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April 29, 2010
Rosalind Krauss argues that while there are many spaces and contexts in which photographs live, the wall of the gallery is the primary discursive space of the photo. But the leap to digital form—indeed, how many of the world’s photos are even printed anymore?—prompts us to consider not only the vertical plane of the webpage as the new home of photographic media.
This is a copy-and- paste or web surfing culture in which images, sound files, videos, and even source code are lifted and repurposed in our visual culture. The representational practice upon which this work hinges—montage— borrows the techniques of collage—namely piecing together fragments, objects, and ideas in what Roland Barthes might call a “tissue of quotations”—to create new valences. This is not so much derivative as dialectical. Each “lifted” piece is put in conversation with each other, so that the combination creates a third (or fourth or fifth...) “term.”
Not many of the worlds photos are printed anymore--the large format crowd do. These are are photos for an exhibition and for sale. So they are high quality images and fine prints. We rarely see these prints on gallery walls -what we see are images on the net.
The rapid evolution of photo-sharing web sites-- Google Images, Flickr, Picasa, MySpace and Facebook --- means that images are accessible by anyone at anytime. This has profoundly modified the manipulations, and the exchange-value, of photographic works. These photo-sharing web sites are photographic archives---different archiving systems on the web--- in which the photographs are freed from their original moorings and “decontextualized” with regard to concrete situations. So we have a form of net art.
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the world as written text of the literary culture has been challenged by the world as digital picture. The fragmented culture that we call postmodernism needs to be understood visually ---in the sense that it places a premium on rendering experience in visual form. So visual culture does not depend on pictures but on the tendency to picture or visualize existence.
Visual culture directs our attention away from the structured formal viewing settings like the cinema and art gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life.