More about Praxis programme

Building the Interminable Ruin of the World uses the image as a means to explore the idea of memory in the virtual world by analysing the new systems that generate it in that ‘invisible' space that is gradually taking over the space of the contemporary social sphere.

The project originated from Victor Burgin's essay “Sonnen-Insulaner: On a Berlin Island of Memory” in the book Memory Culture and the Contemporary City, in which a number of writers consider the theme of urban memory and the way that a memory culture is being constructed in and by the contemporary city based on its architecture, art and monuments. Burgin takes as his starting point Didi-Huberman's analysis of Roland Barthes' theory on the ability of the photograph to keep something alive and goes on to draw a distinction between the concepts of imago (image) and vestigium (vestige, trace, ruin) as a way to explain how the world bears the mark of a loss. He later cites the American painter Jasper Johns' desire to produce an object that speaks of the loss, destruction and disappearance of objects. Burgin sees this object as being the photograph, which, as an image, is the trace of an earlier state of the world, a vestige of how things once were. He goes on to conclude that the sum of all photographs is the ruin of the world.

Juanli Carrión turns his attention to the concept of ubiquity and seeks to give material expression to the invisible space or the virtual space through two locations: Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain and New York in the United States. He begins by searching on Google for images that portray the word ‘ruin' in these two places: Hondamen in Basque, Ruin in English and Ruina in Spanish.
As the basis of the process, the artist will put together a collection of images that the Google search engine allows us to view. He will then use these images to give material form to one of the possible ‘ruins' of the world, which he will construct based on the images found.

Carrión will be in the ARTIUM exhibition space throughout the entire duration of the project, sometimes in person and on other occasions as a virtual presence through the live broadcast of the artist making the project at the Abrons Arts Center in New York. Using the Google images, the artist will gradually ‘construct' in both venues a series of photographs and a sculpture that will give rise to a project that combines performance, net-art, audiovisual elements, photography and sculpture.

In this manner, Carrión will deal with the theme of memory in the virtual world, as well as the changing concept of recollection.

Carrión uses webcams, information control, the Internet and the act of observation as some of the determining elements in his project and touches on the aesthetics of surveillance, a genre that has developed numerous variables since its appearance in the 1970s, especially following Foucault's consideration of the subject in his political analysis of observation in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. According to Foucault, we are not in the society of the spectacle, as announced by Guy Debord, but in the surveillance society. Carrión's work is a much more distant and abstract example of the surveillance genre and one in which the political component resides not in the act of observation but in the content of the work done by the artist on the other side of the camera.

In Buildig the Interminable Ruin of the World, Carrión talks about the concept of recollection that is changing as a consequence of the virtual era, of the organisation and subjugation of the power to which the image is still subject in cyberspace through language, location and even politics. In addition, the virtual experience is frequently reduced to the image and it is on this that the project focuses.

The images that fill the net are increasingly subject to a series of premises, norms and restrictions put in place by governments, companies and individuals. What is left is a sanitized ‘collective' selection of the images that make up the world in the virtual public space. Many of these images can be viewed but not ‘used', since they are encumbered by property rights, thereby restricting our control of the space they represent but allowing us access to the image of it at a particular moment.

In addition, images are also victims of the human need to catalogue and structure since they exist in the virtual world through tags, labels with which we ‘organise' our images. These tags clearly elucidate the predominant tools and allow us to see the structures of power that direct and control information.

Today Google is the window through which more than 70% of Internet users worldwide begin their search for information on the Web (according to market research carried out by Google itself, the figures are USA: 81%; Great Britain: 90%; Australia: 93%; France: 90%; Germany: 92%; and Spain: 93%).

Juanli Carrión tells us about how it is the giant Google and its famous search algorithm that today determine the collective imaginary. An algorithm created for a useful and practical purpose when it comes to gathering information but which, with the passing of time, has become contaminated by other, mainly commercial, interests, the goal being, so Google says, to offer users higher quality hits. However, this directly affects non-commercial users of the search engine and the way in which memory works within it. Today, there is no other Lady on the Web but Lady Gaga, and that is not because more important Ladies have never existed.

Google's argument is that it trusts the user and their critical judgement when it comes to filtering the hits, a declaration of neutrality that is more than open to question.

Google's search algorithm is based to a large extent on location and the user him or herself. In other words, the order in which hits appear varies for different users, even if they are in the same room, since one of the factors Google takes into account is the search history of the IP address of the computer used. Where is the neutrality in this?

But it is not just a question of the order in which hits appear but also of how many hits we can see, since Google continues to reduce the visible hits to make searches more ‘useful', as they put it. A search can throw up millions of hits, though we are only able to see a selection determined in advance on the grounds that these are the most relevant of all those found by our search criteria. The limit, as imposed by Google, stands at 1,000 hits.

The Web is obviously becoming less and less the ‘public realm' of its early days and is proving unable to fulfil its promise as a truly open place where individuals and collectives would find a forum for free expression that would turn the virtual world into a milieu de mémoire. The materialisation of our recollections is fading in a virtual locus that it would perhaps be more appropriate to call the non-lieu de mémoire. An undoubtedly far more environmentally-friendly system that will update itself after our disappearance and overwrite us.