated as an automation engineer in 2005. This followed by a period of searching for an apprenticeship as a photographer.In 2011, after three years of training with a freelance photographer active in cultural field,Berney got his diploma. Since 2013, he has been working as a freelance photographer. In additionhis commercial work, Berney regularly develops projects that allow him to explore various techniques and themes through photography.Currently he lives and works in Switzerland.

With this work, I raise image-related questions about the relationship between photography and reality. I focus on analyzing human perception in today’s technological environment. Applying the medial possibilities of photography, the viewer is directed to questioning and revising the reality of visual experience and rethinking the cognitive inclusion of the image.

As part of everyday life, the rapid rise of digital technology has led to a number of challenges in our contemporary life. Whilst dream-like scenes created through technology have become increasingly convincing, it is hard to distinguish our conventional understanding of the “real” from new digital realities. This weight of information forces us to sharpen our perceptions in order to avoid digital distraction.

The series includes photographic images created by imaging mock-ups built in a studio environment, balancing the visual world of video games and 3D graphics, at the border of real and computer-generated visuals. They point to the uncertainty of our visual receptiveness, calling for a layer of perception called Lev Manovich (by Walter Benjamin) as a labour of perception.

It also gains a critical reading of our techno-positivist approach, which is dominated by digital technology and virtual reality. I regard the camera as a device, a “prosthesis”, which is capable of questioning photographic authenticity, calling the manipulation of image editing programs. Thus, the series of photos, in the context of the digital photographic process, put the critical viewpoints that are often present today into a new context by reversing the relationship between reality and imaging.

Dávid Biró is an artist based in Budapest, Hungary. He graduated from Photography BA at the University of Kaposvár and Photography MA at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME).His main interest is the influence of the technical mediums on human perception. He uses the camera as an extension of the human sight and tries to examine the concept of reality and knowledge. Biró tests human perception, especially the way we look at photographic images. His precise compositions evoke the aesthetics of the digital world in which he and his generation grew up, while he is also questioning the future of photography in a computer-driven society. He mostly works in the studio environment and seeks to unfold his conceptual ideas in a progressive form.

For all the things the domestic scientists concerned themselves with—the correct ways of cleaning, sorting, scheduling—they were only the stage setting, not the central drama. Now we turn to the human actor for whom the stage was set.—Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English

"The Ordinary and the Domestic" is an ongoing project that explores the intersecting politics of contemporary technology and the home space. Utilizing a "nanny cam" to collect imagery over a 3 year period, these works are projected at variable sizes throughout a gallery space in order to mirror both surveillance activity and obsession. This work comments on the fear inducing quality of home surveillance imagery; an invasion of privacy as children adjust to being watched and seen through varying modes of technology and social media; and the boredom of constantly watching and waiting. Also examined is the interruption of a mother's "loving gaze," which is never received by the subject being constantly watched at a distance.

Elizabeth M. Claffey is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Indiana University in Bloomington and a Research Fellow atThe Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. She has an MFA in Studio Art from Texas Woman's University, where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies. In 2012, she was awarded aWilliam J. Fulbright Fellowship. Elizabeth's work focuses on the way personal and familial narratives are shaped by interactions with both domestic and institutional structures and spaces. Her work has been inshown in various galleries and published infamous magazines and others publications.

President Xi Jinping has a lifetime’s rule to achieve a “Stronger, Longer, Bigger” China, on the path to global dominance in technology. The government is creating a techno-authoritarian state powered by artificial intelligence and facial recognition to track and monitor all its citizens. By 2030 China will have one surveillance camera per person and a $150 billion industry by becoming a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence. It is already selling its ‘Big Brother’ surveillance technology to ‘abusive governments’. China's “Social Credit System”, fully operational by 2020, is designed to monitor, control and coerce its 1.4 billion citizens, in a gigantic social engineering experiment, where penalties include being shamed in public, losing access to rapid trains and high speed internet.

Nigel Dickinson, British documentary photographer, photojournalist, filmmaker, focuses on environment, marginalised communities, resistance, protest, sustainable development, identity, culture. Dickinson lives and works between Paris and London Publications: National Geographic, Stern, Figaro, Marie Claire, We Demain. His exhibitions were shown at Venice Biennale, Visa Pour l'Image, Arles Rencontres, Moving Walls 12, Rivington Place London, Kolga Tbilisi Photo, Denmark Triennale, Humanité Paris, and others. Has won many international awards worldwide.

My project is about Poland, the country of Europe, in which the technological boom is visible more than anywhere else. Poland is becoming a major European tech startup hub. I try to show places, social groups and people who develop modern technology, create it, popularize it or use it as a work tool.Through a multithreaded perspective I tried to document the most active group of Poles who are not afraid to use modern solutions and ideas. My story consists of many threads, from lesson of programming for children, through 3d printing and holograms technology to virtual reality, gamers’ world and building prototypes.

My name is Maciek Jaźwiecki and I am photographer and a former photo editor. For seven years I worked at the biggest Polish newspaper „Gazeta Wyborcza”. Besides the work for the newspaper where I cover daily news, the main field of my interest as a documentary photographer is the communities that develop and use technology in their activities. I am interested in both sides: creators and users, as well as how innovations and technology affect our everyday life, especially the way it could shape future generations.

"Intellectuals' roads in Lithuania"– images from google maps – of the roads and streets baptized by the names of philosophers, emerged as a goal and an opportunity to see what is the role of an intellectual in a society? What do we expect from them? What is the position we have foreseen for them? We have long rejected the idea of Plato's philosopher-ruler – the prevailing idea is that an intellectual should not gain political power, he should not be trusted to do significant decisions, but on the other hand, heshould not get caught up in the details of everyday life, should not risk drowning in the trivia, but on the contrary –should be able to maintain the possibility to look from aside, rise above trivialities, analyze what is happening with us, soberly, impartially and objectively. But isn't this vision a way of pushing intellectuals into the margins? Isn't saying that intellectuals have to keep at distance similar to an attempt to create a distance away from them, to place them in ivory towersor in moldy libraries, where they become lifeless and unnecessary?

Viktoras Bachmetjevas is a philosopher, head of Emmanuel Levinas' Center of Lithuanian University of Health Sciences. The Center is devoted to study and disseminate philosophical, intellectual and cultural legacy of Emmanuel Levinas(1906-1995), the famous French philosopher and existentialist of Jewish origin, who was born and raised in Kaunas. Bachmetjevas engaged in the research of modern ethics, he is particularly interested in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Søren Kierkegaard. Currently, his research is focused on the philosophical problem of the concept of forgiveness. He has taught philosophy at various Lithuanian universities. Outside academia, he has had a career in public communications and served as an advisor to the Lithuanian Minister of Culture.

Bachmetjevas is one of the conceivers and initiators of the ideato name the area neighboring Žaliakalnis funicular after Emmanuel Levinas. In 2015,it was officiallynamed E. Levinas square.The site extends from the intersection of V. Putvinskis and A. Mickevičius streets up the slope of the hill,almost to the top. Up on the hillstands Jonas Jablonskis Gymnasium, of which Bachmetjevas is a former graduate.This year, Bachmetjevas symbolically returns to the foot of Žaliakalnis funicular. The first reason is the "Intellectuals' Roads", extending the theme of the streets named after the intellectuals. The other reason is Emmanuel Levinas' Center. By the end of the year, it is expected to complete the reconstruction of the former French Embassy building (V. Putvinskio St. 14) and commence the activities of Emmanuel Levinas' Center. The initiative gives prospect to turn this area into a new center of interest.

Vilius Dranseika contributed to the implementation of the exhibition. Dranseika is a philosopher engaged in the study and promotion of moral psychology and experimental philosophy, lecturer at Vilnius University.

Gondo is a small town located on the border between Italy and Switzerland along the Sempione road that goes from Milan to Brig. The history of this place is linked to gold.The first signs of gold mining date back to the Romans but the real gold rush began in the 1600s thanks to Baron Stockalper.Baron Stockalper exploited more than 20 gold strands by building a series of mines. At that time the extraction had been doing manually with hammers and nails.After the fall of Baron Stockalper, the mines were abandoned for more than a century until were bought by the gold mining company "Société anonyme des Minesdʼor" of Paris. This company modernized the extraction system and starting with 100 employees had grown to more than 500 within a few years. More than 40 grams of gold were extracted per day and in the period between 1892 and 1897 there were extractedover 33 kilograms of gold. Part of this production was used to mint 29 GondoGoldvreneli (now much sought after; one was purchased for around 60,000 euros in 2009). After 1897 the extraction became unsustainable and the mines were closed.

However, a "new gold rush" has started a year ago. For now, there is a new type of gold this time: cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, ethereum, monero). The company that created this "mine" was founded by young local guys, in total about 10 people. In the mine, cryptocurrency is extracted for both the company and the customers.The extraction activity is carried out with video cards (GPU) that perform mathematical calculations allowing in determining conditions to find the cryptocurrencies. There are acting about 100 machines in this mine.

In both cases, the particular environmental conditions of Gondo made these two types of activitiespossible. If on one hand the particular composition of the rocks has allowed the formation of gold veins and therefore the possibility of digging in the mine emerged, on the other - the low temperatures typical of this mountain area and access to a low-cost electricity network (specifically hydroelectric energy) have made Gondo an ideal place for cryptocurrency mining activities. Also, parallelism is in terminology. For both gold and cryptocurrencies, the English term for these activities is Mining, while those who carry them out are called Miner in both cases.

This work offers photographs of historical documents, landscapes, crypto-mines and historical objects held at the Gondo Gold Museum, to be read at various levels in this village, its history and its future.

Claudio Cerasoli was born in 1986 in L'Aquila (Italy). After his studies in Economics hedevoted himself to photography. In 2018 he won the Canon Young Photographer Award for his work on Gondo, and has several publications in national and international magazines. Today he lives and works between L’Aquila and Rome.

When an organism is transported by man far from its original place, it is artificially introduced in an environment where it had not been present before and where it would not have gone autonomously, this organism can spread uncontrollably (fostered by the absence of natural enemies and mechanism of environmental self-regulation) becoming a full-fledged “alien”. An invader capable of carving out a space at the expense of other species.

This process has increased during the last decades due to the massive movements of goods and people and it has worsened because of the rise in temperatures which facilitate the introduction of many tropical species in temperate climate zones. The spread of the alien species has become one of the most obvious signs of the world’s current ecological imbalance, as a consequence of globalization, free borderless selling, consumer culture and global warming.

Italy is among the European countries that are worst affected by biological invasions. This is due to the variety of habitats of this country, mild temperatures that benefit tropical species, long history of trade and transport and careless environmental policy. There are more than 3000 alien species in Italy, which has been increased by 96% in the last 30 years. Today, together with the soil consumption, invasive alien species are the major threat to biodiversity in this country.

After graduating in Communication Sciences at IULM in Milan, Emanuela Colombo worked for almost 10 years in purchasing department of several companies in the area. Finally, she realized that it was not for her and decided to dedicate herself to her passion, photography. In 2007 Emanuela attended a Master in “Photography and Visual Design” at NABA in Milan. Since the beginning of 2007 she works with several NGOs to produce reportages, stories about their activities in Italy and abroad. Photographer published her work on Italian and foreign magazines.

Through the Looking Glass is a visual exploration that interrogates the surveillance state of social media by addressing the relationship of visual language and sentimentality of the photograph as a historical artefact. The exploration questions the effects of the visual imagery itself (a photograph) being corrupted or lost to the decay of over-processing and inquiries into the replacement of context from the original translation of the original file. This investigation has led the research of data decay/over-processing and how the translation of a photograph with lost information beyond basic translation is forced to use text or semiotics such as emojis, as an example, to compensate for the lack of contextualisation in its visual language. Although text/semiotics does not translate the original context of the visual language presented to the audience, rather it creates a new depiction of the context. The methodology approach of this photographic research used six post-production mobile device apps to explore the effects of over-processing/data bending the photographs and question the context of extremism being presented through modern photographic language. The series was created to be a part of the current debates/arguments in the issues of the internet is a critique of this shared space and the treatment of the photographic image in the public eye, while exploring the cultural impacts that the digital space and technologies have towards the historical preservation of documented events and how this could change the social behaviour of human rights in self-expression and freedom of speech in the modern-day society.

Calum Stamper is an artist from North Yorkshire whose work explores the nature and relationships of modern culture and behaviours in present-day society. Stamper is currently studying an MA in photography at the University of Sunderland and has an Adobe Associate Certification. His exploration into the digital space of the internet and social media has changed Stamper’s style from street/documentary to a contemporary representation that is a reflection of this artist’s perspective on discussed issues in the art industries and media.

In my latest photo series, "The Bully Pulpit", I investigate the social phenomenon of cyberbullying through the public profiles of people who attempt to bully me. For years, people have been hiding behind their computer screens to bully others to the point where writing criticizing comments is common and celebrated. These cowards use the internet to bully those they find weaker than themselves.

I photograph myself costumed like the people who’ve attempted to bully me. Finding photos online, I recreated their images using wigs, clothing, and simple prosthetics, while small imperfections mirror the fallacy that the internet will shield their identities. Finally, I overlay the parodies with transcripts of the bullying comments, almost as if I were "subtweeting" them.

My inspiration for "The Bully Pulpit" was the countless numbers of people wrote mean-spirited comments about me in emails, tweets, Instagram posts, blogs and online comments sections when "Wait Watchers" was published online and went viral. But instead of responding individually to “deaf ears”, I realize that I can parody the bullies attempts by creating images and publishing them on the internet —the same vehicle used for their attacks—and the images would be seen by millions, and would live again, again, and again.

Part performer, part artist, part provocateur, part spectator, Haley Morris-Cafiero explores the act of reflection in her photography. Morris-Cafiero’s photographs have been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, and have been featured in numerous newspapers, magazines and online including Le Monde, New York Magazine and Salon. Born in Atlanta, she is a graduate of the University of North Florida, where she earned a BA in Photography and a BFA in Ceramics in 1999. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2014 and a 2016 Fulbright finalist, Morris-Cafiero holds a MFA from the University of Arizona in Art. The Magenta Foundation published her monograph, "The Watchers", in 2015.

Previous Morris-Cafiero’s photo series "Wait Watchers" was exhibited last autumn in Lithuania, Kaunas Photo 2018 festival.