26 September - 6 December 2009

PROJECT GALLERY

GOOGLEGRAMS: JOAN FONTCUBERTA

One of Spain’s most prominent and innovative artists, Joan Fontcuberta is best known for exploring the gaps between art, science and illusion. In this series – first exhibited in Paris in November 2005 – he has used the popular internet search engine Google to create large, colourful photo-mosaics that construct an elegant metaphor for the current era’s liaisons between mass media and ideas of collective consciousness.

The images are created by a generative process which automatically culls images from the internet. The artist’s only control is to select the initial larger image to be rebuilt and to define the specific key words for the search that generates the thousands of small ‘tiles’ from which the mosaic is constructed. Often-challenging, the results are a synthesis of language and a search-engine code that is designed for the market to generate results that satisfy more people more often. As such Google image search prioritises images that have, on previous searches, been selected by other users.