There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are some things we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the things we don’t know we don’t know.[1]

 Asked to write a piece on ‘New Tools in Photography: from Google to the Algorithm’, my first instinct was to type the sentence’s keywords into my Google browser: ‘photography google algorithm’. At the top of the list was an article from the CNN Money blog: “Can Google replace photographers with an algorithm?”[2]. The feature discussed the recent release of the platform’s new product, Clips, a home-entertaining surveillance camera designed to capture random ‘candid’ scenes in one’s own home. The gadget is just the latest in a series of Google software and experimental devices aimed at automation in image making that regularly upset the self-centred concept of authorship of amateurs, professionals and artists alike.

 

Among these inventions, one the most compelling is DeepDream, released in 2015, a computer vision program designed to detect faces and patterns in images with the aim of classifying them. The software has become popular for its ability to produce psychedelic and surreal imagery, generated algorithmically on a self-training basis, simulating hallucinogenic dream- and drug-like experiences by means of digital over-processing.

 

The ubiquity of the Internet in photography required first recognition on the topic back in 2011, after a full decade of overload of visual digital content. The starting point of this escalation is usually associated with the events of 9/11 – for its unquestioned uniqueness in terms of visual, geopolitical and historical meanings – even though it may also be interesting to relate it to the world surviving the Millennium Bug on January 1^st, 2000.

 

It feels like history, but From Here On, an exhibition-manifesto curated by Clément Chéroux, Joan Fontcuberta, Erik Kessels, Martin Parr and Joachim Schmid for the Rencontres Internationales d’Arles 2011, deeply shook the photographic community. A passionate ode to the fullness of the internet and its creative potential, the exhibition presented a range of works by a new generation of editors, be theyhuman, machine or other – Nancy Bean, the photographer cat from Devon, may ring a bell.

 

With the proper distinctions among their specific qualities (both in content and form), the featured artworks were made, or orchestrated, by individuals following a common thread: the registration and activation of pre-existing data – rightly, to a certain extent, the lack of curatorial intervention created fear for the future of quality in visual culture[3]. Appropriated, cut, displaced, edited, manipulated.

 

Whether they liked it or not, when the internet exploded artists were forced to rethink their position within this new cultural horizon. Leaving aside those who merely simulated or deliberately ignored the change, surfing became the modus operandi for many, who went in search of an authorial stance in their screens, looking for ‘general web content’, usually banal in its origins, waiting to be indexed and curated[4]. This reaction was the expression of a human necessity to impose order, typical in periods of sudden visual excess, like the 1920s avant-garde and the explosion of mass communication in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Pioneering projects such as Erik Kessels’s 24hrs in photos, Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (first exhibited in 2011 and 2006, respectively) and Mishka Henner’s Fifty-one US Military Outposts (2010) paved the way for many artists who explored new forms of arbitrary combinations of data, as if they were somehow produced from ‘the point of view of images’[5]. This fundamental phase of comprehension gradually helped image-makers overcome an essentially static idea of how photography could be made and read once it became part of the ether of digital information[6].

 

“Ladies and Gentlemen. May I have your attention please? The new name for contemporary art is ‘Neen’. Shall I repeat? N-E-E-N. I hope you like it. It is made by a computer program. Have a nice evening.”[7]

 

Differently from the 1980s and 1990s when technology was represented as an alienating dimension[8], digital tools and their outputs have been rapidly naturalized within our lives. Beyond the excitement for novelty – along with the human fear of being annihilated – is the everyday. In the end, “The Web is nothing more or less than what the World has always been. Unvisited and unfriendly territories that one after the other change to interior landscape.”[9] Following this assumption, even in photography, there is no longer a need to point out whether an image or another required use of technology, for the artist is immersed in the network just as anybody else.

 

It didn’t take long for this awareness of the internet as a new companion in our journey to be named: in 2006, the artist Marisa Olson defined her own art as Post-Internet. Since then, the term has changed in meaning as often as it’s been uttered, ultimately settling into a more spacious idea – Internet Awareness[10] – of Post-Internet as a quality inherent to our being in space and time, which embraces all aspects of life. This breach, albeit seemingly vague, has allowed the maturation of a more profound phase, one in which “we are ready to move on and say something more with the internet, not just talk about it.”[11]

 

What’s most interesting about the term ‘Post-Internet’ lies in its re-discussion as proposed by Olson herself in the eponymous article written for Foam Magazine in 2011 on the occasion of its 10^th anniversary issue What’s Next?. The first and foremost meaning of Post-Internet lies in the English word ‘after’: one which can signify ‘in the style of’just as much as ‘following’. So the phrase avoids the limitations of a temporal, conclusive statement. “When we pop a post on the front end of a thing, we place priority on priorness. But the time-delay between the conjoined terms should be measured in the context of the near-future, not a vast remove.” Olson continues, “There is no post-epoch, only a categorical here-and-now that will persist until it doesn’t.”[12] For the very same reason, ‘Post-Photography’ – as applied to whatever happened after the internet became widespread – does no justice to the excitement surrounding the subject’s ever-changing almost-future present condition.

 

On the one hand, artists dealing with the photographic image – amongst whom those presented in this issue are punctual and precious examples – have accepted new technologies as an integral part of their methods, embracing all available possibilities such as digital imaging, computational photography, motion graphics, collaborative web-based projects and 3D-rendering, to name but a few. Disregarding photographic traditions and techniques, as artist Lucas Blalock suggests, to consider “the image’s material in terms of a container for manufactured desire (that needs not be photographic at all but simply act ‘like a photograph’) is a really inventive solution.”[13] The photographic object does not even need to be the formal result.

 

But that’s not all. While most artists still find their audience in traditional display channels, photography’s relationship with the net on one side and with the moving image on the other – a natural and inevitable shift derived from the blending of recording tools in today’s devices and distribution methods – has infiltrated the profound depths of the virtual word, running towards its natural destiny. The other one.

 

The collapse of physical space has granted photography new opportunities of reproducibility and mutability: that which is online can be copied, and that which can be copied can be shared. In 2009, the Greek artist Miltos Manetas presented his Manifesto against intellectual property and copyright, inviting the pirates of the internet – that is to say, each person with an internet connection and a computer – to gather in name of the defence and protection of the internet: our new country, a new territory of information.[14] The manifesto followed the actions carried out since 2000 by a group of artists working under the (computer-generated) name of NEEN: an all-inclusive conception of off and online contemporary art, one bereft of any physical volume or support. In other words, software.

 

Refusing the idea of ‘original’ artwork and the logics of scarcity at the base of the traditional systems of art distribution[15], the group focused on the possibility of an artwork that could freely navigate on any possible support, with no copyright, ownership or intellectual property restrictions. Artie Vierkant, who describes himself as “an artist active on the Internet and in physical space”[16], resumes this radical approach in his essay-statement The Image Object Post-Internet (2010), highlighting how the substance of an image, both its materiality and importance, can no longer be regarded as more important or greater than any of its copies. And if one can make multiple, variable versions of the same art object – at the core of generative artworks in which the artist’s input is but the start of a chain of unexpected outputs and interactions – the link between the identity of an art object and its medium is forever broken[17].

 

In his essay Post-Media Aesthetics, Lev Manovich suggests that art after the internet requires the abolition of media-based typology – traditional categories such as painting, photography, sculpture and the more recent and equally ineffective “installation”, which has become insufficient to describe how today’s culture functions. As for photography in the Post-Internet era, when it does not deal with the nature of the art object, its accessibility, reception and social presence become fundamental.

 

Image-making responds now to a different language, one that is ever more important to learn if we intend to make culture comprehensible to new generations – 2018 marks the 18^th birthday of the last horde of Millennials: potential artists with no direct experience or baggage of allegiance to photography’s past. Information, data, interface, hyperlink, stream, storage. All of these concepts and techniques of the computer era determine our “information behaviour”, and our own personal and collective identification processes, that is to say the way we access and process information, ourselves and others. While looking forward to the inevitable novelties the advent of a whole new generation of artists will bring, it seems natural to question whether and how this change will affect the features of the human-computer interface (HCI).

 

In the information society – as opposed to modernism, which naturally provided artists with new physical objects to be represented in all their pulsing mechanical splendour – our setting is described in Manovich’s words as essentially “anti-visual”, naturally talented at “resisting visualization”[18]. Whether working, playing videogames, producing or receiving information, we do not paint any visible gestures or patterns. Our relationship with the machine is visually static, while bits bounce off like wild fire throughout their invisible dimension. Our repertory of gestures – or, rather, positions – is irregular, limited to few movements that have little, if anything, to do with the content of our own actions. We sit in front of our computers awfully still, static figures with vitreous eyes, our fingers shrivelled on our devices. And everything looks exactly the same.