REC
First we pressed the PAUSE button, then the PLAY button, and now we’re hitting REC. The round red symbol, always so easy to find on cameras and electronic devices, takes its name from record, to save, film or register. Whether still or moving, the relationship between the image and memory is a central theme in visual studies that has captured the attention of great minds in the past such as Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and Georges Didi-Huberman. But what remains of this relationship today in contemporary image technologies?
Our throwaway culture means that we no longer take photographs or videos to treasure moments, but to share them and forget them instantly, and we face an overwhelming abundance that wears our sensitivity down, turning all visual memory into pure noise. Added to this is the unprecedented proliferation of fake images –which collapse our concept of reality– and the conversion of any document into a file readable only by non-human intelligences, with software and devices designed to quickly become scrap metal. Furthermore, the structural limits of data centres, where we store memories without taking into account their enormous needs for water and energy, threaten the future of the “archive”, both personal and civilising (spoiler alert: it won’t be possible to keep all the information).
These are just some of the factors meaning that visual technologies are facing a gigantic paradigm shift today. That is why, in the next edition of Getxophoto, we ask ourselves how the visual media arts are reinventing themselves in this scenario: what is the difference between accumulating archives and telling a story, what is the future of images –and of memory constructed through visual registers– in a world with extreme, immaterial, easily manipulated and apparently infinite REC.
CURATOR
María Ptqk
Born in Bilbao in 1976, Maria Ptqk is a curator, researcher and cultural manager specialising in the intersections between art, technoscience and feminisms. She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of the Basque Country, a degree in Law and a degree in Economics, a DEA in International Public Law from Paris II-Sorbonne and Cultural Law from the Uned-Carlos III in Madrid, and a Master in Cultural Management from the University of Barcelona. She has curated the exhibitions Soft Power (Amarika Proiektua Project, 2009), À propos du Chthulucène et ses espèces camarades (Espace virtuel du Jeu de Paume, 2017), Ciencia fricción. Vida entre especies compañeras (CCCB Barcelona, 2021 and Azkuna Zentroa, 2022), Reset Mar Menor. Laboratorio de imaginarios para un paisaje en crisis (CCC El Carme, 2021), Extinción Remota Detectada (LABoral, 2022) and Máquinas de ingenio (Tabakalera, 2023).
She has edited the collective books Breve historia del pimiento para uso de la vida extraterrestre (2017), Especies del Chthuluceno. Panorama de prácticas para un planeta herido (2019) and Laboratorios ciudadanos: una aproximación a Medialab Prado (2021). She is currently curator of Getxophoto, advisor to consonni publishing house, collaborates with the Chaire Arts & Sciences (École polytechnique, l’École des Arts Décoratifs – PSL, Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso) and editorial mediator of .able journal.