GOOGLENTITY

I collect an image file of people, following the process of "virtual drift" (a previous geographic selection), going down the photographed streets included in this technology. I take a stance in the system as a distant observer, a kind of technologic "voyeur" and curious at what I can find.

This process tried to look for some kind of personal essence that "portrayed" some type of quiality or characterustic that those individuals, frozen, and apparently deprived of all human nature. The homogenization of blureed faces makes it seem impossible at first to paint an individual, and makes us think up to what extent we are being watched.

The distance (to the representation of these images), just like the meta-textual discourse that is produced in the “square”of the images that one can take, is turned into the investigation work to scrutinize.

In this way, I limit myself to play their game, just making the selections that I can register (without digital modifications), and without distorting the way in which the images are shown; images that have been previously “frozen” in a system that does not give them any importance and that gets rids of them to exhibit them from a distance, from the presupposition of their dehumanization. 

The randomness of the primitive photographic gaze (capturing an image through Google’s car) does not take into account historical, human or contextual issues… It is a distant gaze that tries to describe the physical world of the architectural information but that does fallback to more human questions. In this way, the work that is done through this project is trying to break this perceptive limits which are self-imposed and that densify one’s gaze, trying to show another possible world.  

Just like the protagonist of the film “Blow Up” (1966, Michelangelo Antonioni), I try to enrol myself as being someone who reveals human possibilities (but with no intension of showing an extraordinary event) in a system that is eminently technologic, where human representations tends to be hidden systematically. When I zoom in and frame the image, I try to find particular gestured or specific situations that can bring back some sign of humanity lost in the mechanic process that Google’s cars make. 

In an transparent way, one tries to initiate long-distance relationships, in order to observe if through it you can depict the individual, or if on the contrary, it is possible to investigate about a global identity. From this perspective, my vision as an spectator and an artist, consists of trying to remove the inquisitivenesses around a distant gaze, who apparently belongs to no one, but belongs to everyone. A gaze that conceives the individual as a residue of the system. Because of this, the gaze that I am trying to show tries to give back importance to the individual, so that one can question the context of these images.

This exhibition consists of images taken all throughout the process, as well as the attached paperwork that allow to see the exhibition as the ensemble resulting of the process, due to the fact that the project remains open and in a continuous evolution.