Emma Charles is best known for Fragments of Machines, a work that investigates the materials that makeup the infrastructure of the Internet and the urban spaces where they are hidden. For her new project The Straightest Path Allowed by Law, Charles leaves the windowless data vaults of New York city for the Allegheny mountains in Pennsylvania, which underwent a secret $300 million construction to allow fibre-optic cables to connect New York and Chicago. Travelling the route of the cables, the artist looked for any evidence of their existence in the wilderness. Along the way, the photographs also show overhead wires, a water storage tower and a playground—relics of the city and its expansion.

Alicja Dobrucka’s series Life is on a High captures the conspicuous new high-rises in Mumbai, India. The images were taken by the artist and  reproduced from local property newspapers, each named by Dobrucka after the advertising slogans used to sell them. There is a disparity between the adverts and the reality—instead of lush river meadows, the “supertalls” (one of which was marketed as one of the greenest buildings in the world) are surrounded by slums. Dobrucka adopts a perspective that draws attention to the slums but cuts the tops of the buildings to contrast with the adverts that present the sky, and ones proximity to it, as luxury.

In both artists’ work we look down at the ground to see the ways technology and architecture write upon the landscape. But to what extent do we recognize their affect? You do not need to see photographs of Mumbai’s high rises to understand how wasteful such developments are. Although  Life on a High Line highlights the injustices of economic growth, Dobrucka equally illustrates how easily images can disguise the affects. Similarly, Charles shows how dramatic changes to the landscape can go unnoticed. The remnants she finds of the internet are not always obvious and while she has used the camera in Fragments of Machines to expose hidden networks, her photographs in the exhibition shows the difficulty of tracing the internet above ground.

Referring back to the title By Set Square, Compass and Eye, the emphasis in the exhibition is less on how we measure the changes around the world and more on how the eye and the camera can limit our perception of it. South Kiosk’s past exhibitions have all revolved around technology, whether new, alternative and forgotten, and the works that criticise it. Although this new exhibition seems at first to be a move away from this speciality, it investigates the problems with using a camera to document an increasingly changing world.

By Set Square, Compass and Eye is on at South Kiosk from the 16 January until the 14 February 2015.

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Paysage avec Poussin is a series of installations based on landscapes by the French 17th century artist Nicolas Poussin. Paysage means landscape, and in some way the installation does resemble a landscape. At once 2 and 3 dimensional, almost like a theatre stage set, you walk in between the plinths and walls on which the objects are placed. Seeing the set from the side or behind, each view is so calculated, the longer you spend in the space, the weaker your knees become. The exhibited objects — marble antiques, velvety fabric — are so carefully chosen from a pool of thousands, your attraction to them becomes fetishistic. In the process of fetishising the object we remove it from its social context, negate its agency; our attachment becomes immoral. Imagine the feeling of the velvet, its mossy Victorian green so exquisitely perfect you can barely stand it. The whole thing is so entirely perfect, so prudish, it is perverse. Ice-cold well-dressed volcano: sex under a delicate but impenetrable veil. The two videos in the upper galleries exacerbate this tension. Little brown flint stones and bank notes, just go so well together it’s obvious. Tableaus of weird Portobello Rd crap that you just love for no reason other than that they’re perfect. Vintage, tasteful, perhaps there is an element of aura, definitely of rarity. The camera lenses and the plate of glass, the stones and the figurines; they are so lovely, I want more, I want them all the time, but also, I don’t. It is the appeal of Snap Chat: the appeal of limitation, exclusivity, or the waves that only just cover the dick, the completely perfunctory sheer scrap that ensures Aphrodite’s in keeping with decorum. Overwhelmed with the infinite scroll of the everyday and allthetime, Cornaro’s tight selection is both titillating and an immense relief. The videos are remarkably short. I watch them on loop, go back into the installation, move my head close to the marble obelisks. My trousers at my ankles, desire in my eyes, Cornaro catches me fetishising her objects. In returning her gaze I am forced to question what it is that makes them so beautiful; what do they want and why do I love them?

Isabelle Cornaro: Paysage avec Poussin is at the South London Gallery from 24 Jan until 5 April 2014.

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