Unnumerous books full of prohibitions as a start, something you rarely experience in a museum. They are laid out neatly in showcases, some of which you can browse through, but the commanding tone of the titles already conveys the desire for black pedagogy: “Snapshots, but right!” That there was a time when the search for the “perfect picture “ could increase to hard work on the camera is hardly imaginable in the era of triumphant AI. But the sheer volume of publications that were once intended to help avoid possible mistakes when taking photos or developing speaks for itself. Creativity was not what this advice literature had in mind. For this reason alone, it must have been a source of joy for artists who despised regulations.
The authors deliberately caused streaks and veils like in the early days of photography, which with its blurred images already anticipated the image disruptions of the avant-garde. In André Kertész's work in 1929, all it takes is a shattered window glass to transform the city behind it into a puzzle of disparate pieces. In the same year, Man Ray exposed a photographic paper entirely to light, developed it and stuck it onto a cardboard base. A surrealistic homage to the “Black Square”? Germaine Krull destroys the perspective of her impressions of Asia with a fog of dots. In the German post-war period, Chargesheimer did it even more radically: he melted the silver gelatin layer of his glass negative plates and thus achieved the effect of poetic “gelatin paintings”.
Curator Franziska Kunze spins the thread of creative potential for breakdowns along the lines of the term “glitch”. It appeared in the technical jargon of television technicians in the 1950s to name distorted images. It now stands for programming or graphic errors in computer games and malfunctions in software of all kinds. The multimedia selection covers a hundred years, from analog photography to video and sound art to net art. In the most exciting chapter, “Critical Disruptions,” the stylistic device of the supposed loss of control acts as a wake-up call to socio-political grievances. A video projection by Sondra Perry hypnotizes with two dancing black bodies in a white room. The frenzied self-erasure effect was achieved using a Photoshop tool that makes the outlines appear ghostly. A comment on tech systems of power whose white logic is intended to be shaken?
With “Zizi – Queering the Data Set” Jake Elwes looks for discrimination in the data processing of artificial intelligence and wonders what would happen if he smuggled the faces of drag queens into the software. The species generated in this way does not reinvent what it means to be human, but it does take the genre of the fake portrait to unimagined heights of self-portrayal. When irritating physicality meets maximum digital manipulation, the urge to play doesn't go far. But shouldn't the fun of interacting with faulty code be long gone? The exhibition offers little hope for this. It is no coincidence that two Japanese are taking action against this. Because they come from a country plagued by natural disasters and nuclear accidents, they have plenty of experience with existential disruption. The fact that they are also looking for these outside of Japan turns out to be a stroke of luck, because the accents they set are, for a change, aimed at image solutions in which contemporary melancholy sets the tone.
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