Taking its title from a quote by US President Donald Trump, All I Know Is What’s On The Internet is at first glance a small exhibition of just eleven international individual artists and collaborative partnerships, which on closer inspection grows in scale and scope—and lasting affective power. With its stated aim to interrogate the systems through which photographic images in the twenty-first century proliferate and multiply online, the exhibition poses questions about new forms of value, knowledge, and work that update for a new era some of the critical discourses around the medium’s relationship to conditions of production—of meaning, of capital, and of labor. Particularly uncomfortable—but timely—is its exposure of the uneasy relationship between contemporary forms of post-Fordist human work and automation upon which the internet largely depends with its invisible army of bots, crowd-sourced digital pieceworkers, and intelligent machines.
As an exhibition, it is itself quite hard work. The...
University of California Press