Underscoring the direness of the climate crisis, Oliver Ressler’s “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Featured are works spanning photography, film, and installation by the Austrian artist that lament the state of stalled climate policy and fossil fuel crony capitalism run amok. His 2-channel video installation Climate Feedback Loops (2023, image), for example, starkly documents the ice melt around Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is rapidly disappearing into the Arctic Ocean.

“The Spectre of the People,” the flagship exhibition of the 2023 Thessaloniki Photobiennale opens in its namesake port city in Greece. Curated by Julian Stallabrass, artists including Lauren Greenfield, Carey Young, and The Archive of Public Protests explore populism. DISNOVATION.ORG contributes ONLINE CULTURE WARS (2023, image), a map of the “over-politicization of seemingly mundane topics, practices, and cultural elements,” with Donald Trump at the centre of a disinformation vortex.

“ABORT, RETRY, FAIL,” Farah Al Qasimi’s first London solo show, opens at the Delfina Foundation. Taking inspiration from Al Qasimi’s 1990s family computer, a major thread in the exhibition is works playfully exploring the “autonomy and disembodiment” of gaming and the early internet. In Anood Playing Sims (2023, image), for example, the UAE-born photographer depicts the self-referential loop of a vibrantly attired young woman with her attention fixed on a CGI desktop—much like her own.

“Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home,” a group show about the blurring of domesticity and labour, opens at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum in East Lansing (US). Featured are photos of 20th-century domestic labour from the museum’s archives alongside works contrasting “newfound freedom” and “the threat of total digital surveillance and exploitation” by contemporary artists including Keiichi Matsuda, Marisa Olson, Theo Triantafyllidis, Jon Rafman, and Angela Washko.

An exhibition for the post-truth era, Trevor Paglen’s “You’ve Just Been Fucked by PSYOPS” opens at Pace New York. In it, the American artist charts the “enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture” through several new works. These include an unknown orbital object photo series, and Because Physical Wounds Heal… (2022, image right), a mixed media—steel, bullets, resin—sculpture that mythologizes the iconography, sloganeering, and abject horror of U.S. psychological warfare.

“New Visions,” the 2nd Edition of the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media opens in Oslo (NO). A total of 22 artists including Anna Ehrenstein, Anna Engelhardt, Kristina Õllek, Monira Al Qadiri, Emilija Škarnulytė (image: RAKHNE, 2023), and Istvan Virag contribute media and installations, drawing on traditional mediums and new modes of automated image-making to underscore the ubiquity of “resource extraction, energy distribution, and data harvesting.”

The final instalment in a trilogy of exhibitions fixating on highrises, Jesse Colin Jackson’s “Mackenzie Place” opens at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery. Venturing to Hay River in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian artist shot a year of time-lapse photography atop Mackenzie Place—the near arctic town’s lone skyscraper. The resulting panoramic video tracks daily and seasonal flux and is bolstered by audio of oral histories about the mining town collected by anthropologist Lindsay Bell.

Trevor Paglen’s solo exhibition “A Color Notation” opens at Pace’s recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. The show presents new and recent landscape photography (image: Near Bodega Bay Deep Semantic Image Segments, 2022) the American artist interpreted through custom-built computer vision systems and AI. “Through his masterful manipulation of these technologies, Paglen brings questions of perception to the fore of his image making practice,” Pace notes.

“IMAGE CAPITAL,” an exhibition organized by Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke, opens in Essen, Germany. Arguing ‘photography is information technology,’ the show (and companion website) explores six themes: memory, access, protection, mining, imaging, and currency. Tracking the photograph across contexts including scientific imaging and archives (image: Max Planck Institute, 2018), the curators ask “when and under what circumstances did images become operational?”

After its inaugural showing at Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2021, an adaption of “How to Win at Photography” opens at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The group exhibition gathers 30 international artists whose works explore “image-making as play,” from early photography to nascent videogames. Case in point: Roc Herms’ Study of Perspective (2015) series appropriates Ai Weiwei’s eponymous photo provocations in Grand Theft Auto V.

Named after the cloud pictures taken by American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in the early 20th century, “Songs of the Sky” opens at C/O Berlin to examine photography in the age of cloud computing. Featured artists like Evan Roth, Fragmentin, Trevor Paglen, Shinseungback Kimyonghun, Mario Santamaría, and Noa Jansma (image: Buycloud, 2020) explore nascent network technologies to invite questions about their effects on climate change, geopolitics, and how we see the world.

An exhibition (and symposium) curated by the head of ECAL’s photography department, Milo Keller, “Automated Photography” opens at Espaces Commines as part of the Paris Photo fair. Reflecting on the school’s eponymous research project, works by 12 prominent digital artists including Nora Al-Badri, Simone C Niquille, and Alan Warburton explore contemporary image-making technologies such as machine learning, CGI, and photogrammetry, asking timely questions about the automation of creation.

Commissioned for the annual Arnsberg Kultursommer festivities, German media artist Aram Bartholl invites the visitors of Arnsberg’s historic city hall to a Hypernormalization photo session. After having their portrait taken and analysed by a custom face recognition software (provided by Tom-Lucas Säger), participants get to chose an emoji, font, and colour to have their face ‘de-recognized.’ The results are then printed on fine art paper for people to take home.

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?”