Soft Errors, Hard Truths
curator: Jutta Brendemühl

Lilly Lulay’s exhibition of recent photo-based works, confronts us with a paradox: the supposedly seamless digital networks that promise connection also deliver fragmentation, disorientation and distortion, and often a profound social isolation—soft errors in our daily interactions that reveal hard truths about our algorithmic present. The works examine the influence of digital technologies on photography and invite visitors to question their own ubiquitous use of smartphones, cameras, and social media.

Born in Frankfurt in 1985—the year the first email was sent between Germany and North America—Lilly Lulay belongs to the generation that consciously experienced the transition from the analog to the digital age. She remembers life before the Internet, printed city maps, and the feeling of being “off the grid” on holiday. Her first mobile phone came at age 14, her first smartphone at 31, and since then it has been her daily companion, alarm clock, office, camera, and storage space for endless personal data.

Photography is the emotional glue that binds us to our smartphones. Through messaging apps and social networks, we exchange images while delivering invaluable data to tech giants. They mine information about our locations, preferences, human contacts, political views. Historically, there has never been an institution with as much knowledge about us as today's tech corporations. During Lulay's art studies in the early 2000s, digital cameras conquered the market. In photography classes, discussions about the truthfulness of digital images were central, tinged by a skepticism reminiscent of today's debates about AI-generated images and deepfakes. Yet this question has accompanied the medium since its inception. In the 19th century, photographs, though monochrome, were considered radically realistic. Then and always, however, they represent only a fragment of the space-time continuum. Photographs conceal as much as they reveal.