 So, welcome everyone. I'm John Riarte, creator of digital programs at the Photographers Gallery. Thanks for joining us for day two of concerning photography, photographic networks in Britain. I'm very excited to be here for what promises to be a very interesting day of debates and discussions, ending with presentation by artist Penis Linger. Before we move to my three markers who will say more on the themes for this morning's panels on materiality and process on its panelists. I just wanted to say a few words regarding the collaboration and how we came to the ideas that will be explored today. The initial idea for this conference started in study day in 2017 in which Mark Haller from Paul Mellon Center and Brett Rogers, the Photographers Gallery director, discussed the idea of organizing a conference to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the gallery. I'm really excited to be here today when with the great work of my colleagues and the staff from Paul Mellon Center, that original idea has turned into a great conference to celebrate new scholarship in the study of photography. I just want to add that the panelists and the panelists this morning are particularly excited to me as we are going to be looking at the dimensions of processes like slide tape and the establishment of digital programs of photograph institutions as we reframe the definition of photography. Before we move to our speakers, we have a few words on housekeeping for today. The session contains three 15 minutes paper on the papers on the material process on the material sorry process panel followed by Q&A. This will be followed by a short 10 minute comfort break, and then we return after the break for the final two papers and further Q&A. The audience members can type questions using the Q&A function. And yes, so you know that this session is being recorded that will be made available to the public. Also, you have closed captioning available, clicking on the CC button on the bottom right of your screen to enable captions. I just want to say thank you to also to Sarah Turner, to Sarah Blackfield, Daniel Combe, and the rest of the team at the Paul Mellon Center, to my colleagues at the Photographers Gallery who put this together, especially to our talks and events creator, Luis Auliet, and to this morning's speakers and the audience. And I think that that's all what I have to say. And now to Maitri and my friend, head of program at FACT in Liverpool. Good morning, everyone. Thanks so much for the invitation, and I'm really excited also to be part of this conference and particularly to be able to moderate this this panel, this morning's panel on material process. As the head of program at FACT, Liverpool. We're a space that specializes in considers new media technology and the role of technology in art. So today's, so today's discussions and today's papers have a lot of poignancy for me in thinking through how representational technologies have moved in over the last 50 years and the kind of evolution of representational technology, particularly thinking about sort of development and photography in video moving image and now networked images. The papers in the session each explore aspects of photography that draw connection between the materiality of photographic works and the visibility or invisibility of the systems and processes that produce them to consider the mediums cultural and political capital within a canon of art as much as as within a communication technology. From the analog print to the slide to video and now digital networked images, what we consider to be a photograph and our relationship to the image and its form has evolved rapidly. The presentations discussed the importance of context produced by the curator space or the institution in shaping discourse and defining the terms in which we come to understand photography, and the challenges in building visual literacy, and then image saturated well as a medium for self actualization, its ubiquity encourages a democracy of access, allowing those typically excluded from more established art forms to be able to represent themselves. Yes, it's also a medium of exploitation in its material processes, which tie it to capitalist supply chains and cultures of consumption. And so this morning we've got, as John said we've got two papers, first up, and I'm going to introduce the first two speakers, then we'll have a brief Q&A around those two papers, and then a short break. Then we'll come back and introduce our second two speakers, and then have a sort of bigger Q&A session, following that. This is my absolute pleasure to introduce the first of our two speakers, Mo White, who is an artist, writer and lecturer. Mo works in moving image and photographic media, and has exhibited widely including exhibitions in New York, Dublin, Athens, Belfast and Birmingham. Research concerns gender, diasporic and queer identities, and their effect on contemporary artists and art practices. And she was awarded a PhD in 2007 for her research examining artists using the moving image in the UK since the 1970s. And has since published on slide tape, most recently in Practices of Projection, Histories and Technologies, which was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. She was a lecturer in fine art at Loughborough University. Following Mo will have a presentation by Katrina Lewis, who is associate professor and head of photography and media arts at School of Art and Design at the Australian National University. She was previously senior lecturer and founding co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, CSNI, at London South Bank University. And from 2011 to 2019, she also held the inaugural post of senior curator of digital programs at Photographers Gallery London. And she's also presently adept with research curator there. So without further ado, I will hand over to Mo. Thanks very much. Thank you, Matri. Good morning, everyone. I hope you can see my screen. Okay, but I've now shared. So the title of my paper is the use of photography in artists slide tape works in the UK since the 1970s. This paper will look at the use of photography and slide tape works by artists during the late 1970s and 1980s in the UK. The tape is a series of projected 35 millimeter photographic slides with a synchronized audio soundtrack with two or more projectors and a pulse command on the tapes soundtrack allowing images to fade between one and another and synchronize with sound. As a technology that is significant in the UK for being used by a number of key and emerging artists for a brief period before being abandoned. The paper itself has been largely forgotten and the paper will consider this and the importance of slide tape as an experimental tool used in artists projected works. There had been projected works in America that prefigured this moment in the UK. It was identified by Chrissy Iles for the exhibition into the light the projected image in American art 1964 to night to 1977 and later those identified by Darcy Alexander in the curation of the exhibition slide show in 2005, which found a large body of works in slide projection from the 1960s to the early 2000s from both North America and Europe. These works in these exhibitions showed a different set of concerns, both the formal qualities and the potential offered by the slide itself, and we're described by Darcy Alexander as a bridge between photography and film. Despite the works in slide tape, these projected works did not use a sound or audio element, and this suggests that slide tape is a distinct form used only in the UK. If as Alexander says, the slides being projected from a carousel are doing so in time. Slide tape is a form that's taken out of time as photographs as to state the obvious, the slide transparency is indeed photographic, and it relies on photography, and its use can be said to combine the qualities of both the still photograph and cinematic slide tape has a context in the late 1970s in the UK slide tape was relieved of its conventional use as an educational and presentational tool and used to make experimental artworks. This became a moment whenever on guard artists in the UK in particular for the different technology with which to explore images and sound. During the 1960s and early 70s, artists had developed a range of art practices in time based media, including performance, film, video and installation. These histories attest to the development of media forms that were in clear opposition to the history and traditions of painting and sculpture, where artists develop experimental practices to address the contemporary social and political landscape. It was in this context that artists use slide tape emerging in the UK. However, slide tape as a form has been overlooked by many writers, curators and critics and their formulations of artists work during this period. The period during which slide tape work circulated in galleries in the UK is marked by two key exhibitions about time, video performance and installation by 21 women artists, an exhibition initially staged at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1980. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art Oxford staged Signs of the Times, a decade of video film and slide tape installation in Britain, 1980 to 1990, curated by Chrissy Isles, which although not entirely retrospective, was signalling the end of slide tapes useful to life as an art form. After this slide tape with very few exceptions, no longer existed as a form seen in galleries and exhibitions. It can be also be noted that slide tape had not always been restricted to gallery context. It was a form that was also used in community arts and education projects. The HUM writes of a project that took place in 1989. Women's Studies students from the University of East London works with local community photographers on a slide tape project produced work that was described as transformative. There are notes in her description that while slide tape was cheap, crude and eccentric, it was useful in separating sounds and images and their effects, which could be interrogated and brought together in the making of visual political theory. For artists slide tapes are relatively cheap way to produce work that could be made without the need for external funding. As Chrissy Isles pointed out in retrospect, it was self supporting practice and slide tape resources were housed in educational institutions and could be accessed by artists to make their work. In 1980 a group of women arts women initiated the exhibition women's images of men at the ICA London, and this led to the exhibition about time later in 1980. Time made an important contribution to a gender based critique and engaged its analysis in an area of practice time based media where male artists had been seen to dominate much of its development. The exhibition included slide tape work by Judith Higginbottom, Pat Whiteread, Tina Keane, and Roberta Graham. Here on the screen the still stills from Tina Keane's slide tape work of 1980 clapping songs shows the playground actions of two girls, accompanied by a soundtrack of their singing of the humorous songs. Another 21 women artists in about time, Roberta Graham exhibited shortcuts to sharp looks, a work made in 1979, which mounted a critique against cosmetic surgery. The projected images of sharp metal knives and human flesh were accompanied on the tape by what was described as a hideously graphic soundtrack. The next slide tape by avant garde artists came with early support from the London filmmakers cooperative. The co-op is important in occupying a central place in the history of British avant garde film during the period. The co-op held a summer show in 1980. It included slide tape as an area related to film, alongside video photography and expanded cinema, all of which were activities that the co-op had embraced since the 1960s. Amongst the varying work on show was Judith Higginbottom's See Dreams and Tina Keane's clapping songs, as seen here in an extract from the catalogue, along with others using a form which was described as either slide tape, tape slide, or installation. During the same period, the Black Audio Film Collective were producing slide tape work. Their first project as a collective group used slide tape forms prior to their well-known film work Handsworth Songs of 1984. Expeditions, Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality were made between 1982 and 1984 and explored colonialism, empire, hybridity and exile. They sourced historical archival imagery with which to establish an archaeology of colonial subjectivity, and this has been described by Oqui N. Razor as an intertextuality where text, sound and image slide across the space of the other. Keith Piper, an artist closely associated with the Black Audio Film Collective at the time, produced a mixed media installation, The Trophies of Empire, in 1985, where projected slides, a plaster bust and a record deck playing Elgar's pomp and circumstance provided the soundtrack. This was a highly critical work described by Piper himself as a work of its political moment, made in the fattier years of high unemployment, race riots and the privatisation of nationalised industries. By the time Chrissy Isles came to curate Signs of the Times, she presented the idea that time-based media by which she meant video and film had clearly developed from these earlier practices in slide tape. Isles considered the work in slide tape had by that time in 1990 become less a set of critical tools than a series of illusionistic devices. Holly Warburton's work Veridus on the screen now was one of the slide tape projections in the exhibition and concerned with Baroque imagery and Given Isles commentary had a place in music, fashion and new romantic pop culture. It used sophisticated dissolve techniques which were used in marketing by the corporate sector. Even there by this time the use of this technology was ending. Artists themselves had been using video since the early 1970s, so when Isles acknowledged that slide tapes precedents were in the earlier politicised work that had overturned contemporary art practice, her statements were also clearly signalling an ending of those projects. Given the demise of slide tape since the 1990s and its current status as a technology that is both forgotten and overlooked, restaging such work is a rare event. Nina De Nino has recently restaged First Memory, a work originally made in 1980 and shown at the ICA alongside the About Time exhibition. First Memory pieces together a narrative through picture in a series of objects and rooms in a house accompanied by a woman's voice that describes a child's view in retrospect. These show the editing sequence of this work was shown in the 2010 restaging of First Memory at Ambeka P3 Gallery in London. These graphs show an intricate structure, a challenge to the notion that slide tape work is crude or inferior. Nina's work was further included in the exhibition Slide Tape at Vivid Projects in Birmingham in 2013. This was the result of my curatorial collaboration with Yasmin Bay Clifford of Vivid Projects based on my research into this area at the time. It offered a fresh appraisal of this abandoned medium. And also included work by Tina Keane, Cordelia Swan, the Black Audio Film Collective, Kathy Wade, William Furlong and the Audio Arts, and here in the foreground, Sunil Gupta's 1980s work, London Gay Switchboard, which documented the organization's activities, as well as images of the gay club and pub scene. A recent article by Glenn Davis has unearthed the queer fragments in Gupta's work with its rediscovered soundtrack as a fragile smorgasbord of visual and audio delights. There are no institutional archives or holdings of slide tape works in the UK, at least in their original format. The very few that are held are now in the Tate archive. They include few of the more critical artists I have mentioned, in fact, only one. The slide tape work by the Black Audio Film Collective, which was acquired by Tate in 2009. This should be no surprise, as the work themselves are difficult to store, archive and allow access to. And the original slide tape projector units in working order are rare. Obviously, obsolete pieces of equipment. Slide tape has always been difficult to categorize. It was once what was called lens-based media, and will now is still called time-based media. The slide tape uses time as a material, but it also has the ability to animate time in much the same way as the medium of film, using sound space and its projection technology to achieve that. The slide tape has fallen between definitions of the still image and moving image cultures. I have argued elsewhere that slide tape has a relationship to moving images, so that it could be said to provide a legacy to this media. As here in this slide showing the work of the otherwise filmmaker, Cordelia Swan, and the work is called Mysteries of Berlin. The slide tape has been described, that's not just Cordelia Swan's work, but slide tape work, has been described by Proto-cinematic by Okwui Enwizor in his commentary on the work of Black Audio Film Collective. Before in between these spaces, slide tape has been described by Rosalind Krauss as a singular practice. This is not a very satisfactory description, as in itself it elides the fact that slide tape was used largely by women artists and black artists as individuals, and if not in collectives themselves, then in a collective endeavour, in response to the political situation they found themselves in. This factor is one that I speculate, combined with the format's initial cheapness and technical instability that has led to its dismissal as an art form, as well as its demise as a technical form. Could I invite Katrina to give her presentation now? Hi everyone, can I get any indicator that you can hear me and see me? That's great Katrina, thank you. Really great, thank you. Well thank you Matri and Mo for that introduction, and in addition to my fellow speakers I'd like to thank the Gallery and Paul Hamlin Foundation for today. And my paper is called Glimmering Screens, Institutional Dreams, Curating Post Photography. So in 2011 I found myself standing in a pile of rubble, wearing a hard hat and high vis jacket on the site which was to become the new photographer's gallery. After an £8.9 million fundraising campaign, the organisation was rebuilding and rebranding itself, and had announced its ambitions to embrace 21st century digital culture. The gallery manager Jason stood next to me, a haunted look in his eyes, nervously clutching a set of architectural drawings. He gestured at the concrete shell before us and said, Katrina, see that wall over there? Do you think you can do anything with it? I had just been appointed the gallery's first digital curator, at a point where post-photographic discourse was already over two decades old. The digital revolution had destabilised older ontologies of the medium, generating anxieties about truth, human agency and techno-capitalist power. And yet, despite the technical death of photography, practices of collecting and exhibiting had remained largely the same. Perhaps this is not surprising. The fight for photography to join the canon of modernist art meant its status as technology of reproduction was generally downplayed. Instead, the photographer was positioned as a virtuoso, and the photograph framed as a creative vision, captured by mechanical means. The overwhelming arrival of the bastardised, contextless networked image, therefore posed huge risks for those museums who had championed photography as an art form. It's worth noting that the digital was not always incompatible with photography's institutional and market success. As Julian Stalabras observes, artists such as Jeff Wall, Andreas Gersky and Gregory Crudson seamlessly combined analogue and digital processes and were celebrated as photographic pioneers who produced works with the scale and authority of historical painting. The digital malleability of the image, rather than prompting a crisis of authorship in the museum, rescued the photograph from older anxieties about artistic intentionality. Digital post-production offered up the possibility that no pixel had been left untouched by the hand of the artist, even if those interventions were not made explicit. Under the guise of a new photographic avant-garde, cultural institutions were therefore able to absorb the digital turn, which at that point did not threaten the existing economies of the print. However, whilst museum photography was busy scaling itself up to colonise the white cube, photography and digital culture was colonising every sphere of life. At the precise point where photography secured its institutional acceptance, it also became ubiquitous, immense, liquid, streaming through interfaces and glorified through hypercirculation. Under data capitalism, the photograph has been reconstituted as a calculable surface, subject to Boolean algebra and algorithmic modes of ordering, taking part in regimes of massive value extraction as part of big data and AI industries. However, this is not to suggest that digital culture has been entirely ignored. Major museums have turned to thematic exhibitions in which image surplus and information is subjected to an art historical lens. These shows tend to position socio-technical change as always already the privileged project of the artist and map the inevitable trajectory from fluxes to male art to our friend Eric Kessels. Others have invested their marketing budgets in promoting the talent of a new generation of digital natives, reinforcing their own curatorial power as contemporary taste makers in the process, even as curating itself has become diffused and operationalised in network culture. So in England, work in this arena has been however constrained by cultural policy which positions the digital as a tool, not as a culture. This is embodied by the approach of the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, a widely criticised initiative from 2012 to 2014 by Nesta, Arts Council England and the AHRC, which promoted the digital in terms of new apps and ticketing systems for cultural orgs, or projects which put drones in the hands of artists where technology once more became a tool of the avant-garde. A quick Google of these projects today will take you through a ruined landscape of broken links and abandoned websites, apart from one project, Culture Counts, which became the preferred metrics dashboard to answer the problem of measuring cultural value in the sector. But perhaps this is not surprising. Under conditions of austerity and the logic of new managerialism, KPIs and other impact metrics continue to discipline the ambitions of UK cultural organisations. And as an aside, I am still haunted by the moment where Peter Bazalgette, then chair of the Arts Council suggested to my colleagues and I in the cafe of the gallery. You need to remember you are not competing with other mid-scale galleries for audiences. You are competing with YouTube. Today, Arts Council England continues to promote the tracking of audiences via Google Analytics over open source alternatives, whilst Google itself is in the process of colonising cultural institutions with its own digital cameras that promise to reproduce museum objects in succulent detail, producing a simulation of the analogue museum at the front end, even as it harvests and privatises the valuable metadata generated by public engagement with collections at the back end. And what of the role of museum marketing teams who have historically embraced technology as a tool for monitoring and increasing audience reach and engagement? In this arena, the digital is positioned as a tool to repackage existing cultural content and encourage new forms of cultural consumption. From VR simulations of gallery spaces and celebrity exhibition walkthroughs on Instagram Live, we have seen how formally disinterested cultural institutions have pivoted online out of pandemic necessity. Crucially, digital transformation here is valorised under the mantra of innovation, in which a broadcast model of consumer engagement is favoured over the dialogic potential of network culture, ensuring the cultural value of the art object remains intact. So the recent appointment of digital curators in photo museums in Europe would seem to suggest a growing interest by the sector to engage with these problems, recognising that technical change cuts across all areas of the organisation from programming to education. But beyond the absurdity of having to uphold medium specificity in a post-media age, what role or agency might digital curating have in the photo museum? And so in answering this question, I will circle back to the gallery's digital programme, which celebrates its 10th anniversary next year under the leadership of John Uriate and Sam Mercer. Set up as a collaboration between the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at Southbank University and the Gallery in 2012, it represents the first attempt by a photo institution to systematically address the digital turn through a dedicated programme of collaborative practice-centred research. It is worth noting that space for this sort of longitudinal research is impossible in the day-to-day running of underfunded organisations focused on short-term projects needing to generate footfall, press impact and data collection. And I know the gallery was fortunate to have received funding by Esme Fevein Foundation to set up the programme. At its launch, the digital programme's focus was to develop a programming strategy for the media wall, the ground floor space which Rogers had conceived as a project space for screen media. As it expanded, the programme explored new formats including Geekenders, which were weekend gallery takeovers, an online platform called Unsinking Photography, Exhibitions and Experimental Photoschool, and more recently formats such as screen walks with photo museum Winterthur. Its concerns span from lolcats to give culture, computer vision and computational propaganda, post-capitalist photography and digital labour, and more recently the politics of imaging the planet itself. It has undertaken experimental commissions with artists, most notably Ernest Lund, who in 2019 staged Operation Ernest Voice, a four-day installation which turned the gallery into an influencing agency staffed by members of the public tasked with reversing Brexit using the tools weaponised by Cambridge Analytica. I like to think of this project as a gallery visual literacy project. And these projects in their own flawed ways tried to probe the logic of the institution and suggest a different agenda. But in considering the problems I outlined in my introduction, I want to conclude by focusing on a project which offers insight into the agency of digital curating and collaborative research in the photo museum. The dataset match was a year-long program of commissions workshops in Symposia, which ran from 2019 to 2020, whose aim was to bring into sharp focus the computer scientist as a crucial yet overlooked figure in photographic culture, and position them as a significant author, curator and mediator of images. It did this through an examination of the computer vision dataset, a collection of photographs used to train machines how to classify and categorize the world. In doing so, we sought to demystify and illuminate the concrete infrastructures of image automation. It positioned AI as a fundamentally photographic project relying on the labour of photographic communities such as Photonet and Flickr in producing the training data or ground truth which animates machine vision. As many cultural organizations began to celebrate Silicon Valley's AI hype, we were keen to bring our focus to the dataset as a material and political constellation of images, linked closely to older knowledge practices and taxonomies of photography. Dataset match became a platform for disseminating the work of Nicola Mallere who undertook a gallery-sponsored PhD from 2016 to 2020 in order to investigate what it means to think about photography and machine vision from the position who annotates images industrially. Referring of CURSE course here to the huge distributed workforce mobilized on Amazon Mechanical Turk, paid one-tenth of a cent to describe the contents of images to machines. And this was a platform which also incidentally was used by Magnum to annotate their own photographic archive. As part of this project, Nicola began restaging a 2007 experiment conducted by computer scientists in the gallery that studied what can be understood from a photograph in a millisecond glance, which later became, informed the development of ImageNet, a canonical dataset in computer vision. This is the paper that the experiment is based on. Nicola re-enacted this experiment in order to ask what kind of vision informs these systems and how does this impact on the way machines see the world. This re-experiment was conducted with gallery staff, members of the public, and ultimately Dr Feifei Li, ImageNet's creator at the gallery at our invitation in 2019. And Feifei Li was actually on her way to Rome at the time to speak to the Pope about AI. And so from a curatorial perspective, dataset match took on the problem of how to see or exhibit a dataset of 14 million images, work with artists to make it intelligible, and open up these questions with an audience. Setting in motion a series of socio-technical and institutional problems which revealed the limits of how the photograph is framed both culturally and by the computer sciences. Using the gallery's media wall, the digital program team worked to develop a script which cycled through ImageNet at a speed of 90 milliseconds per image, traversing the entire dataset of 14 million images in a period of two months. And for us it was really an experiment to see, like, you know, the media wall will soon be commissioned. What haven't we done with it? And that is to really experiments with scale in the institution. And the politics of scale. The constant failures and fixes that were necessary to maintain the ambitious project challenged the infrastructure of the gallery, whilst also revealing something of the politics of curating the networked image. At a time when the sector is in desperately to reach new audiences, the project was able to engage the computer science community during a period when the politics of datasets, their epistemologies have been called out for the racist, sexist categories they perpetuate, and they're harvesting of photosharing communities. And whilst the impact of this work is yet to be determined, essays and artworks which were part of the program are now being cited by researchers in AI ethics, including this recent publication by Google colleagues who had been working with Timnit Gaybru, who lost her job at Google famously, for her own critical work on the curatorial practices of machine learning. In his PhD thesis, Nicola makes the case for the photographic institution as a site where the experimental apparatuses of computer vision can be questioned, engaged with, in ways that are not possible within the narrow margins of the computer lab. But he argues this can only happen if the institution conceives of its role, not exclusively in terms of an art institution, but as a site where, and I quote, different alignments of practices, devices and ways of seeing, coming and going under the name photography, can be explored in their active role in the modelling of the technologies of vision. In bringing this paper to a close, I want to argue that at a time when photographic images no longer appear to represent or mediate anymore, but instead track, activate, oversee, control, detect and identify. There is a danger for photo museums in fetishising images over imaging systems that they cannot move beyond the analogue mirage of the photograph produced by machines for our screens, in order to grasp a new and very necessary politics of post-representation. And that's it, thank you. Thank you so much, Katrina, and I'd like to welcome back Moe to for the Q&A. So Katrina, if you could rejoin us for the Q&A. We're going to do a very brief Q&A now and then we'll take a short 15 minute break. I wanted to start by sort of saying just in kind of summary, both of your presentations, I mean, amazing kind of sort of track the kind of history of photographic media from the slide, and it's very analogue to the kind of now completely dematerialised form of the digital images that you're talking about, Katrina. But both raised for me in questions about photography's place in the canon of art and how artists are often very early adopters of new formats and media, regardless of their acceptance, more broadly as art. And it offers, you know, that these new media formats offer spaces that are largely hidden or spaces for artists whose voices are excluded in other forms of cultural production. And I guess one of my questions is to what extent do you think institutions need to take responsibility for the supporting of experimentation of artists as they use different technologies to examine the social and political impact of those technologies, rather than perhaps focus on producing archives of the most popular. I don't know who wants to start. I might just jump in. I can jump in Moe, would you like? Oh, okay. Well, I think to take one example of smuggling in the most popular I imagine would be the show that we did on Lolcats, for example. For us was really to smuggle in a politics of reproduction and a content industrial complex and address that, whilst also bringing in a new audience to the gallery who were actually positioned as stakeholders who know a lot about the politics of this technology, and are actual practitioners, if you put it that way. And I think that's one of the strengths of an institution like the photographers gallery where, you know, all our audience are photographers and in many ways have unique perspectives and experience in things like network culture, the politics of memes and their aggregation. So I think it's important to actually go where the popular is to actually go where I even suggested why haven't we even done a show of Kim Kardashian. It would a bring a completely different audience to the gallery, but also enable a really interesting program engaging with what is happening to the image. So for me, I purposely always was interested in the popular and what was happening in photography outside the artist in relation to technology, and which is not to say we didn't do that as well. But we felt that there was a really important job to be done with that. Yeah, from the point of view of what I was talking about about the time in the context in which slide tape work was developed. The kinds of cultural institutions that we now have the kind of access to them just didn't exist. The tape modern wasn't there at the time. Many galleries the kind of accessibility that there is to culture. It was it was still an elitist was an elite that had access to culture in that way you know the kinds of things that the kinds of cultural institutions that that generation of artists would be have been presumed to have access to would be things like Rock Street. So that was how a very elite. So, you know that the whole landscape has changed. So I'm not quite sure where that leads me but it just is extremely different context to the kind of the one that you're now describing Katrina. And for contemporary practitioners and people in in the arts, who have access to places like photographers gallery and can have those kind of dialogues and conversations that did not exist. It existed in very small kind of bubbles. One of which I described London filmmakers car up at the time was one such place where artists could meet but this is a very small kind of quite exclusive bubble of people who talk to one another, but they had no access to a popular audience outside of it. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right the landscape and our relationship to the image has changed and transformed so radically over the last 4050 years so it's kind of it's it's it's wonderful to sort of be able to trace that that trajectory. Excuse me there is someone who has got a chainsaw outside my window which is if you can hear that really sorry. But just to follow up very quickly we've got a few questions in the Q&A one from Brett Rogers. One of your aims Katrina was also to try and change the organizational culture within the institution through your program. Do you think you achieve this within your time gallery, and if not, what were the challenges you faced and what might all photography venues need to think about in addressing this moving forward. Thank you Brett for that question. Whoa, big question. No, I do not think I changed the organizational culture with the institution through the program unfortunately. I think the closest where that might have happened was Jonas London's project where I actually got most of the institution to become actors and participants in it. But I think the main problem is institutions model the digital differently according across their different departments so you have education. You have marketing and programming all approaching it from a slightly different way and yet this amorphous term the digital always gets mobilized in meetings and elsewhere. Without any specification of whether you're talking about digital technologies, digital culture, digital literacy. And so I think what photography venues do need to think about in addressing this moving forward is to, you know, strategically understand how they want to address the digital as I outlined in my paper. You know, each of those ways I described is a very kind of conservative model of the digital and what really needs that's why I proposed the example of collaborative research as being a way for institutions to create space to experiment and change rather than going temporary exhibition. Instagram takeover or, you know, the palette of different formats. So that's my answer. Thank you Katrina. And I've got a couple of questions here from Andrew. I'm going to just read. I'll read out the first one and image technologies have been central to the shaping of photography education and indeed to art history. How much do you think the histories of photography should include what was happening in art schools and polytechnics. And actually, the second question sort of links quite nicely to this, isn't the general term artist a problem here. Slide tapes used largely by those excluded from our institutions, and those who adopted network practices have had to capture other institutions. And so maybe more if I direct this to you. Okay, I'll just kind of address that question about the use slide tape one not did not have access to our institutions. No, that's not entirely the case. That was the case. There were projects community projects and so on where slide tape was used. But with community photographers I described one of them but many of the artists who use slide tape did have access to art schools in fact some of the best art schools a royal college for instance, which had terrific resources for artists like Nina to Nino and soon So, and many of the artists I did mention would have would have had that kind of access to two resources. So what was the other question. The other question the other question is about whether the history of photography should include what was happening in schools and polytechnics at the time. So we use photography very much as a, as a means of sort of understanding both the kind of shaping of our history. And the, you know, the question about it's shaping photography education, but how much do we talk about photography as a sort of way of, well, how do we talk about education systems as well as a means of understanding what was happening photography. I'm not sure I could, that's, that's quite a broad question I'm not sure I could answer actually what I could will say is that some, particularly some things that were happening at that time. And I'm thinking of the black arts group which developed from what was what happened in polytechnic at the time, which included artists like Keith Piper Sonya boy said he chambers and so on. He emerged from a fine art course at that time. That that idea which has led to some further developments. And the careers has affected the careers of quite a number of black British artists. So in that sense, yes, and there was quite a lot of other critical work going on at the time in our schools with more broadly. And this is kind of in a fine art sphere rather than necessarily just photography but the work of Charles Harrison Paul would, which has also had some influence, and that all started in our schools. It was a period when our schools were indeed quite radical, not so the case anymore, but anyway, we'll move on quickly. So hopefully that's it has addressed that question in some way anyway. Katrina, do you want to add to that as someone who now works within a fine art. And did so previously as well with self making. Yeah, I think it was quite interesting working at the gallery because a lot of students were coming to the digital program events because they weren't getting any of that in the art school actually and we're saying that. You know, they're forced now to to look at Susan Sontag and see what she would say about Google Street View, for example. So I think I would agree that what was happening in art schools right now is very crucial to the history of photography but perhaps in a different way. And the way in which photography is taught in universities now, you know, this kind of this this modernist sense of authorship, etc. really remains as a tool of expression. And I think I think the question remains, you know, for artists or photographers in particular, you know what what if photography doesn't even like you. It wants to steal your face. What does it mean not to celebrate this medium and be thinking about it in a different way. Yeah, that's a, there's a sort of sense in which the archive and the Canon has always been very celebratory and and now I think there's a kind of shift towards this sort of more critical engagement. And looking at, you know, exactly that what it what if this is a threat rather than something to be to be championed. And the got another question from Liz Wells. And this one's directed at you Katrina again. Thanks Katrina enjoyed that boundaries between art as valued in the gallery world and popular culture and have always been fluid, despite the attempts of some art historians to retain value hierarchies. In terms of the political import of the digital, would you say a little more about the politics of culture and aesthetics, and also the power of private funding, given increasing dependence on sponsorship. And this is a continuation of the question that you responded to for Brett. I think, Liz that really does relate to possibly Brett's question and I think the one of the things I sort of hinting at is the way in which there is huge amounts of pressure on digital programs to partner with Google and other. You know, great new tech work with this organization who's doing VR with this or whatever. You know, here is a project that comes well funded. Let's work with Google to give them our archive and other. So I think the hollowing out of, of, and the of the underfunded arts institution doesn't give them much where to way to move. And so as a result, as there's a desperation to mobilize the digital in order to see this tech startup money or more recently in NFTs. There is a pressure to put one's critic critical thoughts aside and maybe annex the work you've been doing in order to collaborate with with private funders and sponsors in that way. So I think that's why collaborative research was a great model for us, because it didn't need it could be experimental it was a bit under the radar, you didn't have to deliver a huge amount of footfall because it wasn't some big Google collaboration. It was importantly funded by a trust and foundation as my fairbanks so I think it's very hard for galleries to, to maintain a distance as I said, even as they're, you know, on the one hand, they might be exhibiting autonomy cube by Trevor Paglin, even as they're posting data on the free Wi Fi downstairs so there is a kind of impossibility for the institution to maintain a kind of a kind of politics there I think in, especially in British austerity and cultural policy. There's also a really interesting thing that came out of most presentation relations to that, particularly about how, because some of these media are cheap they're easy to access. It's, it kind of draws people to them. And yet, there's there's obviously a kind of a different type of relationship in terms of both the kind of the supply chain relationship and the kind of the way in which these things lead to different types of consumption. And, and I'm quite curious, we'll get more of that I think later later today from our next two presentations as well but I'm quite curious about this relationship and the tension between the origins of some of these more you mentioned that slide tape kind of was very widely used within educational settings and had this sort of relationship to a different type of consumption before it got adopted by artists. And, and, and I think I'm quite curious about that relationship that comes out of what media might have been used for and intended for and how it's been transformed by bringing it into this other context is kind of our context which sort of holds it up outside of a kind of a broader sort of more, more, more sort of general cultural, cultural space. This idea that institutions trying to create a hierarchy that exactly as Liz is sort of establishing. You know, the standard history lecture at the kind of time that I was describing used slide transparencies of artworks. So everybody was very familiar with that with that kind of technology at that point. I see the same kinds of things happening with my own students now who are using kind of, you know, the Facebook and so on and using Instagram and that this is where they're putting their artworks and they're doing that quite uncritically, as you pointed out Katrina. And there is that's become a very popular meeting you. The other thing is that you mustn't forget I don't think is that while particularly younger undergraduate students are, you know, particularly in those early years they haven't accumulated those critical faculties yet. So they're accessing popular media is in much the same way in much the same as everybody else. We have a question in the chat that's come in from Lewis Allen be and he says, I'm currently a third year BA final graduate final student. I have finally started doing photography workshops in the department. And I joined this academic year as I didn't get get this until this year. I've had a keen interest in its first year obsessed with the dark room doing my dissertation on camera versus camera less photography and abstract photography. So it was really appreciated this talk, any advice research on what's out there in the real world so to speak. I'm having to teach myself really. What does he mean by camera less photography. I can only I can only go with what's written in photography is alternative photographic processes. Yes, yes, yeah. So he's using the sun or using light in other sort of way. I'm going to interpret the question in relation to trying to make sense of. Here we go. He says photographs pinhole photography etc. Oh okay. You are on a roll there maybe you want to. He's looking for resources that what the question was. I think looking for advice about real world experience so how to what what what you can do outside of the, the halls of academia. Yes, well there's the London alternative photography collective. So you should definitely hang out with them. Oh and Rowan's pointed to the sustainable darkroom project in the chat. Okay. Yes, perhaps other people are more aware of these things than I am in, you know, based out in the East Midlands. And while you're at it, you should read Fluss's philosophy of photography. That's my advice. Fantastic. Thank you both so much. This has been great. Thank you so much. It's so difficult to kind of unpick some of the ideas that you sort of touched upon in your in your presentations. We're going to take a short break now, and we will be back at 1135. No, so we're taking a break now that's the time now. And we'll be back at 1150 with presentations by Bowen Leah and Peter Lide. Hello everyone. I'm going to give it another couple of minutes. And then we can start with our second part of the panel. Okay, let's get going. Welcome back. To kick off the second half of this morning session, let me introduce our next two speakers. The first part of Rowan Leah is an artist and a doctoral researcher in photographic history and theory at the University of West London under the supervision of professors Michelle Henning and Helen Hester. And formed by feminist new materialist post humanist and process philosophies. Their thesis argues that photography has constituted a new kind of body. He has conducted research papers at leading leading photographers in Europe, and has conducted research in archives and collections in the UK and North America. In 2018 to 19, Rowan organized planetary processing, a peer forum for experimental photographic artists at this gallery. Following the presentation, Rowan will have a presentation from Dr Peter ride, who is the course leader for the masters in museums galleries and contemporary culture at the University of Westminster. He has worked in a wide range of arts organizations, including the National Museum of photography form and TV, the photographer's gallery Cambridge darkroom gallery, the Arts Technology Center, our tech in London and DA to digital arts development agency. And he's also with Professor Andrew Gidney of the new media handbook published by Routledge in 2006, and the digital media handbook published by Routledge in 2013. And he has published widely on new media projects in museums and galleries. So I'm going to hand over to Rowan, if I could ask Rowan to join us on with her camera on, and then we'll, if once Rowan's done, if that's very much. Okay, just going to wait for some slides, great. Hi everyone. Sorry, should I start the video now Rowan. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you. I'm just going to run in the background. The summer of 1976 was a hot, sticky affair. To escape the heatwave, British daytrippers swarmed to the beaches, taking their cameras with them. Over the summer retailers experienced such high demand for photographic equipment that Kodak was not able to fulfill their orders. The first late-spoiled films began to flood in through the mail to further processing factories around the country, including one in northwest London. Here, 400 workers and their machines operated long shifts in a photochemical haze, processing, developing, printing, sorting and packing, thousands of snapshots daily in a building without working cooling system. This resulted to what the company director related to Smith's as bad feelings that summer. When the mostly female East African Asian and Afro-Caribbean workforce walked out of Granwick processing laboratories limited, they triggered one of the most significant labor disputes in British history. Today, Granwick is celebrated for its displays of mass solidarity that spanned race, gender and industry, and lamented for its failure to attain union recognition or reinstatement for the striking workers. And the union breaking that was to swiftly follow. The dispute has been studied in histories of labor-organizing trade unions and immigration, but there has been little discussion around its implications for the history and theory of photography. Borrowing a phrase uttered by strike organiser Jai Bin Desai, this paper argues that what Granwick brings to our attention is the honey on the elbow. You can smell it, you can feel it, but you can't see it. The honey on the elbow here is the residue of networks that comprise photo-capitalism, a sticky web which bind weather to workplace, consumer to worker, machine to empire. So this paper is extracted from a more extensive discussion on my doctoral thesis, where a full account of the Granwick disputes and working conditions inside the factory can be found. Today, I will follow the theme of this conference to attend specifically to what Granwick reveals of the networks and infrastructures of mass film processing, an industry which peaked in the 1970s and 80s. I'm going to outline just two particular networks critical to the photo finishing sector in this period, and consequently to the unfolding dispute. And those are the harnessing of the National Postal Service and the phenomena of free film, and secondly workforce recomposition, following the collapse of British occupation and anti-colonial resistance around the world. In 1968, as a young company, Granwick boldly changed their business model. Rather than rely on business from chemists and retailers, the company reoriented to target photographic consumers directly. Granwick consulted a female marketing director in America to develop a mass mailing drive. As director George Ward noted, the format of the envelopes are improved by stressing feminine colors, pastels like pink and lavender to appeal to the housewife. Granwick's target customer was a home worker or a second shifter, a working or lower middle class woman. Unlike the amateur hobbyists who prowled photographic departments of boots and other retailers, this customer was time per and managed a smaller household budget. Granwick initiated their first direct mail campaign in 1968, supplying 2 million households with prepared and prepaid envelopes in which to seal their exposed films and return. The mail order strategy was not based simply on low price and high convenience. Granwick also began to offer an expedited service, promising to return films in four or five days, much faster than the industry standards of 10 to 21 days. An impulse that contributed to speed up in the factory. The deployment of mail ordering, along with the demand created by new low cost cameras like the Instamatic, led to growing competition between photo finishing companies. Each needed to attract and retain a base of customers, making regular orders. This instigated a widespread free film market. As an industry analyst described in 1972, whether they come fluttering down as garish envelopes on the doormat or appears premiums on biscuit packets or mustard pots, the principle is the same. Send your color snatch to us for processing and we will send you a free film in return. The free film phenomenon was a symptom of an industry in transformation. Technical advances and increased capital expenditure on film processing machinery put pressure on companies to keep their production lines busy and free films generated a logic of return invested in the consumer and their desire to photograph. With their own free film called Bonus Pool, mass mailing became the primary apparatus by which Granwick put them in the hands of consumers. The fingers of busy home photographers met the fingers of busy photo finishers through the sorting apparatus of the National Postal Service. Consequently, the blacking of Granwick's mail was one of the most significant actions of the industrial dispute. Over four days in 1976 and seven weeks in 1977, postal workers refused to handle the company's mail. In both periods of blacking, the Post Office stopped making deliveries in the neighborhood. Workers refused to collect Granwick's mail and redirected incoming posts via sorting centres elsewhere in the UK, creating a slowdown effect. Three weeks after the 1977 postal blacking began, there were nearly a thousand mail bags containing about 100,000 packets of processed mail piling up in every available corner in the chapter road works. 84% of Granwick's trade depended on mail order and this power presented about £1.5 million in today's money. The company's vulnerability led George Ward to repeatedly describe the blacking as a threat to our jugular. The mail network was not the only vital system targeted by the strike. Drivers at British Oxygen refused to make deliveries and Heathrow Airport workers blacked Granwick shipments, forcing the company to alter its export trade routes. Small pickets were set up outside several pharmacies that sent film processing work to Granwick and Kodak workers themselves threatened Granwick with blacking at a time when the company was spending about £2 million per year with Kodak. Granwick's business model relied on mail order and national supply chains of goods and services, revealing the highly networked character of the photographic industry at this time. A phenomena that Henri Van Lea described in 1983 as planetary processing. Critically, these networks were both a source of the company's success and its site of vulnerability. As suggested earlier, the fluctuation of seasonality posed a continual problem for photo finishing companies as well as photographic retailers with peaks and troughs over the year. However, the development of British capitalism had long attempted to soften the blow of fluctuation through flows of internal and external migrant labour. As Stephen Ann Dan describes, migrant labour, precisely because it was migrant, seasonal and contractual, filling in the labour gaps in times of expansion and being fired in times of recession, served to absorb the shocks of alternating booms and depressions. In the 1960s, over a dozen African countries gained independence from British rule. The racial tensions built and exploited by colonial administrations unsettled the status of newer arrivals. As a result, British subjects from South Asia, living in African countries faced enormous uncertainty, if not outright expulsion, and many travelled to build new lives in the UK. As the empire retreated territorially, it re-territorialised the people it had displaced under it. Faced with the movement of people from former colonies, successive interventions by the British government worked past legislation in 1962, 68 and 69, which tightened the definition of citizenship, creating a renewed racialised hierarchy. Some were granted the right to work in Britain, but under circumstances it exposed them to institutional and overt racism, and by limiting full to citizenship, rendered them vulnerable to expulsion. These were the circumstances under which the Grunwick workers had moved to the UK. In their previous settled lives in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, many of Grunwick's women workers would have been part of an urban middle class, living in relatively affluent households and engaged in low-wage piecework at home, such as sewing. Drive and Decide began to work for Grunwick in 1974 and observed the rapid transformation of the workforce. The recruitment of new immigrants was a deliberate campaign. She says, they got more work out of us. Asians had just come from Uganda and they all needed work, so they took whatever was available. Grunwick put out papers, come and we will give you a job. We give jobs to everyone, door to door. When I went, a friend of mine followed, and soon they were full of our people. Within a few years, Grunwick staff changed from being majority white female and working class Britons to immigrant female and of East African Asian or Afro-Caribbean heritage. However, those newly settled in Britain developed strong communal bonds and brought together with them with high expectations of their rights as workers and British citizens. Laxmi Patel, a former Grunwick employee and member of the strike committee, reported that the strike came about because our women were treated badly. We believe that if women had so many rights in this country, then why can't we have them too? All in all, the state had achieved for capital the best combination of factors for the exploitation of labour while appearing at the same time to barricade a donation against the intrusion of an alien wedge. The toxic milieu informed Grunwick's recruitment strategy, which was as Anita writes, to hire workers who exhibited all the classic characteristics of cheap labour, readily available, that cost little or nothing to recruit, that was willing to accept low hourly and weekly wages, that offered flexibility in terms of hours, overtime and seasonal demand, and that was assumed to be docile and therefore unlikely to resist continuous efforts to increase their productivity. Interviews with workers also reveal a racial division of labour within Grunwick, a separation between the upstairs male room, which was populated with South Asian women, and downstairs in a processing room where women of Afro-Caribbean origin worked. The structural division, entailing different shifts and rates of pay, helped to ensure a racial hierarchy, weaker communication between workers, and prevent coordinated resistance. This is reflected in Desai's observation that it was several days before black workers in the film processing department learned about the ongoing action and joined the strike. The strategic fragmentation of the workforce was common among British companies, meaning workers' revolts took a certain character. Resistance to racial abuse and discrimination on the shop floor was more spontaneous than organised. Some workers left their jobs and went and found other work, others just downed tools and walked away. Against the backdrop of our pervasive anti-immigration rhetoric, union remains suspicious or hostile to organising by immigrant workers. The widespread trade union backing of the Grunwick strikers, though ultimately defeated, marked a radical shift in that tendency. British colonial conquest annihilated people's social and cultural networks and relationships. As Nadine Elna Nani writes, colonialism involves the theft of intangibles such as economic growth and prospects, opportunities, life chances, psyches, and futures. Colonial migration networks worked in Grunwick's favour, enabling low pay and abuses of power on the factory floor. At the same time, the new networks and solidarities formed between immigrant and Indigenous workers, unsettled the white supremacist structures of British life. What I have described are two of a multitude of flows that converge at Grunwick, a flow of workers and a flow of goods. But these are not the smooth flows imagined by capital. In sunny weather, photographic films fill the post. Over winter, they dwindle. At the border, people are blocked, interrupted and filtered. In the factory, workers go slow. Down tools, stop work. At the gate, strikers swell to prevent entry, and the police develop violent tactics to remove them. The flows of this network are viscous, perpetually stopping, starting, resisting, reconnecting, getting stuck. The sticky network of labour and logistics revealed at Grunwick demonstrates how thoroughly British photographic production is and was entangled with colonial and capitalist imperatives, beyond and in fact prior to any representation proffered by the processed and printed photographic image. Donna Howard suggests that networking is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. Studying the embodied and perpetually leaking networks of photography makes tangible a web of connections and possibilities for solidarity. Where the forest miles of those in front of the camera meet the gritted teeth of those who hold the picket line. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rowan, for that absolutely beautiful presentation. And now let me hand over to Peter. Thank you. Hi, thanks, Matri. Okay, I'm just going to share screen. Okay, can you just confirm that's up and running? That's great, Peter. Thank you. Okay, fine. Thanks. And hello, everybody. It's great to see such a fantastic group of people here today. So a quick word of explanation because of technical reasons this is a talk through a PowerPoint rather than a reading of a written paper. So today what I wanted to look at was a moment in time when the independent photography gallery sector started to embrace new media practice. And I want to talk and I'm going to start off with a little case study, which is a project called art aids that ran from the early 90s through to the late 90s, and which was in essence a collaborative online arts project. But I'm doing this as a case study because I want to think about the precedence which was set by it and the lessons which we can learn from it. Okay, today, for those of you who don't know, is the first of December. Will you all know that? But today is World AIDS Day. And World AIDS Day started up in the late 1980s and emanated from New York and particularly with a group called Visual AIDS, which led on it. And in 1989, they organized the first day without art where art galleries around, well, particularly in New York and around the States, started to take an action, a political action because of the appalling government actions in places like the US, but also in the UK as well, towards courting, developing medical treatment. A lot of these things ring very true with what's been going on over the last year with artists and cultural groups taking action. So David was operating in New York, but there was actually despite quite a lot of activity around AIDS as a health need and as a social need in the UK at the time. There actually wasn't a lot which was going on as kind of culturally organized things. I was then working at the photographer's gallery and Sue Dades was then the director and replaced in 1991 by Sue Grayson Ford. And we discussed what we should do as a way of taking part with this general social movement. And one of the things that we decided we could do within the limited form was to take part in A Day Without Art, which involved things like for example, shrouding pictures within the walls, rather than closing the gallery. But then we also started to ask what could we possibly do which would take on board other kind of actions, and could we actually do things that would lead us to other kind of projects. Could we do things which were more photographic, for example do things like a photographic quilt. The AIDS quilt was something which was had been developed at that time. Could we do something which actually it seems a little bit ludicrous now but we talked about it very seriously, which was a way of gathering people together, and actually faxing photographs as a way of creating a chain of photographs which could go around the country and work in particular with the, with the galleries which saw themselves as the independent photography galleries. And so this was something that we were exploring as a possibility. At the same time we were working on more conventional photographic approaches. I was involved with a group of photographers gallery was involved with a group with Steve Mays the network agency of the Terence Higgins Trust to develop a photo documentary project, which was called positive lives and that finally was published as a book and it was premiered as an exhibition of the photographer's gallery and that kind of photo fish in Glasgow. The, but also another thing which was really significant which that at that moment which was that Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. And by the early 90s this became a kind of a possibility, a possibility for people to actually work with images in a shared online space which was a hugely radical concept. A Netscape released the first web browser in 1994, which made possible the idea that we didn't fax photographs from one person to another one organization to another but actually photographs to be uploaded and held in a jointly accessible shared space. Again, as I say, these ideas were, which seems so banal now were extraordinarily radical and game changing in the in the in the 90s. So what happened with with the project was that art aids became known as a project where I was then at that point working at the photographers gallery in the print room to be developed as a collaborative public engagement project, which could, which could involve anybody who want to take part in it. We held a number of activities we hold an international arts gathering, working with UCL University College London, who had what was essential and very few people had the super Janet broadband network and what was then called the M bone, which was a high, high data transmission route between academic organizations. And remember, this is the time when, when a lot of households actually have telephone lines let alone have have anything that had the technical capacity to carry a signal. We also worked with an arts and AIDS charity crusade, Queen Mary College and the BBC Networking Club. There are a number of actors that were all incredibly interested in saying how can we harness the work of new technology and there are people who were coming together with a political purpose and as was mentioned at the previous session of this conference. The 1980s and the 1990s were a time of extreme opposition to conservative governments that had been in rule for a long period of time and ruthlessly suppressing all kinds of things like social political sexual action through things like clause 28. So there were reasons for, for people who are involved in the cultural and the academic sector to band together for to be involved in projects which were just not just about the development of the image and the way that we could see that through the development of technology and where they could, where that could go to, but the way in which politics had a very social function. So the art AIDS project began as an internet art project that started off with 20 artists who contributed in essence their work, some things being made specifically for the project and some being work which already existed which they wanted to contribute. Because of course technological access was an issue. The, the number of people who could participate was really relatively limited. And because there was no easy access for images to become shared it was FTP file uploads which was relatively a complicated kind of process. So we recognize that what needed to be done was a series of workshops which could take place with photographic galleries. To bring communities, people together who had a like minded interest you might want to take part. So the way that we described it at the time was that this was a chain, a chain of images that it played with the notion of the virus that it played with the idea of modification and regeneration of the virus but doing something in a positive way and again I only have to look back at the things which I've been involved in and a lot of my colleagues have been involved in over the last year and a half to see the same language that's happened around coronavirus that was was happening around AIDS. Also another thing that was really important was the idea that not project could be a collective activity which enabled people to contribute and people who wanted to play a part within the kind of the cultural and social discourse around a disease or sort of the social effects of the disease whether or not it was directly affecting them and the immediate circle of friends that idea of being involved is absolutely crucial. And the idea as we said in the original text, we are all involved was absolutely kind of important for the logic of the project like this. And to just give you an idea of some of the images that came through and how we were operating this is an image contributed by an artist, Alice Raphael, an image of an empty bed, an image by an artist Jane Prophet of the heart and where the heart is the seed of blood but also symbolically the idea of love and its relationship to the body. But then through the workshop process that took place and the online contribution of images, these sorts of things happened. Now I look at this and it is, I could go now, you know, a four year old could do this now on their phone, but actually in the early 90s the idea of someone taking an image of a bed, creating a quilt put on the bed and then quilting hearts on the bed, which was playing the metaphor as well as obviously what was happening with Photoshop was just actually quite staggering. And it fulfilled so many of the needs of the image because it was seeing that an image to be taken one thing being developed into another the idea of the authorial relationships between the different images was being kind of questioned. Lots of stuff which was happening through these kinds of this kind of image making was creating a dialogue about how we exchange what we own what we do what intellectual property is, though I don't think I would have used those words then. And, and also it shows to me one of the things which which also now working on a huge number of socially engaged and community participation projects. These in a sense become the standard way of operating and and a little bit becomes really important and significant. So just a little bit more on the project so one of the other things that made this project interesting was that at its time it was probably the first internet based art project in the UK. And then went to the arts council and the photography panel for funding and received funding to develop it as a photographic project and I was then working at Cambridge darkroom gallery so it was being hosted then and so it then became the first project funded through the arts council as an internet as an internet art project, and went on with a number of commissions worked with a number of galleries, photographic galleries around the country. We held workshops in many of those galleries either on art aids on on World AIDS Day or at other times of the year when people would come in, but also kind of at other points. And the work was shown within the gallery context and I'll speak about this a little bit more later, and we work with international collaborators so this was with the international arts group, based out of Toronto general idea, where there was a work in a piece which was recently on showing in Tate Britain. And this was in collaboration with with an American organization called outer web. So, what can we learn from the case study like this what we can see from this the number of changes that were taking place in the sector, and there was also a growing need to respond to a cultural moment and the determination to get on board with innovation. And actually was that happening with with the photography galleries. I think also what we see here which is important to be seen as a shift in the way the galleries thought about their relationship with audiences. And also by reflecting, there is a value at looking back at early new media projects to see not only how they operated and what they were trying to do, but the way in which they operated within a broader context or a kind of an ecology of arts practice at the time. So, let's take a second and think about what was happening with the independent photography galleries in the 80s and 90s. In a way, you know, and this has been talked about by many other people so I won't go into this at great detail, but the independent photography sector had a really important significance. Because they produced photography around the country and there was there was a substantial number of photography galleries, but they were mission driven. They really had a clear purpose which was to enable them to support practitioners and to support a language and a discourse around photography and present it within a cultural context, all the things that led to the development of the photography gallery in 1971 with things which led over the kind of the next 10 years to a number of spaces starting up around the country. But essentially as well, unlike the photographers gallery they operated the fringes very much at the fringe of the art world. And because and excluded for a lot of the conversations that have taken place within what we've now called visual visual culture. Combined practice communities and art communities, literally a lot of these spaces had dark rooms so there were people who are coming in who are making work as well as people who are interested in discourse around photographic practice and sometimes more broadly within photographic practice in its relationship to wider practices, but the idea that photographic photography offered something that was special was really important. I think it has to be said that the precarious finances for these organizations it was a really important point, we would do anything that the smell of an oily rag, it was extraordinary what was going on with very, very small budget so there was incredible capability for people to be inventive with the resources available to them. So there's also a quest for recognition, and what we could now describe as kind of a slice for the slice to the audience's attention, and for recognition that photography was important. The other thing that needs to be said was there is very strong set of networked relationships and touring networks which were funded directly by the Arts Council or little bit of seed funding from the Arts Council to enable touring shows so basically, people could see each other and there was an incredibly strong sense of camaraderie. This is really important when you think about what happens with new technology. Visual arts really had no particular interest in the visual arts sector in new technology and what's offered. There'd been an exhibition at the ICA and the late 60s, which looked at digital aesthetics and electronic art but in some ways the discussions about that really have gone a lot further than that. There was a sense that computer arts was sat within academic resources, computer science departments. It was being taken up by people interested in music and performance and obviously people exploring the ideas of coding but it really wasn't crossing through into a broader sector. Video based art performance installation were the kind of things that the visual arts sector was more concerned with and more interested in embracing. I would say however as well it's kind of, I wouldn't say that the photography sector embraced wholeheartedly new technologies at all. There was a considerable degree of caution. There was a considerable fear that a lot of the arguments and discussions about photography had moved beyond materials and tools and techniques and gone into visual art practices and theory and working with technology was taking it back again. But also communities of practice and practitioners meant that people weren't always interested in what was happening as the new. But universities were incredibly important as places which would generate a discussion, critical practice and work. And one of the things about the photography sector is that it did work closely with universities and schools of art. And also schools of art had access to resources which were really important. And around the country there was a sense of there being multiple hubs and spokes that there were networks not just the ones I sort of spoke about the photographic networks but all those galleries had their own networks, all of which mattered. And of course the big game changers for new media is the release of Photoshop the release of director, which happened in the the 1990s and put sophisticated programming into the hands of students and academics and arts practitioners. And I'd also emphasize that because the photography gallery wasn't the only place that was interested in this there was video time based arts interested festivals that were supporting stuff. There were there were many different things going on but as one of the artists I was interviewing. But in advance of this presentation said to me, the festivals had the budgets video had the resources, but photography galleries had spaces and audiences and that was really important. So if you think about the shift of the photography sector, I can sort of say well why is it worth, worthy of consideration, and, you know, what did it offer people who were challenging and thinking about the idea of the photographic image. So these are the things we can see being explored through practice from those very early days and things like the art aid project how discussions that lead to things between has been talking about with the digital wall and centers for reconsidering what the photographic image is now within digital culture has importance but also this major institutional impact that went on as well. I spoke to former curator at the camera work said I wanted if, if new media with the nail and the coffin of the independent photography sector because pretty much it had imploded within 10 years of this period of time. And I would say that necessarily wasn't, but I think there are a number of factors going on. And if I've got time. Do I have time to continue for about another three minutes. Okay, great. So I want to look at some work which is generated by the galleries by galleries like zone camera work site impressions focal point and to think about the physical reality and the resources that that the went on here. One of the things that needs to be said of course was I said about the galleries having spaces, the galleries have the space to create exhibitions but an exhibition could sometimes be putting a CD ROM on display. It could be creating an exhibition of digital photography on the walls in a conventional way but it could also be showing online things galleries also photographic galleries also had a very good tradition of commissioning work and supporting through other means and supporting through other means could mean lending a laptop or, you know, lending as simple as lending a modem so someone could do something. But also the photographic galleries became very good at interdisciplinary collaborations recognizing that going across art forms was was and it was enabled through digital materiality, but also was socially possible and it made things happen. There was a strong alignment with academia and with industry, so people who are working for example in in games industries, starting to work with artists working collectively to produce work. I talked about networking but networking was also important internationally as well as nationally, and the, and all the things we understand now, the very fact we weren't talking about the physical transport of work meant that networks to be very effective in terms of collaborative collaboration of work. So collaboration became a consistent mode of practice and that's really important as a change of operation with photography galleries which when most places was primarily about a solo artist producing work and then it was put on the walls. So collaborative teams working together and all the risks that that involves and all the creative challenges became important. And what's really significant is the way that the gallery provides a context the gallery provider the link to a discourse around media practice and all its forms. And in a sense what's happening I think we can say is that photography, the photography galleries were curating a moment away that things could be shown. For example, for example, and some of these may seem really banal. A very early project by Nancy honey who is ready established as a photographer particularly working on women's shoes and and images around family. This is an interactive project that she did seen as a CD ROM rolling on over those photographs brings more detail about the women whose images they are and their histories. Anti ROM was exhibited at Camel work gallery it was CD wrong, and they created events around it. The artists who were then working at University of Westminster were really interesting and challenging kind of what a digital navigation was and what a wrong structure was Susan Collins zone gallery interested in motion detection and using this trigger images. I'm profiting Gordon Selly, developing an early AI project which was using a game's formats but creating a world of fictitious world where where people could upload content will upload behavioral characteristics to animals that would then live within that world. So I think this is the termans project telematic dreaming here being seen live between camera work in London and zone gallery Newcastle. So it essentially what we're doing now, early video conferencing. That line that slightly later project by Susan Collins which takes us absolutely back into the realm of the photographic a shared project between site gallery in Sheffield, and the new line art gallery and Cornwall, where photographic image of a landscape is being built up pixel by pixel, one pixel per second. So it's a durational image and that's being seen an image of landscape image of Cornwall is being seen in Sheffield and vice versa, and skies the name of the show is transporting skies, the sky of Sheffield is being seen in you learn and vice versa so you know in the sense early video conferencing. But, but absolutely challenging the idea of what the images and how we can understand it. And I put this image in because this is from his own gallery, a really typical idea of what was going on. Whether someone was I'm not sure what the headset is this this person's wearing, but you know, on the back of the office you see a computer was probably being used at other times to do email being brought out for, for the exhibition purposes on a relatively makeshift. This is exactly the kind of thing that was happening. So within these projects there's a, there's an idea about what the materiality is of the photograph the idea of the authorial experience the idea of the authentic experience. The idea that the the interspace is a surface that can be worked with the code is a kind of a choreography that we can work with. And the whole site is of the gallery and where the photograph is actually cited is the photograph actually cited in spaces of the photograph was the image cited somewhere else and interactivity I can't go through this presentation without mentioning indirect through anti activity is one of the artists I spoke to said well, was it a holy grail or was it a cul-de-sac because it was talked about in the nineties as a, as a holy grail, but interactivity is really important because if we think about it from a 2021 perspective where it's hugely around within the gallery and museum sector around participation and social engagement. It's a necessary way of getting there as a shift in the understanding of curation and what it is from the, from the passive consumer of the image or the art experience to the, to the active experience to the user generated content, which was great when the gallery was doing was designing opportunities for people to be engaged. So, all these things leaders for the grandest conversations about representation, how we understand it kind of photographically but not just the Katrina was alluding to this, not just identity based issues of representation photography was so big on, but the underlying issues about what are the structures and the industries that propel the representational media. So, all the things that leaders think about post photography and post truth languages we weren't using then, but they are thinking, thinking about power structures who owns the software. What is the data, what a big brother notions about observation. So, all the early conversations about art and science were really important here and the ideas that they're new languages new territories, which are be which are militarized which are highly gendered and highly racialized, and that artists can provide and galleries can provide a space to actually insert and have a dialogue about that. So kind of very rapidly to wind this up. So the, the Arts Council supported through the network of photography galleries as the establishment of something called channel, which, by the time that I had left campus diagram gallery and was working at our tech I was was responsible for which was trying to create an alternative online gallery space didn't work completely, but generated number of projects which were interesting and show very much the direction that things were going on. Between 97 and, and about kind of, you know, 2000, around 2000 channel was operating very effectively with with a huge number of these galleries, but doing things like for example this is forced entertainment, a well known performance kind of theater group that may describe themselves as based out of Sheffield at that time, creating a city space that people can have it and place their stories within the space. So I was working doing a project with folly gallery with site gallery and folly gallery, hacking into police CCTV cameras, and enabling people to report fictitious crimes, which would then be sent through to the facts lines of the police, and then keep them busy. So a little bit of kind of an urban mischief making going on there by faith planting, which is very much part of the kind of a way of operating things. And so I was thinking about it, overall and reflecting back on it. What do I say, well I've seen lots of ways that these projects and the way the independent photography galleries were operating, we're really trying to support and further photography is legacy, or the way they saw that their role of legacy, challenging the medium as a communications device, interrogating how it's used for making meaning, thinking very much about creative practices a tool for social engagement going beyond the gallery, which I'd say previously been limited to a notion of community arts which was very kind of excluded from main gallery practice, and definitely for expanding the audience experience. And one of the museum curators I work with often says that the museum is the place where humanity meets the hardware and I would say in my conclusion here that the gallery the photographic gallery became the meeting place where humanity meets the software. And I'm just going to end on a World AIDS Day image from the from the art AIDS project. So thank you and I do apologize for that excessive use of time. Thank you so much Peter that was a tour de force history of 30 years of independent art galleries of photography galleries. Thank you so much for running through that so concisely and lots and lots of questions. Could I ask Rowan to join us and we'll do a short Q&A with the two of you and then I'll invite our earliest speakers, Mo and Katrina to to rejoin and we'll have a kind of a broader panel discussion of some of the kind of key themes that come through all of all of the presentations this morning. And I want to start, and there's, there was a lot of chat already around Rowan your presentation but I'll come to that in a minute I think one of the things that I pulled out as a sort of really interesting parallel between both of your presentations was the importance of that the image and photographic technology has been the nexus to explore questions of inclusion and exclusion. The Gromwick process coalesced around supply chain network focused around ambitions of turning a technology into a mass conceivable leisure pursuit, and there was a coalition of perhaps labor forces who were excluded from that consumption. That as a means of production. And on the flip side you have the networks of independent photography galleries, who were excluded from a mainstream visual cultural discourse or art world discourse, but nevertheless were producers who could then take some control over the production. And I'm really curious to kind of explore more about what these inclusions and exclusions have allowed for how the photographic medium and the discipline and technologies allow in the form of activism, both around, around the medium and within the medium. Rowan I don't know if you want to start, and then I'll hand over to Peter. Yeah, great. Yeah, thank you for the comment and question. I guess my, yeah, I'm not super sure how to answer but I guess my real interest in exploring Gromwick is in the workers and the people who are like I, in my thesis I would say I described as photographing bodies. So that will include the people who are taking pictures at the beach during the heatwave, but will also include the people who are working in the factory to process those films. So I think there's a way of being trying to think about photography, where you start to try and look at all these aspects all these ways that people are entangled in the networks of photographic production. And that is not necessarily the traditional photographer with a camera perspective, so there's a lot of different kind of perspectives in that, in that process. So I'd say like elsewhere I've looked at the impact of pollution from the photographic industry, and how that's affected people in a kind of spatial and temporal displacement from maybe the place where photograph is actually taken. Yeah, and I guess, yeah, also my interest is in forms of resistance as well. I think I'm quite, maybe like quite concretely not not so concerned with, with representation as forms of resistance it's just maybe not where I'm looking. And I think that's reflected also in my presentation, where it wasn't, wasn't so concerned to show pictures of Grunwick. They're very easily found Grunwick is quite a spectacle. Hey, Google, you see the pictures. I was kind of interested in this metaphor that Desai spoke about the honey on the elbow, something that you can't see. And I was thinking about. So what is it that we can't see when we look at these pictures of the strike of Grunwick and kind of all the spectacle of it. It's important the things we're not noticing or not seeing. And I have to say one of the things that's quite hard to get any pictures of is what what actually the inside of the factory look like. There's a little bit but not very much. And so it's instead it's listening to people's kind of own narratives and descriptions of their working conditions are working lives, as well as you know these narratives are all competing as well the narrative of the company director that you can't take on it. And you're kind of reading between the lines of what people are saying. So yeah, that's, that's kind of my concern and my interest at the moment. Peter, do you want to say anything about this idea of the kind of inclusion exclusion and the ball of the image and in that kind of activist space. Yeah, I'd like to. And I think I got to say, maybe I thought you joined our two presentations together perfectly, because on one hand it seems like they don't side each other that easily but actually I think I think they do. And I think there's something, something fascinating and interesting of course, you know, beyond, but before the idea of new media underway which are the sort of the area that I was talking about of course the huge thrust within the photography sector, what's social documentary practice, it was oppositional practice one of the key, the key in sense it was sort of a key tenant was that photography was being used to explore the thing this is the independent photography sector was being used to show an alternative understanding of what was happening, it was, it was absolutely not about fine arts practice it the generation of places like photographers gallery and those galleries were utterly about saying, how do we give voice to represent the kind of things that were going on, and some galleries more than others of course were really interested side in Newcastle for example, absolutely interested with the within the tradition of kind of black and white documentary journalism photo journalism about, you know, looking at a disposition and social groups who are otherwise excluded. So there are questions and problematic issues, which we can ask about this, you know, people from art schools kind of looking at looking at people who didn't have resources. But those things align themselves immediately to the kind of things which were being brought up by new media practice which we now call digital poverty and access, who has, who has access to resources, who has power over those images, and the kind of things that Katrina was talking about earlier. What happens to your images your intellectual property. What is Gmail doing to the things that you write. Why does Alexa know that when I've talked about something that it then offers me something to buy all this kinds of things, which about our relationship to a kind of a larger structure how, how we operate within it. Those are all the things which are being kicked out and I think the thing about exclusion about because it's not just about who doesn't have access to resources it's much bigger than that it's actually about since how the powers that control the resources work with the people within the systems. I think the groundwork example is absolutely fascinating. And one of the things as well which photography was sometimes good at talking about and sometimes not good talking about was that we can talk about photographic process and we can talk about materiality, but the people who involved in making this was so important to people who are involved in factory lines, producing images and we'd now also talk about industrial health, the conditions I would dread to look back and consider the kind of a lack of health and safety that I suspect probably existed on the lines of someone like runway, all the things that we now and those that right racialized environment. Those things are actually really important I think they align together very very well. Yeah, I absolutely, I absolutely agree I mean I think these questions of the deployment of the technology but also the kind of the invisible impact of it. Data today, and the invisibility of energy consumption around data around how the digital image and the circulation of the digital image and still produces these iniquities. And as you say about digital poverty, is there's a really interesting kind of parallel to draw with with the work that Rowan was talking about. Rowan, there's a couple of questions directed at you in the Q&A one was in your presentation you referred to a writer on colonialism and the theft of intangibles. Could you tell us a bit more about that reference and also there was a lot of questions in the chat during your presentation around the way in which you used images in your presentation at the video that you shared with us. The question from Amano Tracy is, I understand that what you were saying, I understand that what you were saying to be more important than what you were showing, but without the visual prompt, it was not easy to follow. I wonder what the thinking was behind this mode of presentation, and maybe you've answered this question but I'm still wondering so do you want to kind of just expand a little bit more about that relationship to representation. And I suppose it also touches upon this question of ownership of the image who has the power to share and show. Yeah, cool. Thank you. Thank you for those questions. And just on there. The writer is Nadine Elinani. And I'm just going to put a link in the chat to the big. I think it's really called bordering Britain. I think the subtitles law race and empire. And it's really really good, but I really recommend it. Kind of the history of British border making and brand making. Yeah, and just really excellent, particularly if you're interested in abolition as well thinking about. Yeah, borders and abolition. It's a great text. So yeah, that's I just put that in the chat. I think that's going to everyone. Yeah. Yes, the question. Oh, thanks, Shona. The question about yeah, I mean, I guess I'm pretty. I'm pretty like, you know, I think, yeah, like I think you can maybe see why I had those images in that way. And like I said, I'm not interested in the spectacle and I'm kind of not interested in repeating those images, because they didn't relate directly to what I was kind of talking about. That's the point that it's nice to focus on an image. So perhaps one image might have been better, but I'm just kind of interested in, yeah, I think the focus is quite an interesting question as well like when something is or isn't in focus, and when you can see it and when it's tangible. One of the things that we tend to focus on in thinking about photography, and the things that are out of focus I think those are really important questions, not saying I made any bold like maneuver in relation to that but maybe that was part of my thinking. And the question of ownership is also really important. This is being recorded. I don't own any images of Granwick myself. A lot of them have been bought by stock image companies and the ones that aren't obviously they have copyright issues. So I think that's, that's probably, I wouldn't say it was tough of my mind but I think that's also an issue in thinking about who knows these images of these, the strikers, the strikers and Tharris as they were called. One of the other things that's come up in the chat in the Q&A is, and Peter perhaps you might want to touch upon this as well. One of the UCU are on strike for better conditions of employment in universities. How do you see the relationship between the cultural politics of the historical period, trade unionism, and resistance to a reactionary state. You know, I feel like we are quite consciously aware of the cultural rules that we're kind of, we're riding through at the moment. I'd be very curious to get both of your thoughts on this. From my point of view, there's a slight irony. So my university isn't taking part in the strike because we missed by 1% the threshold to for a balance to be recognized, which is, you know, the tail end of thatcher's anti union legislation. I could say a lot about union and organized workforce now I'll, yeah, I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Thanks Andrew for the question. I think, like obviously studying Grunwick is like completely fundamental to understanding the situation that we're in now. And I think things like secondary picketing I think in particular was kind of almost a direct response to Grunwick banning banning secondary picking. And I think that's really affected how we use our kind of networks of solidarity how we can display and show and be in solidarity with other workers. And there's been some really nice work done comparing Grunwick with a more recent, I think the gate gourmet dispute. It's really good text I'll find a link to put in the chats, where they discuss the kind of differences between to two labor disputes before and after and kind of a lot of the union breaking took place and the kind of differences in how it was has been celebrated and the effectiveness of the dispute as well. And so, yeah, I've actually lost the question I think it's disappeared to another part of the chat but it was them. Yeah, I think I think it's really fundamental. And I'm kind of interested, you know, there are, there are, there's something about dislocation from the, from, I guess, dislocation of the photographic industry or the distribution of it so that if you're a photographer you might not think you're in solidarity or could be in solidarity with someone who maybe works at B&H photo in America where they had a large strike of Mexican migrant workers in previous kind of few years ago. And you might not think you have an automatic connection to like their struggle, but actually like if we think about photography differently. And as I know Andrew's also asked us to do as to forget photography as a single thing, like we can maybe start to trace those, those networks a little bit more tangibly and and realize like there are people that we should be in solidarity with. It's really interesting when we think about sort of the networked image and I'd like to invite Katrina and Mo to rejoin us and we can have a sort of a broader, broader conversation but just thinking through this idea of the networked image even though we've the power of unions as a sort of networked alliance of solidarity is dissipated and not just dissipated it's been actively dismantled. There are other forms of solidarity that actually do coalesce around the image in some ways about circulation of an image and how it's networked and brings creates new forms of network. And I'm quite curious actually to bring Katrina into this there's so much of your presentation also touched upon this and how the kinds of image circulation and the sort of removal of the image from, those more tangible modes of mediation or representation have allowed it to kind of form different types of community in and solidarity and spaces that you wouldn't ordinarily can conceive of. Absolutely. I've been thinking about this a lot recently in relation to the kind of shifting contexts of photographic circulation and particularly the ecosystems and how the infrastructure of the web has really shifted, especially since, say 2004 when Flickr appeared and really offered a possibility of what kinds of collectivities can emerge around like forms of image sharing. And there were some incredibly interesting political stupid throw away like imagery that that that brought people together and formed new relationships around that and I think, of course Flickr was an interesting example because it, it try it was really the poster child of web to open content, creative commons, tried not to be evil, and eventually got taken over by Yahoo made no money and now smug bug has come in to save the day and return it to its original state, promising to only do advertising 1.0 and not sort of add tech kind of extractive policies but of course, you know the huge amount of startup funding and corporate funding to keep that going is quite extraordinary and the business models means that even if you're trying to create a kind of community online, there are, you know, ultimately at the back end, there are extremely extractive processes to the point where now I'm quite fascinated with the example of a photo platform called I am which was a competitor to Instagram going come here authentic photographers we will have you go you don't need to be in the bot land of Instagram, but then they ultimately pivoted into a stock photography company as a political statement because they refused to work with the ad tech model of Instagram now and then they pivoted into an AI company where photographers are basically training their machines in aesthetics. So it's very hard to understand a kind of politics of the networked image because it's like an iceberg. You can like look at it from one point, but there's all this other stuff beneath the surface and what seems to be politically liberatory in the circulation of a certain kind of image, you know, ends up. I don't know being scraped into the flicker data set, which was then scraped by IBM and oppressing minorities in China through facial recognition the next day so it's really quite difficult to begin to think where the politics of representation have gone. In this quite complex stack, the photographic stack I guess you might want to call it. That actually leads us very nicely into a question that's popped into the chat around the politics of representation because we're in your resistance to want to spectacularize or use the spectacle of the images generated in the Guamwick protests. One of the questions that's come in is, could you say a bit more about the divisive approach to race in the conflict. The owner of the factory was Anglo Indian to what extent did a right wing agenda utilize the event towards particular hierarchies within a near imperialist agenda. I have a follow up to that but I'm going to let you answer that and then I've got a question that connects to Mo and Peter. Great, yeah thanks for that question. Yeah, I think to a great extent perhaps. I think there's a lot of writing around the kind of race politics of Guamwick and so George Ward was an Anglo Indian. He wasn't the only director as well, but he was the one who was most visible. And he worked with a group called NAF, National Association for Freedom they were called, who are this neoliberal think tank thing which basically brought about a pre neoliberalism but they brought it about essentially. And they kind of backed him up in his kind of fight against the workers. I think I'm less concerned about where to assign blame and to decide who or who isn't being racist in the situation. I think there's the government inquiry, the Lord's Garmin report I think it's called you can download it. I think it concludes there isn't there wasn't any kind of like serious racial harassment or kind of oppression, like I think that's what they concluded. But at the time, I think my interest is in actually will look at the entire system look at the way that capital works look at the way that labor is exploited look at the way that people are moved in and out, allow basically allowed in two countries to serve particular purposes. I think it's interesting that kind of systemic structural view of the, yeah, which I think is, is so like really important for the context of groundwork to, to understand that and the way that like imperialism and racism capitalism like basically work together to construct a situation that happened at groundwork and I want to say groundwork is not exceptional. It's exceptional because that it kind of blew up in a way but in terms of its like practices as a as a company. I think it was, you know, it wasn't the biggest wasn't the smallest it was very kind of like a lot of other companies. And in a way we just get this little insight because there's so much kind of publicity and interest in groundwork. It gives us this real insight into what again is still invisible but like is there we can kind of grasp a little bit of what was happening. I hope that maybe answers a little bit. I think so. And I guess the follow up to that about that these kind of questions around representation for me, Mo. The history that you depict you present around slide take technology, and particularly the way it was adopted by women and black artists in the UK. And it's its role in sort of creating a different type of representation. You know precursors to video precursors to different types of moving image. I'm curious about how that relates to some of the sort of the fringe activity that's happening in independent photography galleries, how supportive the spaces were of those practices by marginalized artists. There's obviously different types of activity happening in the margins you have the networks that Peter was talking about in terms of the independent galleries. And then you have the kind of these networks of artists who are working with sort of fringe, fringe, fringe media in some ways so I'm curious about understanding that history between the different types of media and the different types of spaces. So in the, I mean, I've researched slide tape over many years now. And one of the things I didn't, one of the sentences I had to cut out on my paper was that the documentation that exists is fleeting and spread across many different spaces. Right, none of those I came across were photographic spaces exclusively photographic spaces. I didn't go to the photographer's gallery for instance when I was doing the practical research. So in fact, kind of to it isn't a question I've thought of before in many ways because I've always assumed that was a relationship with photographic. There weren't spaces made within the folk within photographic institutions to show this type of work. And this is what I talked about in the way in which it falls through all these different definitions it never sat very comfortably in any of them. So it was, it was in none of them, and maybe in some of them. It did exist in places like, say London filmmakers cop and in galleries at the start of the 80s, but and in art colleges. You know some somewhere like Wolverhampton had a great reputation for producing slide tape works, hence people like Keith Piper, and so on had access to that. But yet photographic institutions. No, perhaps it was the sound element I assume which would have thrown. The photographer's gallery and so on. Can I can I add something into that. Sure. But I do, I do think there are times that the photography galleries used sort of tape slide and, but sometimes it was. Sorry, am I, am I on. Yeah, I am. Okay. One of the things of course about the slide was it was such it was a domestic medium, and it was used within kind of family situations to show the family archive. And it was the in a sense of the kind of the poor person's way of kind of projecting something out because you couldn't afford to do something in a larger scale. So community based organizations were using slides and slide and slide carousels and not not always sophisticated as the tape slide and the way that mechanism that way that the most talking about it is kind of aligned technologies, but it's absolutely really there and you see it, for example, in Nan Golden's family album project, which was going on into the into the northeast, where she's using the idea of the the carousel, and that very familiar that sounds like a chunk chunk chunk chunk, which is so important as a kind of as a signifier as something happening because it's because it takes something which is a domestic medium, and a relatively low cost medium into the gallery space so when gallery so when answers they were, they were, they were applying a technology which in some ways just that application itself is a little bit subversive and playful. Yeah, well that that was it yes that was a distinction Peter the made earlier on. Of course there is slide projection in photography galleries and then a whole long history of that, including as you say people like man golden and so on, but I'm using tape with it slide tape so that that approach which took it into as I as I said took it more towards film media. I'm really conscious of time. I'm also aware that we have we have overrun a little bit so I don't. I have other questions I could ask you all. I'm going to stop and take the time to thank you so much for your very, very generous presentation they were so provocative, and bought to bought to like so many different narratives around both photographic medium, its technology and the networks that that have sort of allowed it to become both a space and a site for activism and as a space for us to really question the role of technology within contemporary society the role of the image and how we how we use it today. I think at that point if there's if there's nothing else anyone wants to add in. I'm just going to take the chance to thank you all and yeah, have a lovely afternoon and the rest of the conference today. Thank you very much major thanks everyone. Thank you.