Tech

Preserving Google's Deranged Infrastructure

By Alex Pasternack

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Clement Valla is an artist and coder fascinated by the processes that “produce unfamiliar artifacts and skew reality.” Not in the primary race, but in things like Google Earth, where he enjoys discovering aberrant digital phenomena before they get corrected by humans. He explains his pursuit in a recent Rhizome interview:

In Hapax Phaenomena and other projects such as Google Earth Sites, you refer to your art objects as artifacts or curios. Do you see yourself as an observer documenting an endangered technological curiosity?

Yes. These things will all disappear, and probably soon, in the name of progress. These artifacts are atypical ephemera, and often accidental products created by various internet algorithms. There is very little direct human hand in these artifacts. Though the purpose in collecting them is not simply for their preservation. It’s more about framing them, allowing them to be seen, and showing a kind of bizarre byproduct of these super-functioning and useful systems, such as Google.

Read the rest at Motherboard.

By Alex Pasternack 1 year ago
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