Experiment #Location
The website is installed as a different interaction device aiming to create an experience that does not reproduce the experiments completed so far, but to create a new set of relationships that apply the learning from all the micro-experiments conducted during this research. In this sense, one of the issues that has been taken into account is the trajectory created by linking together different images from different times and places. Digital images in their ubiquitous form would allow a new set of practices and relationships that escape my own intentions, the collection of images uploaded to the internet does not just open up relations, but it opens up to the flow of information in computer networks (Lash 2002 in Hand 2012, p.70). Therefore, the photographs would not just belong to the collection, but to a series of networks and relations that are not given through the eyes of the expert, but by the way search engines respond to the information added to each image in the collection. In this context, the website that I have produced is a hybrid cosmology of images, ‘contaminated’ by the view and experiences of others, that could be seen as a decolonial approach, questioning the colonial matrix of power in place in both locations.
The website has a landing image that is a drawing of the map of both cities conflated into one image. Their audiences can see red points which identify the places visited. By clicking on these points, the photographs taken in each of the gardens appear, which is then immediately blurred by a sequence of other images downloaded, related to the image metadata. The page is programmed in HTML / CSS / Javascript. The image search logic is programmed from Javascript which uses Google Custom Search Engine limited to “medium” size. In this sense, each user experience is unique; this is because each user has a history that triggers different searches from the same keywords. In this way, the page seeks to generate user experiences that emphasise the different perceptions that exist. Looking at how colonial agencies are also part of this new set of relations dictated by Google algorithms and that of the site.
To summarise, the creation of the web logic commanded by the metadata will allow users to navigate between the images, not as a structured visual taxonomy (one image side by side with the next), but as a series of different cosmologies, the relationships amongst which will be invisible. In doing so, my intention is to create a space for representation where gardens can allow users to reflect upon the different perceptions of the landscape in Chile and how these perceptions are conditioned by history, politics and a social context that has been framed by the colonial matrix of power.