Although it may seem as if we continue to live in the visible and describable ‘objective’ reality of our ancestors and forebears, this is only an illusion, our reality and our self have been digital for some time. Our interests, our thoughts, our identities, our emotions, our work and our transactions have been transformed into data and exist in a data-driven virtual technological space.
The human face, the human body, the role and the image of the human being in digital space is in a constant state of flux due to its infinite speed, its ability to restructure or even disintegrate. Our face, our body, our self, because we think of it almost exclusively as an image, as a surface, and we interpret it, multiply it, as mere information, it escapes our own authority and control and begins to live a life of its own.
And the global ecological crisis is confronting us with the fact that the dignity of our position, the hierarchy at the top of which man has occupied a place, seems to be shaken, to be collapsing.
The aim of the exhibition is to present an apparently fragmented picture of the way in which the human and what comes after it, the human, appears in the various contexts and problematics of contemporary photography/art.
It is unlikely that man, however transformed, could ever relinquish hir role as ruler or conceive of a truly non-human world. However, hir shaken position and the coercive logic of the global capitalist system force hir to constantly self-reinvent, to permanently self-optimize hir strategies of existence, hir self, hir body, hir face.
Our fluid digital existence and identity is no better or worse than it was in a completely analogue era, for most of human history, but we have to find newer and newer means, and at ever increasing speed, to describe and articulate who we are no longer.