Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015
New Photography, a longstanding exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents Ocean of Images, an exhibition that explores image-based post-Internet reality.
In celebration of New Photography’s 30th anniversary, this year’s exhibition is expanding to 19 artists and artist collectives from 14 countries with works created uniquely for the exhibition. The latter include works by the art media collective DIS and artists Katharina Gaenssler and Katja Novitskova.
As 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron practiced photographic experimentation in her time, photography today has become a field of experimentation through digital, informational, and software systems. Ocean of Images investigates contemporary photo-based culture, focusing on connectivity, communication models, the circulation of images and information networks.
Examining the various ways of experiencing the world in an image-heavy, post-Internet reality, the exhibition looks into images that are born digitally, made with scanners or lenses in studio as well as real life settings, presented as still or moving pictures, distributed as zines, morphed into 3D objects, or remixed online. The contributing artists are not concerned with the question of what a picture is as much as what decisions constitute the image.
The title refers to the Internet as a vortex of images, a site of piracy and a system of networks, which is reflected in the new and recent bodies of works featured in the exhibition. These critically redefine photography as a field of experimentation and intellectual inquiry, where digital and analogue, virtual and real dimensions cross over.
Ocean of Images will be on view from Saturday 7 November 2015 – Sunday 20 March 2016.
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