Artifacts from the Age of Acceleration

The smartphone has radically changed our daily life in the last years. Always close at hand to connect us to the world, it has redefined our culture of communication and our sense of the here and now. Lilly Lulay’s new works investigate what takes place behind the scenes of our touchscreens, looking far back, both geographically and temporally.

In the series Lesson I: The Algorithmic Gaze, Lilly Lulay works with anonymous photos from the 60s and 70s, a time in which private photos were carefully archived in family albums, instead of being sent via smartphone or posted online. Lulay scans the analog photos and interprets them, as if she were an algorithm herself: she foregrounds selected elements, while the rest of the image disappears in the dark. With the aid of a black panel, evocative of a school blackboard, she filters colors and shapes from the found photo, and transforms it into an abstract composition crisscrossed with chaotic numbers and arrows. Her drawings are a playful, yet critical illustration of how algorithms “look” at photographs. They visualize the mathematical processes of abstraction and pattern recognition that form the basis of algorithmic image processing. The titles of the individual works come from the handwritten notes that the previous owner meticulously wrote on each print. This analog form of metadata reminds us of the manual labor that was once necessary to allocate a context and meaning to each photograph. Our digital devices have already freed us from such tasks. Yet on the basis of which mathematical laws and abstract concepts do algorithms "help" us to cope with the flood of information in the digital era? How do we deal with the fact that AI systems increasingly act as curators of information, who control and censor what we get to see? 

Today, sending a photo around the world takes just seconds and a few clicks. At Your Fingertips, Uncovering Histories of Information Transmission is a growing archive, in which Lulay‘s assembles images of people, cultural techniques, and raw materials that are, or were, involved in the transmission of images via the smartphone. In her archive, data centers meet abaci, hieroglyphs meet emojis, and blueprints for the photographic recording of biometric data from 1840 meet today's AI-controlled facial recognition software. This flood of images is presented on slim aluminum tubes that look like futurist versions of the relay batons and scrolls that were used in ancient cultures to convey information from A to B. Via metallic structures, reminiscent of puzzle pieces or text characters, the relay batons are interlinked with each other.