CSNI

Photographic research has two related objects of attention. Firstly we are interested in current work around computer vision and how it is being framed and taken up in research labs and commercial development. Secondly we are interested in what is happening to cameras and the optics of vision.

Applications Invited for Artist in Residence Expanded Photographic Practices London South Bank University

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Artist in Residence: Expanded Photography Practices, London South Bank University Applications are invited for a new Artist in Residence programme at London South Bank University (LSBU). We are seeking to appoint a dynamic and enthusiastic person who is seeking time and access to resources to develop their practice and would benefit demonstrably from doing this within the practice, research and teaching culture at LSBU. The residency will be for 5 months, running from Oct 2019 to March 2020, cumulating in a public exhibition in Borough Road Gallery. Photography at London South Bank University includes the BA(Hons) Photography programme, the South Bank Collective; a student run production agency, the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image; a research centre made up of … [Read more...]

Curating Photography in the Networked Image Economy

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From 1st December 2018, the CSNI researcher Katrina Sluis will be undertaking a Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project “Curating Photography in the Networked Image Economy” in collaboration with Dr Wolfgang Brückle, Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences, Fotomuseum Winterthur, FotoColectania and The Photographers’ Gallery. The central objective of the research is to generate new academic, professional and public knowledge and understanding of how the networked image economy is transforming established models of curating photography and the production and location of cultural value. In doing so, it proposes to bring the largely disconnected fields of museum curating, social media curation and computational photography into productive dialogue. … [Read more...]

‘Crowd Theory’ and ‘Like Fire Walk with Me’ in Melbourne

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The CSNI associate researcher and artist Simon Terrill is currently showing his work in two exhibitions in Melbourne. The first is at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) where Terrill presents a retrospective of his 'Crowd Theory' project (2004 - today). The exhibition explores crowd dynamics and the relationship between urban architectural spaces and those who inhabit them. In a conceptual dialogue with the CCP exhibition, Like Fire Walk with Me in Sutton Gallery, is centred around the Plato’s Academy Park in Athens, Greece, a public space of gathering and a site that Terrill returns to time and again. Exhibition dates:Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP): 2 February – 31 March 2019Sutton Gallery: 2 February - 2 March 2019 … [Read more...]

Operation Earnest Voice

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Over 4 days in January 2019, CSNI Researcher Katrina Sluis worked with the artist Jonas Lund to transform the 3rd Floor of The Photographers’ Gallery into an influencing office tasked with reversing Brexit. Part installation, part performance, part working think tank, Operation Earnest Voice aimed to explore and interrogate the numerous tools, methods and strategies used to influence public opinion online, from the generation of fake followers to the fabrication of images.The name of the project is an inspiration from Operation Earnest Voice, the US-sponsored campaign, whose purpose is to spread pro-American propaganda on social networking sites. Find our more about the project on the artist's page, while you can also watch the stream that captured live the 4 days of the installation / … [Read more...]

Post-Capitalist Photography Now!

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In dialogue with The Photographers' Gallery exhibition All I Know Is What's On The Internet, the one day symposium 'Post-Capitalist Photography Now!' explored issues around photography's capacity to challenge neoliberalism and bring alternative systems into view, and the roles of public institutions and the art world in such a context. Questions addressed include how do we make sense of photography’s relationship to corporate power? Do participatory photographic cultures serve the interests of global capital or provide potential sites for resistance? In what ways can we think about photography as work? And does computational culture extend, disrupt or intensify photography’s historical relationships to post-Fordist capitalism?The full programme of the symposium is available here and you … [Read more...]

Machine Glancing

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In December 2018, the CSNI PhD researcher Nicolas Malevé took part in the Image Net/Works conference, organised by Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur. The conference focused on images and the associated economies of looking, producing and sharing as well as the photography's changing role in the context of contemporary political-­economic systems. Malevé presented his paper titled 'Machine Glancing'. You can find the programme and the abstracts of the conference here. … [Read more...]

All I Know Is What’s On The Internet

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The exhibition 'All I Know Is What's On The Internet' at The Photographers' Gallery in London, presents the work of 11 contemporary artists and groups seeking to map, visualise and question the cultural dynamics of 21st Century image culture. It is curated by the CSNI researcher Katrina Sluis, whom you can hear talking about the ideas and the works of the show in the interview below:Participating Artists: Mari Bastashevski, Constant Dullaart, IOCOSE, Stephanie Kneissl & Max Lackner, Eva & Franco Mattes, Silvio Lorusso & Sebastian Schmieg, Winnie Soon, Emilio Vavarella, Stéphane Degoutin & Gwenola Wagon, Andrew Norman Wilson, Miao Ying.Exhibition duration: 26 October 2018 - 24 February 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K6Xbo6Y07c … [Read more...]

CSNI Summer School 2018

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The second annual CSNI Summer School took place in the 7th of June at Jerwood Space in London and it was a rich day of presentations and discussions. This year's invited speakers included Dr. Geoff Cox and Dr. Magda Tyżlik-Carver who presented their current research projects and responded to the presentations by the CSNI PhD students and led the discussion during the day. The Summer School was also joined by CSNI associate researchers Adam Brown and Simon Terrill from London South Bank University (LSBU), Dr. Elena Marchevska, head of the Centre of Digital Storymaking at LSBU as well as Dr Cayo Honorato from University of Brasilia. See below the schedule of the day for an idea of the topics covered and discussed: … [Read more...]

P3: Post-Photography Prototyping Prize

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CSNI associate researchers Adam Brown and Alan Warburton, along with the game designer Tabea Iseli, were this year's winning team of the P3: Post-Photography Prototyping Prize! Brown, Warburton and Iseli worked under the theme of 'Generative Photography' and created the prototyping project Freezing the Photographer.  The Post-Photography Prototyping Prize (P3) is a biennial prize that supports artists, creative technologists and researchers questioning the changing role of photographic media. In 2018, the second edition of the P3 encouraged interdisciplinarity and collaboration, bringing artists, technologists and researchers together to address specific issues that underlie the changes in contemporary photographic culture. Academics, visual artists and creative coders joined forces to … [Read more...]

Complex Values – Somerset House Studios

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Alan Warburton's work Homo Economicus is part of a new exhibition at the Somerset House Studios which questions the implications of producing, collecting and sorting data for society and the individual. The exhibition, titled 'Complex Values', includes the works of three resident artists at the Somerset House Studios: Alan Warburton, the curatorial platform Album Corp and the art-research duo FRAUD. Homo Economicus is an installation with video and sculpture which focuses on the ideas of men who work in the City of London's financial district, and examines how they both modify and commodify their own bodies. The work intentionally conflates the corporate and the corporeal, questioning male self-worth and its apparent apotheosis in the hyper-competitive financial services … [Read more...]

‘Encounters: Photography and Curation’ symposium

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What does photographic curation mean in an era of the fluid image and during a time of non-medium specificity? On the 2nd of June 2018, Katrina Sluis, CSNI Researcher and Digital Curator at The Photographers' Gallery, spoke in the 'Encounters: Photography and Curation' symposium - a collaboration between The Photographers' Gallery and London College of Communication, UAL). The symposium aimed to examine the relatively under-discussed area of photography curation at a time when academic curating programs are expanding globally and our understanding of the practice is evolving. Sluis' presentation was part of the panel Encounters which also featured Tim Clark (Curator and Founding Editor, 1000 Words), Lucy Moore (Director, Claire de Rouen Books), and Lars Willumeit (independent … [Read more...]

CAS Annual Conference – The Virtual in Museums: Hot Medium?

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On the 10th of May 2018, Professor Andrew Dewdney presented a talk with the title "What Is The Current Fascination With VR On The Part Of Museums And Art Galleries?" in the Contemporary Art Society’s 2018 Annual Conference. This year's annual conference explored the rapid development of digital imagery in the artistic realm and its representation in museums. Abstract: Over the past two years more and more national and international museums and galleries have teamed up with technology companies to demonstrate how VR applications can be used in the cultural heritage sector. Modigliani’s studio in VR at Tate Britain, The Royal Academy in partnership with HTC Vive demonstrating VR in the ‘From Life’ exhibition, Zaha Hadid’s Architecture in VR at the Serpentine or Matt Collishaw’s … [Read more...]

New Media Egologies

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Juan Martín Prada, CSNI external researcher associate, has contributed a paper titled New Media Egologies in the 6th issue of the journal Re-visiones.  This article addresses the notion of the web as a mirrored sphere. The debate about the primacy of a psychomorphic vision of reality, associated with the use of the new technologies of connectivity, is here related with the practices of self-representation and hipervisibilisation that are characteristic of the new communicative and social habits that take place in the network-system. Key words: web 2.0, social networks, self-representation, egology, multitude Read the full article, here. … [Read more...]

BBC Radio 4: Powerpointless

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CSNI Researcher Katrina Sluis was recently interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 Programme 'PowerPointless', a documentary on the culture and aesthetics of Microsoft PowerPoint. She discussed the production of the 2016 Media Wall project PowerPoint Polemics at The Photographers' Gallery and the contribution of artists including Clunie Reid. Listen to the programme, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b092r9j0 … [Read more...]

Alan Warburton: Goodbye Uncanny Valley

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CSNI Researcher Alan Warburton has just released a new video essay online It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real... but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is... what happens now? Written and animated by Alan Warburton with the support of Tom Pounder and Wieden + Kennedy. … [Read more...]

Workers’ education in the age of intelligent machines

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Workshop 22 July, 12pm start with Nicolas Malevé and Adam Brown: Rethinking workshop / Rethinking work @The Photographers' Gallery in London [part of geekender and Experimental Photo School] 16 - 18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW What kind of work is photography, and how can a photographic worker be taught, in the face of increasing automation, precarious working and a saturated market? Thinking back to the beginnings of workers’ education in the nineteenth century, a historical emphasis on self-empowerment through creativity persists in contemporary creative education, but how does one empower an algorithm, and does the camera or digital network now play the role of ‘middle management?’ … [Read more...]

Experimental Photo School: Geekender

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5-7 May 2017 TPG Geekender: Experimental Photo School with Morehshin Allahyari, Gretchen Andrew, Adam Brown, Rich Cochraine, Claire Davis, Gene Kogan, Nicolas Malevé, Andrew McGettigan, David West, organised by Katrina Sluis, Ioana Zouli with support from Nicolas Malevé The collision of photography with planetary scale computing is transforming the medium, disrupting traditional conceptions of visual literacy, raising new questions concerning the agency and cultural value of images and creating new job opportunities even as it destroys others. Today, computer scientists develop algorithms to read, organize and valorize the billions of images which circulate online without familiarity or reference to the history of aesthetics or photography theory. Animals, weather cameras … [Read more...]

The University of YouTube: the medium, the user, photography and the search for really useful knowledge

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The University of YouTube: The Medium, the User, Photography and the Search for Really Useful Knowledge. by Andrew Dewdney In Unthinking Photography, September 2016   This short text is the result of an attempt to understand photographic theory by YouTube, which took the shape of an online errand of forking paths, full of interesting digressions, leading of course everywhere and nowhere. After several evenings of semi-distracted browsing and a solid half-day of clicking and watching I had to put a stop to it. Just how many paid/unpaid, work/leisure hours should one dedicate to the world’s third most visited website, where five billion videos are watched each day by over one billion users who upload 300 hours of video every minute ? By what methods is such a vast repository … [Read more...]

‘The cat sits on the bed’, Pedagogies of vision in human and machine learning

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'The cat sits on the bed', Pedagogies of Vision in Human and Machine Learning by Nicolas Malevé In Unthinking Photography, September 2016 I am watching Professor Fei-Fei Li, director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab giving a TED Talk titled ‘How we teach computers how to see’, uploaded to the YouTube platform. She begins her lecture by evoking an image of a three-year-old girl: “She might still have a lot to learn about this world, but she is already an expert at one very important task: to make sense of what she sees.” (00:38) The little girl is the first of the many children that will illustrate the presentation, including Leo, Li’s son. However, another child (albeit never qualified as such) looms in the background: the machine learning algorithm. … [Read more...]

Visiting Researchers @ CSNI

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Juan Martín Prada & Remedios Zafra Visiting Researchers July - September 2016 Expected Research // Centre for the Study of Networked Image, LSBU Considering art as a privileged practice for the critical examination of digital and visual culture, the purpose of this research proposal is to investigate in depth the emerging challenges and transformations of the photographic image as a symbolic agent and as a medium for the (self)representation of social identity as produced and distributed in the Internet. … [Read more...]

A Digital Summat: engaging, critically with structures and strictures.

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Informal seminar Katrina Sluis @ Animate Projects in partnership with QUAD Friday 22 January 2015, Derbys (UK) Animate Projects in partnership with QUAD are holding an informal seminar on critically engaged digital practice. Artists and curators will make brief provocations, referencing notable artworks, organisations and events, to set a context for a discussion addressing questions that may include: How do we square embracing and utilising technological change and forms, with critical interrogation? Does public strategy help or hinder, lead, follow or shape practice? How does creative innovation and experiment blur distinctions across commercial and cultural practice? … [Read more...]

25 Years of Photoshop Party, The Photographers’ Gallery

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4 and 25 October @ The Photographers' Gallery, London Join us for our inaugural "Geekender", a weekend of events and workshops devoted to digital culture on 24th and 25th October at The Photographers' Gallery, London.  Saturday night we will open late until 9pm, with a party to celebrate 25 years of Photoshop. Experience the delights of being hands-on with Photoshop version 1.0, a live “cut and paste” studio (SouthBank Collective) and a Photoshop Battle. Photoshop Layer Cake and RGB Drinks will be served from the Photoshop “Toolbar” whilst Adam Brown (Buncefield Records) will translate your favourite JPEG images into sound in a special DJ set. Visuals taking you through the history and culture of Photoshop will be provided by Central Saint Martins MA Photography … [Read more...]