Joan Fontcuberta, Datascapes – Sylvain Campeau, Sutures et traitements numériques

[Summer 2007]

This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Joan Fontctuberta’s latest body of work, Datascape, is composed of two series: Orogenesis and Googlegrams. The first series was produced with software intended to produce photorealistic perspectives from topographical maps and satellite imagery. However, Fontcuberta fed the software with reproductions of artworks. The work in the second series are assemblages of thousands of small digital images, or tiles, found on the Internet through the Google search engine. All tiles in a single work responded to search criteria related to the larger composite picture. The author reads these works by Fontcuberta as instance of eternal displacements, in which the content of each image is yet another culturally produced image. As such, the content of these works continuously evades any fixed meaning and acquires significance only in the displacement itself.