From videogames to self-portraits at a new exhibition, How to Win at Photography, the old ways of engaging with technology and art must give way to new forms of reflection and resistance

At first, it felt familiar. Familiar, like 2014. The artist list for How to Win at Photography, an exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery purporting to explore the link between visual culture and play, feels like one I’ve seen before. In the first room are Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Landscape 1 (2005, a Nintendo hacked to display just the clouds and a road from the videogame) and Aram Bartholl’s sculptures, Justin Berry’s landscapes taken from Call of Duty (2018) and Tabor Robak’s renderings of objects using software meant to design videogames (Rocks, 2011). These artists’ works have been displayed alongside each other in the past. I wrote about several of the artists featured, taught their works in classes about post-internet art and new media, talked with them at conferences.

In the early 2010s, I was a bit of a latecomer to this community: I am not techy, after all, just dorky. With a growing awareness among users, half a decade after the first swell of social media platforms, that the corporate structure of the internet affects all users, there was an opportunity to present art that engages with technology in ways that were not specialist. Artists like Constant Dullaart – whose mediums included websites, routers, and manipulated found images – were making work that was not only structural, but also felt critical, like it could provide another perspective from which to understand the changing digital landscape. Not dissimilar to High Retention, Slow Delivery (2014; presented here) – where Dullart’s narration talks through a video displaying various profiles of the 2.5 million fake Instagram followers he bought alongside his art-world peers – they were direct, highly specific in their visual language, and humorous (‘Slippers are ok on the balcony’, Dullaart’s ‘balconism’ manifesto explained in 2014).

Η συνέχεια εδώ.