Past cluster | Saturday, 08.12.2018 – Sunday, 17.02.2019

To look is to labor

The photographic industry not only introduced new fields and practices of work, but was furthermore instrumental in the optimisation of industrialised forms of labour. Photographic images, in turn, became crucial in re-organising our perception by capitalising on our gazes. In today’s digital systems, the viewer’s gaze is tracked and analysed to perfect the “harvesting of eyeballs”, turning every spectator into a worker.

In the production models of our so-called attention economy, digitally networked technologies and photographic media play a fundamental role. What Jonathan Beller expressed so succinctly in the phrase “To look is to labor” in The Cinematic Mode of Production, has of late been the subject of digital elaboration. Photographic images on major social media platforms are accompanied by metrics that suggest their value, giving rise to new forms of labour, with influencers, cloud workers and crowdfunding campaigns being some of the – more or less visible – agents in the global production tied to the networked image. The current cluster investigates these increasingly complex modes of production and the relations between photographers, the image network, as well as images and their viewers.

With works by Zoe Beloff, Saskia Groneberg, Silvio Lorusso, Joana Moll, Sebastian Schmieg, Indre Urbonaite and Andrew Norman Wilson.

  • The Dating Brokers
  • Indre Urbonaite
  • Conference Image Net/Works
  • Saskia Groneberg
  • Sebastian Schmieg
  • Jonathan Beller
  • Zoe Beloff
  • Silvio Lorusso
  • Andrew Norman Wilson