Machines Dreams & Fabulations: On Time After Time & The Wild Ones

This essay was written to accompany an exhibition entitled Time After Time & The Wild Ones by Nick Berkeley, Bridport Art Centre, Dorset, October 2022. It concerns two series of Berkeley's work: Time After Time, involving the printing of found images made with a slit-scan camera, and The Wild Ones, a suite of C-Type photographic prints of found images captured from low-quality online video content. The essay places these photographic projects in relation to recent and current discourses on so-called 'operational images', discussing how they work through careful and strategic displacements, the confounding of expectations, and the mobilising of the viewer's faculties of non-conscious cognition