Digital III: Generative
With DIGITAL, the Fotogalerie Wien is dedicating its latest focus series to a topic that is shaping our entire epoch. Speculation about workers spending a great portion of their waking life with their eyes glued to a monitor no longer belongs to the realm of fiction. The globe rotates beneath a net of satellites that continuously generate images of its surface. Almost all of us carry a computer in our trouser pockets, we are all under surveillance, measured and expressed in two numbers: zero and one. Digitalisation has had wide-ranging consequences for photography. Some have declared it dead. But contrarily photographic imaging processes have developed into an important principle of our digital life style. Photographs are produced and consumed in unprecedented numbers. Photographs on small, garish screens have become the interface of algorithms and our emotions, desires, fears and dreams. We dare to cast a gaze on this present and show, in three exhibitions centred on the DIGITAL, an overview of the technologies and the reactions of artists to them. Together with them we are attempting to get a sense of the intangible and to assess its potential and dangers.
The third chapter of our main focus series is entitled GENERATIVE. It is devoted to the creative power and the momentum of digital systems. Here, different rules apply: The continuum of physical reality is transferred into abstract information, into discrete values. The material becomes a text. A kind of parallel world emerges without ambivalence, without fluid transitions, without blurred boundaries. In this world, every process can be clearly defined and must follow absolute laws. According to definitive rules digital systems generate new data and use these as a basis for further calculations. In this way, they expand their own possibilities into the potentially infinite. It seems as if almost anything, any image, sound or text can be simulated by machines. In a sense, digital technologies have imitated 鈥渃reation鈥�: something has been created that can in turn create. The results of these processes are beyond the imagination and control of their creators. Perhaps we are fortunate that our machines are not designed to last, in accordance with the free-market system that created them.
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With DIGITAL, the Fotogalerie Wien is dedicating its latest focus series to a topic that is shaping our entire epoch. Speculation about workers spending a great portion of their waking life with their eyes glued to a monitor no longer belongs to the realm of fiction. The globe rotates beneath a net of satellites that continuously generate images of its surface. Almost all of us carry a computer in our trouser pockets, we are all under surveillance, measured and expressed in two numbers: zero and one. Digitalisation has had wide-ranging consequences for photography. Some have declared it dead. But contrarily photographic imaging processes have developed into an important principle of our digital life style. Photographs are produced and consumed in unprecedented numbers. Photographs on small, garish screens have become the interface of algorithms and our emotions, desires, fears and dreams. We dare to cast a gaze on this present and show, in three exhibitions centred on the DIGITAL, an overview of the technologies and the reactions of artists to them. Together with them we are attempting to get a sense of the intangible and to assess its potential and dangers.
The third chapter of our main focus series is entitled GENERATIVE. It is devoted to the creative power and the momentum of digital systems. Here, different rules apply: The continuum of physical reality is transferred into abstract information, into discrete values. The material becomes a text. A kind of parallel world emerges without ambivalence, without fluid transitions, without blurred boundaries. In this world, every process can be clearly defined and must follow absolute laws. According to definitive rules digital systems generate new data and use these as a basis for further calculations. In this way, they expand their own possibilities into the potentially infinite. It seems as if almost anything, any image, sound or text can be simulated by machines. In a sense, digital technologies have imitated 鈥渃reation鈥�: something has been created that can in turn create. The results of these processes are beyond the imagination and control of their creators. Perhaps we are fortunate that our machines are not designed to last, in accordance with the free-market system that created them.
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