Capping a two-year project by Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers, and others, “Attention After Technology” opens at Kunsthall Trondheim (NO). Artists including biarritzzz, Kyriaki Goni, and Femke Herregraven explore “how algorithms affect us and how we could imagine them otherwise.” Johannesburg-based CUSS Group’s The Pursuit of a True and Only Heaven (Disintegration Cycle) (2023, image), for example, recast Instagram’s Explore page as a trauma-inducing “snapshot of South African society.”

Investigating notions of play and gamification in contemporary image-making, “How to Win at Photography” opens at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Featuring 40 artistic positions including Cory Arcangel, Aram Bartholl, John Yuyi (image), Akihiko Taniguchi, and Ai Weiwei, the assemblage of multimedia artworks and vernacular images questions the very function of photography today. “Are we playing with the camera or is the camera playing us? Who is playing along? And can this game be won?”

Aptly illustrated with Richard Prince’s 2014 series of New Portraits (image), an essay by writer and critic Jacob Barnes concludes that in the arts, social media clout does not equal market value. On Instagram, he notes, art school students regularly outperform established names while selling work for relative peanuts. As boundaries between art, artist, and process dissolve, Barnes identifies two metrics that signify value: “the maturity of an artist’s practice and the photogenicity of a given work.”

“It turns the picture into a puzzle—an enigma in a way,” says Jean-Jacques Calbayrac, one of five Game Boy Camera enthusiasts writer Raymond Wong interviewed about the allure of taking 128 x 112-pixel photos in the Instagram age. “It’s like going back in time, back to the birth of digital photography.”

In protest of the (digital) opening of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, a new museum embroiled in colonial controversy, local artist Aram Bartholl releases a site-specific AR sculpture, Greetings from Berlin! (2020), as an Instagram filter. Part of the artist-led Owned by Others initiative that examines problematic narratives, places, and artifacts from, around, and on Berlin’s Museum Island, Bartholl’s digital overlay ‘rekindles’ the fire that ravaged the south portal of the $700M edifice in April.