Exhibition Review: All I Know Is What’s On The Internet

Abstract

All I Know Is What’s On The Internet: The Photographers’ Gallery , by Harriet Riches. London, UK, October 26, 2018–February 24, 2019. Taking its title from a quote by US President Donald Trump, All I Know Is What’s On The Internet is at first glance a small exhibition of just eleven international individual artists and collaborative partnerships, which on closer inspection grows in scale and scope—and lasting affective power. With its stated aim to interrogate the systems through which photographic images in the twenty-first century proliferate and multiply online, the exhibition poses questions about new forms of value, knowledge, and work that update for a new era some of the critical discourses around the medium’s relationship to conditions of production—of meaning, of capital, and of labor. Particularly uncomfortable—but timely—is its exposure of the uneasy relationship between contemporary forms of post-Fordist human work and automation upon which the internet largely depends with its invisible army of bots, crowd-sourced digital pieceworkers, and intelligent machines. As an exhibition, it is itself quite hard work. The exhibits demand both sustained attention and interaction in the gallery and beyond, echoing the internet’s reliance on active audience engagement to generate and circulate its user content, contributing to the seemingly endless afterlife of the photographic image online. The three curious mechanical machines that make up Stephanie Kneissl and Max Lackner’s 2017 Stop the Algorithm [Image 1] attempt to confuse the logic on which social media content is produced and reproduced: one machine is fitted with a spinning mechanized thumb poised over the screen of an iPhone to scroll through Instagram’s never-ending feed, pausing at random to emulate—and confuse—the stop-start actions through which the platform evaluates and promotes its uploaded images. On another, two substitute fingertips hop up and down on the screen, occasionally pressing the “like” and “repost” buttons to manipulate the popularity of Twitter posts that have replaced traditional sources of news. IMAGE 1. Stop The Algorithm (2017) …