These days it can feel as if half of the news cycle is fake news, half is concerned with the fake news, and a third half bemoans the impact of this cruel and unusual media circus on our mental health, democracy and culture. None of it makes sense. We are repeatedly told that we are addicted to likes, manipulated by media platforms which know us better than we know ourselves, while images whipped up by uncanny new AI or old-fashioned fraudsters try to bamboozle us. Increasingly, entertainment veers towards exploitation.
A healthy ecosystem of think pieces, masters degrees, and consulting jobs has grown from this rich manure of media anxiety, while exhibitions like Somerset House’s Big Bang Data in 2016, and individual works from the likes of Wesley Goatley, James Bridle and Julian Oliver offer richer perspectives.
Into this crowded space steps , a worthwhile but not groundbreaking exhibition about the systems and infrastructures that underpin 21st-century image culture.
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The journey begins in empty space. Winnie Soon’s Unerasable Images consists of 300 screenshots taken in China between January and December 2017. They display the results obtained when Google’s image search was tasked with finding the moment in 1989 outside Tiananmen Square when a man faced down a tank. Pictures not of the protest have been edited out. As a consequence, most of these screenshots are white fields, left barren by Chinese state censorship. There is however a Lego recreation of the iconic scene (pictured above), which apparently survived for months before a change in the algorithm, or human intervention, rooted it out. Soon’s work shows the search process as something dynamic and evolving: something to fight for, and to struggle with.
Around the corner, in installation World Brain, two videos play amid tree stumps. Each film puts the reality of the web into question.ĚýIn one, sharks chew on stubbornly physical transatlantic fibre-optic cables – so much for all those “cloudy” metaphors for the internet. In the other, researchers attempt to survive in a forest using only information they learned, abstracted, on Wikipedia.
Much work here is about the people who facilitate on-line exchanges of imagery and information. The hands of people digitising pages for Google books, caught accidentally in some of their scans, populate Andrew Norman Wilson’s ScanOps. The faces of Google Street View operators are captured as they adjust equipment in Emilio Vavarella’s The Google Trilogy 3: The Driver and the Cameras. Eva and Franco Mattes’s stories of internet content moderators lift the lid on a world of horrors we’re normally saved from seeing.
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All of this begs a question: in what sense are these systems truly “invisible”? Who is left to be surprised? If you work alongside thousands of other content moderators in an office block in India or the Philippines, getting PTSD from days spent watching obscene and brutal videos, these systems are already a present and tangible reality. There is no revelation or secret to be excited at, and engaged by.
The stories and systems uncovered in All I Know is What’s on the Internet are interesting, but at this stage in the “media cycle about the media cycle”, revelation is not enough.
Brigading_Conceit by Constant Dullaart (pictured above) is a sculpture made from hundreds of SIM cards that the artist used to create an “army” of fake identities to “like” Instagram posts, aping the acts of hundreds of political parties around the world in recent years . There’s a military metaphor to be read in the large mirrored surface of the sculpture, where SIM cards have been arranged in battle formations. It’s a highly Instagrammable piece; the perfect backdrop for a selfie. But the metaphor of the bot army, and the mirror reflecting the narcissism of social media, are fairly familiar conceits. Dullaart’s work aestheticises the problem without taking us any further.
There is nothing wrong with a gorgeous picture, but it brings us uncomfortably close to where we started: mesmerised by a cycle of entertaining, consumable shocks.
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runs at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, to 24 February
Lydia Nicholas is a researcher in ethics and culture
