about darktaxa-project

 

darktaxa-project understands itself as a working and discourse platform of artists working experimentally at the interface of photography and new digital imaging techniques.

We understand photography as a networked and globally interconnected medium of communication, and as a socially as well as politically relevant practice. The term "photography" has always been used to refer to a spectrum of different older and current imaging processes that are based on culturally complex coded models of seeing and viewing regimes: technical-optical apparatuses, chemical processes and programs as well as forms of image action and image use that have either been integrated into "photography" or have newly emerged with it and continue to mutate in the digital space. The boundaries to the moving image, animation, sculpture, programming, and performance are fluid. Today, the traditionally elastic term seems more blurred than ever.

darktaxa-project works, researches, discusses and publishes in an open field on phenomena of the digital starting from the medium of photography with a view to future potentials and developments. This includes working methods using digital image processing, CGI (Computer Generated Imaging), motion capture, scanography, 3D scanning, artificial intelligence and machine learning, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), programming, photogrammetry, 3D printing, augmented reality, as well as media-archaeological and hybrid digital-analog practices, i.e. work processes that are not executed with digital tools but are digitally constituted. Themes and questions negotiated by darktaxa-project concern fundamental characteristics and structures of processed, algorithmic images, the materiality of the digital, posthuman photography, photographic surveillance cultures, the so-called "flood of images," the photographic archive, and the relationship between photography and ecology.

darktaxa-project jointly organizes exhibitions and projects, such as darktaxa talks and lectures with invited guest artists and theorists, as well as public lectures, discussions and presentations. darktaxa-project does not strive for a coherent aesthetic-formal program and does not see itself as an artist collective.

The name darktaxa is borrowed from taxonomy, where it refers to animals that exist but do not yet have a name or have not been assigned to a species.

darktaxa-project members as of 5-2023:  Arno Beck, Ralf Brueck, Raphael Brunk, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Philipp Goldbach, Alex Grein, Beate Gütschow, Spiros Hadjijanos, Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil, Achim Mohné, Johannes Post, Michael Reisch, Anna Ridler, Ria Patricia Röder, Aaron Scheer, Björn Siebert, David Young (Antwerpen, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Köln, Leipzig, London, New York).

Actively participating members from 2019 to 2022 and continuing to be friends of the project are: Banz & Bowinkel, Julius Brauckmann, Susan Morris.

 

 

Text: Philipp Goldbach, Michael Reisch, 6-2022

 

 

 

CV darktaxa-project:

- 2024 upcoming: darktaxa-project: phtoograify, Projektbüro DFI e.V., Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media photo+, Düsseldorf

- 2023: groupexhibition Photography in Progress, Internationale Photoszene Köln, Michael Horbach-Stiftung, Cologne

- 2023: darktaxa-project, Städtische Galerie Regensburg, Festival Fotografischer Bilder, Regensburg

- 2023 groupexhibition Expect the Unexpected, Kunstmuseum Bonn

- 2022 lecture and panel: The new landscape of Photography: AI, NFT and Metaverse, Paris Photo

- 2022 lecture and panel: symposium We do/are Photography, Photoszene Köln

- 2022 panel: Postphotography is over, darktaxa-project in conversation with Gregor Jansen, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media photo+

- 2022 pop-up exhibition and book presentation, darktaxa-project: the Düsseldorf-constellation, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media photo+

- 2021 publication darktaxa-noPubliciation, 1000 pages, 3,6 kg, image and text

- 2021 groupexhibition darktaxa-project: the Paris-constellation, Geste Paris

- 2021 Blog #61, Im Digitalen ist alles FotografieFotografie neu denken, darktaxa-project in conversation with Andy Scholz

- 2021 groupexhibition darktaxa-project: the Berlin-constellation, Office Impart, Berlin

- 2020 panel + artist talk: From generative photography to darktaxa, #ArtProject2020 Vancouver Biennale, darktaxa-project in conversation with Marco de Mutiis, curator Fotomuseum Winterthur and Stefan Gronert, curator Sprengel Museum Hannover

- 2020 publication darktaxa-publication noManifesto, collective text, 44 pages

- 2020 panel + artist talk: darktaxa-project in conversation with Iris Hasler, curator Staedel Museum Frankfurt

- 2020 groupexhibition darktaxa-project: the Frankfurt-constellation, Schierke Seinecke Galerie, Frankfurt

- 2019 groupexhibition The Wrong Biennale, NRW Forum Düsseldorf

-2019 Blog: Perisphere-Blog, about darktaxa-project

- 2019 public lecture and panel: about darktaxa-project, Haus der Fotografie/Deichtorhallen Hamburg, DFA Deutsche Fotografische Akademie

- 2019 groupexhibition Photon | Icon, Galerie Falko Alexander, Cologne, in connection with Photoszene Köln und/and Symposium Photographic materials: archives and tools, KHM Cologne

- 2019 initiated by Michael Reisch