May
27
Inserito da admin il 27 May 2008
This virtual photography event, with its slide shows and lectures, brought the museum as simulacra to life. This was manifest not only in Fontcuberta’s presentation of “Landscapes without Memory” (2005) and “Googlegrams” (2005), but also in the choice of having Roman Berka of Vienna’s Museum in Progress (MIP), describe the MIP’s art projects that take place in public spaces and in the paper-based and digital media. Fontcuberta’s “Landscapes,” now collected in an Aperture monograph, continue his exploration of the interfaces between art and technology. Based on map rendering software, the images are created by scanning images of actual, painted landscapes, by Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, et al., into a computer that interprets the colors as elevations on a topographical map. It then proceeds to render a digital landscape such as one that might be found in a video game or military flight simulator. The results are remarkable. At times they resemble their source material, but generally these constructed landscapes serve to remind us that the very notion of a “landscape” itself is a human construct and exists outside of the real world. The “Googlegrams” take advantage of Google’s image search applications and the composite image rendering software that produces photomosaics. For instance, Fontcuberta used keywords–for example, from the Final Report of the United States Congress on Abu Ghraib–to source images that were then composited to replicate the infamous image of U.S. Army Private Lynndie England holding an Iraqi prisoner on a leash.