Workshop’s programme

Curating Social Media
12th & 13th September 2019
The Photographers’ Gallery

Speakers: Brian Droitcour (Art in America), Olia Lialina (artist), Félix Magal (Museum of Internet), Anika Meier (Monopol/This Ain’t ArtSchool), Olga Goriunova (Scholar), Annet Dekker (Curator), Hannah Ray (Condé Nast/Vogue), Wolfgang Wild (Retronaut), Matthew Plummer Fernandez (artist).

A two day event which brings together artists, critics, academics, curators and social media misfits to explore photography’s relationship to the ‘curation economies’ of the museum, web and cloud. How might photography be curated in the context of post-scarcity? How are photographs being shaped into new aggregations that in turn harness new vectors of attention and value online? What is the role of the curator working within online platforms?

Network users, technologists and cultural organisations presently engage with the problem of curating images from very different, yet complementary positions. The computer sciences seek to optimise and automate the flow of visual information, through the production of a new generation of algorithms which exploit deep learning, computer vision and machine learning to analyse, aesthetically evaluate and automate the curation of image content. Cultural managers, on the other hand, tend to approach‘the digital’ predominantly as a tool and adopt the analogue broadcast model of one-to many transmission based on traditional models of institutional cultural authority and disciplinary expertise.

The network user or social media curator occupies another set of positions, variously engaged with the organisation of visual content in terms of creative expression and identity construction (‘curating the self’); the preservation of online image cultures and their communities; or the acquisition of cultural capital through the aggregation and circulation of image content (‘self-branding’).

This two day workshop seeks to open up the tensions between these different positions, in order to develop an expanded account of photography and curating in computational culture.

Programme
2-6pm, Thursday 12th September
Session 1: Circulation & Audience
Brian Droitcour, Hannah Ray, Anika Meier, Wolfgang Wild, Annet Dekker, Gaia Tedone.

9:30 –1:30pm, Friday 13th September
Session 2: Curating Network Culture
Olia Lialina, Olga Goriunova, Félix Magal, Matthew Plummer Fernandez.

Read the detailed programme

Part of ‘Curating Photography in the Networked Image Economy’, a collaborative research project in partnership with Fotomuseum Winterthur, Foto Colectania, The Photographers’ Gallery, Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Design, Australian National University & Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Free, Booking Essential: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=1333