A juried photography exhibition Viral: Photography in the Age of Social Media will be hosted at the Alison Richard Building. An opening reception and academic colloquium to mark the launch of the exhibition, Virulence: visualising the African body as a vector of epidemics, will take place on 19 February 2015.

The convenors are currently seeking entries to the exhibition on the theme of ‘viral’.

In our age of emerging infectious diseases and “epidemic” information sharing, becoming viral has come to be seen as an indispensable part of 21st century social life.

From Ebola to social media, internet memes, and online videos, what “goes viral” has come to underscore the potentials and dangers of our interconnected world.

Both vital and lethal, things viral are the subject of the new collaboration between United Photo Industries and CRASSH.

Shared, tweeted, liked, appropriated, manipulated: photography and short-form videos have become the undisputed visual language of our generation, a powerful communication tool at a time of shortening attention spans and simmering visual saturation. No longer able to imagine (or care to remember) a time unmediated by the social/digital experience, we have willingly surrendered our understanding of the world to the filtered collective-consciousness of the feed. In the words of conceptual artist Joan Foncuberta, “Images don’t represent the world any longer – images compose the world”.

Artists are invited to submit photographic images and short videos reflecting, questioning, and expanding on the notion of “viral” and its impact on everyday life and our understanding of the world. The call for entries is juried by

• Jon Feinstein – Co-founder, Humble Arts Foundation
• Dr Ann Kelly – Medical Anthropologist/Ebola Response Anthropology Platform, University of Exeter
• Dr des Lukas Engelmann – Medical Historian, University of Cambridge
• Sam Barzilay – Co-founder & Creative Director, Photoville

For more information on how to submit to this exhibition, please visit the United Photo Industries website. Deadline for submissions 9 January 2015.