In terms of image, we live after the flood. Photography's success in the digital era reproduced its own extinction: overpopulation in digital shoeboxes, useless. Post deluge, visibility is no longer determined by the image but by apparatus that can concentrate attention - make visible. In the sense that algorithms and the attention economy are able to package its visibility into a frame, they are doing their own picture-making. Photography is superseded, the new apparatus of picture-making is an algorithm of attention. Engagement rate drives the shutter on a moment.
Go look at how primitive our images used to look, Jessica Stockholder at Jay Gorney Modern Art; it's is practically Stonehenge. This is all to say, we need more pictures of the past, and maybe this is the way to take them. Perhaps the 90s will have taken place again.
See too: We scroll images of images. Our capacities for dealing, for dealing with, making sense, of them erodes as the sheer quantity of information we are met with on the eponymous daily. They flow against whatever wishes for a control to the spigot, they'll be more tomorrow. We begin to triage our incoming information; our form of relation moves from a relation of understanding to one of recognition, able to name something, our conversations formed around the little opinions we've manifested as stopgap standing in for control, CAWD.
In the beginning, there was darkness, formless and empty over the surface of the deep, hovering over the waters, and Forrest said let there be Contemporary Art Daily and there was. And Forrest saw that Contemporary Art Daily was good, and separated those exhibitions from the limelight and the darkness. And Contemporary Art Daily called its light "of contemporary relevance" and the darkness "not worthy of publication."
