The most significant event in the Rencontres d'Arles 2011 est the emergence and the recognition given to "photographers" using internet and the web as their source of inspiration and tools. Sadly the importance given to the curators overanks their selection of artists.

Alex Kummerman

Below are five of the most significative work presented:

Jenny Odell:
Odell is interested in art, writing and design. The thread that connects her work is a concern with arranging, with creating order. Her pieces in From Here On are massive collages collecting dozens of everyday objects, including grain silos and suburban swimming pools. Grouped together and divorce of a context, these familiar things become surreal, and barely recognizable.
www.jennyodell.com

James Howard:
James Howard is a former hacker turned artist. He uses internet spam as a starting point, and turns those familiar garnish images into strange collages. Interested in what he calls the "secret internet" he explores the parts of the World Wide Web most users never condider.
www.luckyluckydice.com

Hermann Zscheigner:
Hermann investigates "photography in the age of Google" in a number of projects. " +walker Evans +sherrie Levine" is a collection of all twenty-six images of Allie Mae Burrough produced by a Google image search based on a series' title as the search parameter. File size, pixel aspect eaten and URL of ales images are included as a frame of reference. Only in reading the file names can we identify whether the respective image is by Levine or by Evans.
www.follow-ed.com

Corinne Vionnet:
Vionnet's work is generally concerned with isolation, a sense of being on the fringe of things.
For this exhibition, je about-faces and oes instead of the hart of amateur mainstream photography : tourists snapping landmarks. She collected hundreds of examples of the eiffel tower and other favorites shots in pricesily the same way, over and over again.
Vionnet then composited these clichés to create the ultimate series of landmark photographs, each on unusual almost painterly picture an overly familiarly structure captured in a overly familiar way.
www.corinnevionnet.com

Mocksim
This artist discovered that Brighton's database of parking meters fine could be accessed, including photos of the offending cars. He collected these, and blew up some images in order to explore the world of online information.
www.mocksim.org