COPIA: Collection of Post-Industrial Arts (2023-2024)
Lombardi–Kargl, Vienna
The shift from analog to digital is fundamentally photographic, because today photography is coextensive with the world, inseparable from its perception and analysis. Digital photo-mediation is ubiquitous and constant, the permanent production of images by human and nonhuman agents that don’t simply represent the world but shapes it. Today, the amount of images that can actually be perceived by humans is only a small part of those produced. The photograph is no longer simply something seen, but an infinitely reproducible file, dematerialized and distributed. It is everywhere and nowhere, always waiting to be realized but real nonetheless. This essentially dispersed ontology of the virtual is the diagram of contemporary life, generating new social forms and the new forms of capitalism that exploit them, channeling feeds of images that accumulate value through their continual manipulation of clicks, taps and swipes. This permanent state of consumption–production rolls time and space into the constant flow of information and images that constitutes our instant. An instant to which the image is no longer fixed, its constant reproduction forming a ramifying series of repetitive differences, an unstable surface of time and (dis)appearance.
Bizumic offers an alternative to this incredible inflation of photo-images, a kind of de-growth or slowing down of production, a return of the hand in images that do not flash, crash and re-form, but instead mold time into new shapes, mixing present, future and past in ways that do not reduce them to a meme or an ironic reference.
