Spawned from a notion of ephemeral flash-mob style exhibitions cancelled by a pandemic, Circumstantial Evidence has become an online exhibition that addresses the ongoing issues of truth in both digital and analogue photography and analyses its ability to hold forth in an online world
Now, online images have wings that help them travel to diverse parts of the web. Apart from straight appropriation, images can find themselves re-classified and captioned by image search sites, archived by various web archive projects, and dropped into image datasets for AI training.
Circumstantial Evidence is an online showing of five New Zealand visual artists (Stu Sontier, Haruhiko Sameshima, John Lyall, Jennifer French and Jon Carapiet). It was initially conceived by John Lyall as a series of physical shows that would have had an ephemeral flash-mob presentation style. Given the inability to reach that audience as of March 2020 and covid-19, the show has been re-worked as an online concept.
While not directly responding to the lockdown event in New Zealand at that time, each artist has held deep misgivings over the contemporary Western consumer-driven paradigm, and this has informed the way they work and the work they produce.
What is being said here by each voice in different ways is that the notion of the photograph as evidence should be treated with continuing distrust. Some of the photographers may lure you into taking their pictures at face value. Some are literally taking the image apart and questioning the apparatus and the delivery.
All have been producing work that depends more or less on its evidential qualities, and all have worked both in film and digital mediums extensively, assessing the qualities of each and embracing one or the other (or both) for each body of work they produce.
This extension of their work into the online space is both an experiment and an assessment of the ability of images to be presented and received as digital works, rather than as print-based.
This exhibition thus looks at qualities of evidence and deceit inherent in the nature of the photographic image translocated as either film-based or in digital form, or the migration of one state to the other.
As well as just transitioning to a digital viewing format, the show has been conceived with a meta-narrative that looks directly and critically at the nature of the visual exhibition in a networked environment. As a whole, it attempts to be self-aware of its place in online space, where its components can be loosely received, and recontextualised.
It is a transition to digitise visual imagery, but there is another level again when an exhibition is taken into the unconstrained world of the internet, and this may be taken into account when assessing work, and in considering the longer term meaning of the show and the individual components of it, which may become detached from each other.
Some extra elements that may be considered are fragmentation, disassembly, loss of context, loss of quality, loss of control, loss of authorship.
The accompanying essays cover a variety of topics, looking directly at the work and artists, but also looking at the nature of the image in the twenty first century, with the complexities that critical theory and networkability bring, along with the interplay between digital and analogue. The main essay also looks at what artificial intelligence and machine-learning may bring to our concept of the still image. It also acts as a meta-critique of the notion of online exhibiting of visual art – an essay looks specifically at the many notions of the online exhibition in general. From the philosophical intent of such exhibitions and how they may differ to ‘irl’ shows, to practical evaluation of some strategies for showing online and practical considerations for exploring a venture into putting work on the internet.