PERSONAL PROJECTS
HPIM6253
Different videos of family memories shown in different order. The sound of them is superimposed and sometimes the shots, the search is to represent a fragmented and simultaneous memory.
These digital videos are be flawed, glitched. The .mov is completely glitched with the audio editing program 'Audacity' and the .mp4s with small modifications in their hexadecimal code through the text editor 'Sublime Text 2'.
At the same time, a screen shows me filming the process (the webcam of the computer).
Finally, after getting the viewer used to this past tense view, I turn the camera and film myself. At this point I break the live recorded image with a capacitor with which I touch the camera circuits. The aim is to perform a liberalizing action that violates the memory support from its origin.
ARGLETON,
LANCASHIRE
The idea for the project was inspired by the work of James Bridle. This author coined the term "new aesthetic" to refer to the visual expressions derived from technological uses and processes that are intertwined with all aspects of our lives today. Bridle seeks out these images and groups them together, studies them, and shares them, but with the idea of provoking critical and reflective thinking about all the underlying processes and systems that produce them, as well as the points of view and ideologies that are hidden beneath the obscurity of technology. Finally for Bridle these mechanisms hidden behind already massified and habitual uses become evident, above all, in the flaws of these technologies (such as the glitch).
Following his tumblr, where he posts images, essays and notes that make the "new aesthetic", I came across the story of the ghost town of Argleton. This town came to online fame when a blogger realized that in the place where the town was, on the google map, there was only an empty field. And the most interesting thing is the fact that because the town existed in the google database, it caused several algorithms that work automatically to start locating hotels or bars in the area, and even job offers. The town was eventually deleted, and google offered that it was a casual mistake (although some believe that it was a mistake on purpose, as a trademark to protect the copyright of the map, a common trick among cartographers).
Anyway, in order to deal with this topic of the visual expressions of technology and how we get used to them without realizing it, reaching dangerous limits, I decided to make a kind of fiction using google street view.
The idea was to use google street view images to make a fictional tour of some parents looking for their missing son in England (after he went to live in Argleton). I decided to record the computer screen while I was moving with the arrows of the keyboard in the street view to give it a little more dynamism, but above all to make more evident the ridiculousness of some parents going through google street view to find their son. The strange movement is an account of those processes Bridle talks about, of the digital materiality, of the limits of that map. The contrast of a realistic sound, assembled with files from an internet sound library, with the fragmented images and the spastic movements also contribute, by counterpoint, to this idea. And to continue airing the flaws of this map that seeks to duplicate the world, like a new planet, I tried to bring out the fact that in google street view it never rains, nor is there fog, nor night, for the simple fact that google's little cars do not find it useful to go out if they can't see everything clearly. Throughout the short film we hear the storm nearby, we see overcast skies, but the rain can only come outside the map.
GLITCHING
