"No Looking After the Internet" is a looking group that invites participants to look at an image (or a series of images) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. Chosen in relation to an exhibition, an artist’s body of work, or an ongoing research project, "No Looking" examines images without the traditional frameworks of the caption, gallery exhibition, or artist's talk. Instead, it offers the space and time for immersive looking, asking what we might see when we look at images slowly and collectively.
Premised on the idea that we don’t always trust our interpretive abilities as viewers, the aim of "No Looking" is to examine what makes practices of looking difficult. How does a slower form of looking allow us to be self-reflexive about our role as spectators? How do we look at images differently when we interpret them with a community of others?
In response to the current theme of C Magazine, on citizenship, this edition of "No Looking" will examine images from Google Street View, to consider the practices of looking—and questions of ethics and spectatorship—that this technology produces.
"No Looking After the Internet" is facilitated by writer and curator Gabrielle Moser
About Jon Rafman: Nine Eyes (New Documents, 2016)
In The Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–), Jon Rafman employs a new approach to the strategy of artistic appropriation, extracting screenshots from Google Street View’s vast online archive to create singular photographs that range from the lyrical to the abject. Selected from the larger collection of images that comprise his ever-expanding project, the images in this volume illuminate in multiple dimensions our mutually constitutive relationship with images and testify to the importance of Nine Eyes in an increasingly codified, image-saturated world.
Rafman’s photographs appear alongside essays on the work by editor Kate Steinmann, Joanne McNeil, Sohrab Mohebbi, and Gabrielle Moser, as well as a text by the artist himself, written in collaboration with Sandra Rafman. Edited by Kate Steinmann. Designed by The Future.
Contributor Sohrab Mohebbi and publisher Jeff Khonsary in attendance. Copies available for sale.
About C Magazine:
C Magazine is a Toronto-based contemporary art and criticism periodical devoted to providing a forum for significant ideas in visual art and culture. Each quarterly issue explores a new theme through original art writing, criticism and artists' projects.