Staged in four venues across the UK, Variations by Felicity Hammond is an evolving installation exploring the relationship between geological mining and data mining, image-making and machine learning. V4: Repository is the final chapter of this project, following V1: Content Aware which was exhibited as a public realm installation as part of the Photoworks Weekender in Brighton, 2024, V2: Rigged, presented at QUAD, Derby as part of FORMAT International Photography Festivals biennale, FORMAT25, and V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
In Variations, Hammond uses the many landscapes associated with artificial intelligence (AI) to map how digital photographic material makes its journey from mineral to pixel; from the subsurface to the screen. The project aims to reflect on the entanglement of contemporary forms of image making – specifically those made using generative AI tools – with the politics of surveillance, data extraction, and the exploitation of land, resources and labour. Machine learning software relies on an ecosystem that extends far beyond the interfaces its users are presented with.
Presented at Stills, V4: Repository is an expansive installation that reconfigures photographic works intended for exhibition alongside the props, equipment, tests, contact strips, raw files and digital traces that led up to the final work being produced. From a mis-addressed print of a Michelin advert accidentally sent by a commercial printer to email and WhatsApp exchanges to secure the delivery of a shipping container, the archive attempts to map the territory of the project in its broadest possible sense. Through doing so, it questions how archives are contained and exposes the flaws in the ongoing move from the physical archive to digital repositories of data. As Stills Centre for Photography enters its 50th anniversary year and looks towards its own archive, this exhibition asks particularly pertinent questions about the preservation and storage of photographic works under cloud capitalism.
V4 Repository, by Felicity Hammond, commissioned by Photoworks with the support of The Ampersand Foundation, Spectrum Photographic and Arts Council England.