Networked Images on Display

The linking of digital image and communication technologies in mobile devices marks a media upheaval. The photographic field and the field of telecommunications have been connected and reshaped through smartphone technologies: integrated into apps, image production, processing and distribution are increasingly merging into one single flowing process. This infrastructure enables practices of image sharing, liking and commenting via social media regardless of distance. As media and as a social practice of sharing, networked images (Rubinstein/Sluis 2008) have become a central component of a globalized post-digital lifestyle. Through the expansion of the audiences, images have become a transnational means of speech and an image currency. Entangled between the economic interests of global corporations and the need for self-representation in the attention economies of the prosumers, networked images exert a powerful cultural impact. Image feeds have not only conquered our everyday lives but they have also become a central subject of artistic production and a crucial object in contemporary art. However, there has still been no comprehensive systematic investigation into the correlation of networked images and art exhibitions. Discussing works of contemporary art by Adam Basanta, Marc Lee and Erik Kessels the lecture will relate the terms “display and dispositive” (Frohne/Haberer/Urban, 2019) to the practices of the exhibition of networked images. The investigation is guided by the following question: What new and expanded modes of perception and reception does the art exhibition open up as an aesthetic, ideological and social space for the phenomenon of networked images?