Michael E. Smith. 2020 was published by the Secession on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition in Vienna. For the project, Smith produced 692 unique cat calendars, each based on a photographic archive originally used for the development of software and algorithms in the field of computer vision.

The archive comprised 9,000 cat photographs collected by researchers from image-sharing platforms and personal blogs.

Each calendar contains a unique selection of 13 individual cats from this database. The images range from familiar pet photographs to more unsettling views of sick animals and bodily traces. In this way, the calendar shifts between the banal, the intimate, the technological, and the abject. What first appears as a familiar domestic object becomes a reflection on image circulation, automated vision, classification, and the unstable status of photographic material.

The title 2020 refers not only to the calendar year, but also to 20/20 vision, the medical measure of visual acuity. Smith’s edition therefore connects everyday timekeeping with the question of how images are seen, sorted, and evaluated by both human and machine vision. As an artist’s edition, the calendar extends Smith’s spare and often disquieting sculptural practice into the format of a printed object.