Net result

Homeless (2005) Detail at right

The Internet and search engines have become so much a part of our lives that the brand name Google has entered our language as a verb. It's not really surprising then that it should also infiltrate arts practice; although Joan Fontcuberta's art might not be exactly how you'd picture new technology being used.

The Australian Centre for Photography will be presenting Fontcuberta's Googlegrams exhibition this month, opening on 13 July. Fontcuberta has used the Google search engine to create large, colourful photo-mosaics that construct an elegant metaphor for the internet-era’s liaisons between mass media and our collective consciousness.

Never resting at the boundaries of his medium, Fontcuberta takes a step further back from the process of photography, using Google image searches to blindly cull images from the internet by controlling only the search engine criteria with the input of specific key words. These Google-selected images are then assembled into a larger image of Fontcuberta’s choosing, displayingan often challenging relationships between words and pictures. Fontcuberta’s concept focuses on the deft juxtaposition of search-engine criteria against the larger image those criteria comprise.
Thumbnail portraits of the richest men and women in the world are pieced together into a mosaic depicting a homeless man; the iconic image of detainee tortured at Abu Ghraib is cobbled together out of images of public officials involved in the scandal.

Like traditional photomosaics, Googlegrams have the pictorial tension of being legible on two different scales, illustrating Fontcuberta’s interest in both trompe-l’oeil and palimpsest. Unlike other mosaics, these works also exhibit the friction between the artist’s selections and the supposedly impartial selections of the computer. In representing these tensions, Googlegrams become emblematic of today’s media culture, presenting a sterile archive built of many decentralized voices competing for attention.

As the artist notes, the Internet itself is “the supreme expression of a culture which takes it for granted that recording, classifying, interpreting, archiving and narrating in images is something inherent in a whole range of human actions, from the most private and personal to the most overt and public.” World affairs and human sexuality are topics mediated by the cacophony of news, pornography, blogs and ads on the information-superhighway. The thousands of images that comprise the Googlegrams, in their diminutive role as tiles in a mosaic, become a visual representation of the anonymous discourse of the Internet. With his characteristic sense of mischief, Fontcuberta brings these tensions together in a provocative demonstration of media navigation.

Joan Fontcuberta was born in 1955 in Barcelona, where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited extensively at museums and galleries in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. His work is in numerous institutions, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Send us your feedback on this article or anything else in The Blurb

Advertise with us | About us |Our privacy policy

Joan Fontcuberta:
Googlegrams

Venue: Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington, Sydney
Dates: 13 July - 18 August 2007
Cost: Free

Click on the images for a larger view

Subscribe
to our monthly e-newsletter

Check us out on

Subscribe to our blog to keep
up to date on the latest news and reviews
at The Blurb