Songs of the Sky, Les Rencontres d’Arles
The exhibition ‘Songs of the Sky – Photography & the Cloud’ will be shown at Les Rencontres De La Photographie in Arles, after first exhibiting at C/O Berlin earlier this year. The show will include several of my Celestial cyanotype works.
Thinking about photography today entails a consideration of the infrastructures that form and organize networks. Regardless of whether images are generated by surveillance cameras or satellites, or consist of archival material or personal vacation photographs on our smartphones and laptops, almost all photographs are saved as digital data on the cloud. But the cloud is not a romantic place up there. It is a network that constantly relocates our data. It is a machine through which artificial intelligence learns. It is also a techno-capitalist system that is lent material form by hard drives, cables, and computers. Similar to the way that clouds resonated in the beginning of abstraction in photography one hundred years ago, the way artists today interact with the cloud reflects the twenty-first century’s visions of the future. Juxtaposing historical and contemporary photographs, the exhibition mirrors the consequences of cloud-computing technology on climate change and geopolitics.
Images: Installation views © C/O Berlin Foundation, David von Becker
Claudia Angelmaier (1972), Sylvia Ballhause (1977), Marie Clerel (1988), Raphaël Dallaporta (1980), Noémie Goudal (1984), Louis Henderson (1983), Noa Jansma (1996), Stefan Karrer (1981), Almut Linde (1965), NASA, Lisa Oppenheim (1975), Trevor Paglen (1974), Simon Roberts (1974), Evan Roth (1978), Mario Santamaría (1985), Adrian Sauer (1976), Andy Sewell (1978), Shinseungback Kimyonghun, (Shin Seung Back, 1979, Kim Yong Hun, 1980), Louis Vignes (1831-1896) & Charles Nègre (1820-1880), World Meteorological Organization.
WITH THE COLLABORATION OF C/O BERLIN AND THE KULTURSTIFTUNG DES BUNDES.