different kind of order

The exhibition sketches the contours of the new visual and social territory in which photography finds itself today. A number of key themes serve as guidelines that link the works in the exhibition: (i) Artist as aggregator identifies one of the main aesthetic offshoots of the digital image environment: the present-day descendants of the "image scavengers" of the 1980s who are now busy plundering and reorganizing anizing found, online photographs into highly personal, web-based archives. (ii) Theresurgence of collage is evident in works that combine photographic fragments, digital images, paint, three-dimensional objects, and audio and video material to blast open and reconfigure the space of the photograph in unprecedented ways. (iii) At a time when all manner of power structures are being called into question, mapping has become a renewed subject of artistic inquiry - part of a wider fascination with the power of ordering systems that has emerged in response to the dematerialized disorder of the Internets environment (iv) The Internets dissolution of geographic distance has spurred the development of new forms of community, allowing artists to explore new forms of connection, collaboration, and multiple authorship that do not depend on physical proximity.