Rethinking Photography from the 21st Century | Metadata | Ringling Museum

The term “metadata” is used to describe the information that travels with a digital image file but is unseen within the image itself. This data includes the details about the digital photograph’s creation its ownership and how it is situated within structures of order. In our networked digital environment metadata is accessed by both human users and artificial intelligences. Software algorithms orchestrate what images we see and exchange while collecting the valuable data generated by our interactions. In our moment dominated by image-based social media and surveillance we are becoming increasingly aware that understanding the information that circulates unseen around photographic images is just as important as seeing what they depict on their surface. Metadata: Rethinking Photography from the 21st Century is an exhibition that explores new paradigms for understanding the ecology of the photographic image.

The exhibition features work from the past decade by an international selection of artists and visual activists that are working to make palpable the unseen information or metadata that undergirds the image regime. This includes not just the tags or descriptors attached to image files but the power relationships biases and economic interests that are not always visible in the image itself. The exhibition emphasizes an expanded concept of photographic practice that includes research-based projects installation conceptual work and activism as well as analog and digital photographs. Artists featured are Mohsen Azar Viktoria Binschtok Mladen Bizumic Joy Buolamwini Ali Feser Jason Lazarus Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Lilly Lulay Trevor Paglen and Penelope Umbrico. Metadata: Rethinking Photography in the 21st Century will be held at The John and Mable Museum of Art Sarasota Florida from March 6 through August 28th 2022. The exhibition is curated by Christopher Jones Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Art.

Art Exhibition | 03/05/22 – 08/28/22
Rethinking Photography from the 21st Century | Metadata

Sarasota

John Ringling Museum
5401 Bay Shore Road Sarasota FL 34243
941-359-5700