Roc Herms led a tour of his favourite virtual worlds and shared his practice of screenshot-based photo reportages. Viewers were given the opportunity to engage with the artist, learn about screenshotting techniques and discover alternative online spaces for social exchange and interaction.

Live streamed guided tour of virtual worlds

Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Biography

In 1978 Gary Thurek and his assistant Carl Gartley sent the first mass email with advertising purposes, reaching 393 users at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (called the ARPANET), unaware that they just sent the first example of what would later be known as SPAM. That same year, over 9000 kilometers away, Roc Herms was born in Spain. 28 years later he discovers photography as a tool to learn, and he manages to combine it with his interest in the Internet, video games and parallel realities: showing his passion for technology and the need to take a step further in photographic practice. “Postcards From Home” and “<YO> <YO> <YO>”, his two long term projects published in book form, try to shed some light on the life we live inside the computer. “Hacer Pantallazo” is an intimate diary made with screenshots, a capture process that he ends up understanding as the ultimate step on photography’s digitalisation. His work has been exhibited in “From Here On”, Centre d’Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona and “Photography 2.0”, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid both curated by Joan Fontcuberta, as well as in the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands; Platine Festival, Germany; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Hammer Museum, USA; CCCB, Barcelona and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France.