The exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life continues a series from 2018 that poses existentially pressing questions through observing the way technology is slowly changing people today. How deeply has human consciousness become inseparable from the technological solutions that grow increasingly useful and convenient with each day? Are we the same individuals that we were when we didn’t have smartphones and smart watches that serve us so well in monitoring the world? What are the ways in which our attitudes have shifted in respect to seemingly eternal things and ethical values centuries in the making? What testimony will there remain after our time is past? We invite you to pursue this line of thought by employing the coordinate system used throughout art history – that is, the traditional genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life. These have changed beyond recognition in the new epoch, the screen era.

Perspective is a long-standing topic of interest for Dutch visual artist Katja Mater and American photographer Erin O’Keefe. It functions both as a playing field for practical experimentation and as a tool to raise questions about the supposedly indexical status of the photographic image. Even more, perspective reveals itself to be a significantly malleable construct. Mater and O’Keefe employ the optical ambivalence intrinsic to photography to highlight that seemingly fixed viewpoints are carefully composed, rather than fluid and subjective.

The idea of utopia and its variations are a topic often discussed and represented in art and culture and used to create new potential world structures; a place that does not exist, a place of prosperity, a concept striving for a better future, a place where an ideal model of society and daily life exists. The perspectives from which the concept of utopia can be viewed are boundless and can be positive, analytical, or critical. Utopia is thus a subjective perception of the world that exists outside the usual dimensions of time and space. It can simultaneously be real, affected by social and political authority, or an imagined and transient fantasy made up by an individual. This is a common idea explored in theory and practice that often contextualises potential models of society – there are endless examples where utopia has become a cause or overture for cultural research and visual art exhibitions. However, the topic remains inexhaustible and open to different contexts, probably because it is inherently impossible to concretise utopia or subject it to long-term planning.

Keynote speaker Moritz Neumüller, the writer of Photobook Phenomenon, outlines the context of the conference “21st-Century Central and East European Photobooks” in Riga. The interest in photobooks amongst historians, collectors, curators, and artists is translating into the publication of successive detailed studies. “Books about photobooks” have now become a genre in their own right. This genre is mainly composed of exhaustive publications which rework the national histories of photography, and it includes books devoted to Austrian, Belgian, Chinese, Czechoslovakian, German, Soviet, Swedish, and Swiss photobooks. Rarer, though no less interesting, are synthetic works (with Gerry Badger’s and Martin Parr’s three-volume history of the form being a case in point), dealing with specific themes (like photobooks by women), and photobooks focused on particular cities or regions (such as New York, Paris or Latin America, for instance).

Technology can simultaneously provide entertainment and facilitate work, and also enable users to acquire information and knowledge rapidly. Over the last 30 years, the amount of technology and screens in society has increased. Where once a family shared one desktop computer, people now own more devices than there are opportunities to use them. Even very young children, at first intuitively and later consciously, consume the wide range of services offered by technology: cartoons, games, and social networks. This begets a question – what will still life look like in the future in a reality that consists of screens? Together with artist Līga Spunde, children and young people will have the opportunity to create their own world of screens in the workshop “Screen and Child” and construct a still life that summarises their era.

The development of technology in the 21st century and the emergence of social networks has made it possible for people to be together and connected no matter where they are. This has enabled us to contemplate a more accessible and inclusive society whilst, at the same time, it has contributed to misinformation, polarisation, and political manipulation by targeting people's fears and feelings of uncertainty. Instead of uniting people, these platforms now provide opportunities for disseminating beliefs that divide society. Within the framework of the educational programme of the Riga Photography Biennial's exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life III, the series of talks “Self-Isolation” will examine the subject of society's still life through the prism of isolation and self-isolation.

In a broader cultural context, a photo album demonstrates the impulse of modernity to document and archive fragments of everyday life. The photo album is widespread among amateur and professional photographers, and it was probably one of the most common formats for displaying and viewing photography in 19th and 20th centuries. It is a unique and one-of-a-kind visual object and a medium in itself, which tends to collect and include not only photographic images but also written testimonies, drawings, pasted newspaper clippings etc. The photo album necessitates in-depth research and contextualisation. Unlike the analysis of single examples of photographic images, when researching photo albums it is important to establish what the purpose of creating the object is, what the principles of selecting the photographs are, and ask whether it is an individual or collective process, private or public. The relationship between the medium of photography and the culture of memory is inevitable. Photo albums are like “time capsules” where collected photos, written testimonials, and other attributes interact and convey the narrative of the album's creator. Furthermore, photo albums, as deliberate repositories of memories, bring together a subjective arrangement of moments from the past into a single volume that can be perused.

Reinis Lismanis acknowledges and challenges the conventional structures and frameworks present in image-making, display systems, and art production in general in a process-oriented manner. His ongoing interest in engaging with the multitude of agents present in the everyday of his practice working as an assistant in artist studios in London offers an opportunity to reflect on past work whilst simultaneously using it as a source for producing new iterations and interpretations. Lismanis’ exhibition at LOOK Gallery is an assemblage of pre-existing material and conceptual elements developed for (as well as rejected from) previous projects that have been revised and reworked during the pandemic. These will be exhibited alongside newly produced material.

The development of technology in the 21st century and the emergence of social networks has made it possible for people to be together and connected no matter where they are. This has enabled us to contemplate a more accessible and inclusive society whilst, at the same time, it has contributed to misinformation, polarisation, and political manipulation by targeting people's fears and feelings of uncertainty. Instead of uniting people, these platforms now provide opportunities for disseminating beliefs that divide society. Within the framework of the educational programme of the Riga Photography Biennial's exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life III, the series of talks “Self-Isolation” will examine the subject of society's still life through the prism of isolation and self-isolation.

Photographs are traditionally looked at as if they are transparent. The idea is that one usually doesn’t look at the photographic surface, but rather through it to contemplate the scene an image presents in all its detail. This transparency of the medium serves many purposes, specifically, it enables the photographic image to function as the universal communicative language it is today.

The development of technology in the 21st century and the emergence of social networks has made it possible for people to be together and connected no matter where they are. This has enabled us to contemplate a more accessible and inclusive society whilst, at the same time, it has contributed to misinformation, polarisation, and political manipulation by targeting people's fears and feelings of uncertainty. Instead of uniting people, these platforms now provide opportunities for disseminating beliefs that divide society. Within the framework of the educational programme of the Riga Photography Biennial's exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life III, the series of talks “Self-Isolation” will examine the subject of society's still life through the prism of isolation and self-isolation.

Technology can simultaneously provide entertainment and facilitate work, and also enable users to acquire information and knowledge rapidly. Over the last 30 years, the amount of technology and screens in society has increased. Where once a family shared one desktop computer, people now own more devices than there are opportunities to use them. Even very young children, at first intuitively and later consciously, consume the wide range of services offered by technology: cartoons, games, and social networks. This begets a question – what will still life look like in the future in a reality that consists of screens? Together with artist Līga Spunde, children and young people will have the opportunity to create their own world of screens in the workshop “Screen and Child” and construct a still life that summarises their era.

The development of technology in the 21st century and the emergence of social networks has made it possible for people to be together and connected no matter where they are. This has enabled us to contemplate a more accessible and inclusive society whilst, at the same time, it has contributed to misinformation, polarisation, and political manipulation by targeting people's fears and feelings of uncertainty. Instead of uniting people, these platforms now provide opportunities for disseminating beliefs that divide society. Within the framework of the educational programme of the Riga Photography Biennial's exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life III, the series of talks “Self-Isolation” will examine the subject of society's still life through the prism of isolation and self-isolation.

Collecting in general, and collecting works of art in particular, has been as a way to preserve valuable artworks for future generations since the Renaissance. Although art collection is mostly seen as being an elitist practice related predominantly to the patronage of the arts, the activities of state art institutions, or the collections of private foundations, collection can take on a variety of forms and have different motivations. In her book Museums, Objects, and Collections (1992), researcher Susan M. Pearce analyses collection practices and identifies sixteen different motivations, ranging from individual aesthetic taste to attempts to attain immortality and thus to create a certain identity, or a representation of self-identity.

Personal computers, smartphones, and tablets have become an integral part of our daily lives; they have become our planners, assistants, calculators, clocks, cameras, and music players. It would be hard to imagine contemporary life without them. Traditional forms of communication, such as letters or physical photographs, are becoming a thing of the past. While technology tempts us with instant communication and the wide range of information that available to us via email, chat, social media, and online communities, it creates a new, instantaneous, and global sense of space and time. The more we live in the digital cloud, the more it merges with the physical reality that encourages us to be online constantly. Although this parallel world promises instant connection, the question arises – with whom?

Collecting is an interesting phenomenon; it is one of the most important cogs in the mechanism that maintains world order. Collecting is based on the natural instinct to hoard, which, of course, is not always perceived as something positive and does not always have a place in the rapid and insatiable lifestyle created by a producer-consumer society. However, it is due to this innate urge that subsequent events can unfold: the collection process sparks an interest in research, there follows a yearning for a deeper understanding of historical and social contexts, the collector’s erudition grows along with their desire to match their collection to others’ and to contribute to a common field of research. It is quite possible that without collectors/cultivators the world would have advanced in a different way, but the process of writing and reading history would most certainly have been different.

From the late 19th century and into the 20th century, photo postcards served as a form of public communication and as a reflection of moral values, lifestyle, and aesthetic ideals. The cultural history of the 20th century also shows that this small format of photography was widely used for creative experiments and, in the words of Salvador Dali, became an “experimental base for the study of the modern popular unconscious thought”. While the growth and popularity of postcards in the late 19th century was fuelled by the boom in lithography and other printing techniques, including collotype and colour lithography, the first half of the 20th century became the golden age of the photo postcard due to the reforms introduced by an American company – the Eastman Kodak Company.