Photo exhibition: SITUATIONS #20 – #22: Formats
Venue: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Gruezenstrasse 44+45, Winterthur, 8400, Switzerland
from 03-10-2015 to 29-11-2015, Tue-Sun: 11-18 hrs, Wed: 11-20 hrs, Mon: closed
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[O]n 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.
The SITUATIONS programme is organised around key clusters: the first was Relations (SITUATIONS #1 to #8), examining the changing social ontology of photography in relation to digital culture. The second cluster Seeing Machines (SITUATION #9 to #19) explored the way that technologies of seeing are increasingly devoid of human agency, the unprecedented power of algorithmic vision developing a new mode of ‘seeing’. 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.
The latest cluster, launched on 3 October 2015, is Formats (SITUATIONS #20 to #22), an exploration of lost and changing visual formats. As the lifespan of data storage formats decreases, the Internet provides unprecedented modes of production and distribution by which media content is constantly copied, transformed and circulated, thus persisting in both old and new formats. What reflections arise from these medial transformations and what implications do they have for a contemporary examination of art and photography?
Submitted by Daniela Schwendimann
