LILIANA FARBER

Liliana Farber is a Brooklyn based Uruguayan artist. She had solo shows at 1708 gallery, Richmond, VA; Arebyte gallery, London; Dodecá Center, Marte UpMarket gallery, and MEC gallery, Montevideo, Uruguay. She participated in group shows at The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal; The National Museum of Fine Arts, Chile; The National Museum of Visual Arts, Uruguay; Ars Electronica, Austria; WRO Media Art Biennale, Poland; Katonah Museum of Art, NY; Glassbox Art Space, Paris; and more. Farber received the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology, the Network Culture Award, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, and the Art and Technology Award, Montevideo City Hall. "Maps embody narratives and world perspectives. Atlases and charts visualize layered collections of data, sourced from different origins, compiled and modified to become canon as they survive the tests of time. In scholar John Pickles’ words, “Maps do not only represent a territory but produce it.” Historically, in addition to being used as tools for navigation, maps epistemologically define the world. They delineate hierarchies of power, what is accessible and what is beyond reach, what is real, and what is fiction. Maps are the tools of empires. Google Earth is no exception.

History has proven many world representations to be inaccurate, but there are still some data visualizations that seem to be almost raw, truthful, untouched by the biases of human interpretation. Satellite photography, as artist Aaron Rothman points out in “Beyond Google Earth,” has yet to earn our distrust. The combination of a god’s-eye perspective with automatic machine-made images, creates the illusion of a neutral and precise documentation. However, as Laura Kurgan explains in Up Close at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics, “…there is no such thing as neutral data. Data are always collected for a specific purpose, by a combination of people, technology, money, commerce, and government. The artwork ‘Terram in Aspectu’ scrutinizes the platform Google Earth and inquires into the room left for manipulation when using artificial intelligence technologies. The work consists of a series of phantom islands, bodies of land represented for many years in maps but proven to have never existed, recreated as satellite photography through a machine learning algorithm trained with images from Google Earth. The series explore Google Earth’s colonial ancestry and the fictional representation it creates by mechanical means, by rescuing discarded colonial maps of mistaken islands, and bringing them back to life, as if they were images taken from Google’s platform. "

Terram in Aspectu, 2019, Digital Archival Inkjet Print

--Liliana Farber