'Ultradistancia' - Federico Winer

http://www.ultradistancia.com

Jorge Luis Borges’ fragment ‘On Exactitude in Science’ describes a map that has been created by perfectionist geographers to cover the entire territory, a piece that seems strangely prophetic in the age of Google Maps.

With the Googlisation of the world proceeding at an exponential rate, from the mapping of metropolises, deserts and even coral reefs, the formal space of the art exhibition has also been colonised by the digital. Google Art Project aims to virtualise the world’s art galleries, allowing anyone to wander the wings of the Louvre or Prado without leaving the frame of their own home.

With this in mind, it was inevitable that artists would respond to developments such as these by using Google itself as a means of crafting new art.

A compatriot of Borges, the Argentine photographic-artist Federico Winer’s latest series ‘Ultradistancia’ seeks to transcend the way we look at the world by taking elaborate ‘trips’ across Google Maps and capturing some truly arresting and hypnotic images.

By manipulating colour contrast and saturation, the pieces cannot fail but have an immediate impact on the viewer; psychedelic, and at once disorientating yet strangely familiar from our own personal brushstrokes across the same digital canvas.

Exposed to this satellite perception, the built and natural environments collide in a revelation of patterns and forms that are each weighted with their own imaginative potency.

A car park is revealed as an intricate micro-circuitry board, each tiny vehicle charged with the movement of data between unknown destinations. A hypodermic pier punctures the tissue of the shoreline. The impossibly blue Miami sea is scattered by small boats that float like fallen leaves. Vast highways become reams of fibre-optic cables just as spiralling motorway junctions become rhizomes shooting and twisting from out of the ground.

Planes are lined up in neat rows on an airport concourse like butterflies under the careful hands of a lepidopterist. The modernist architecture of a rail terminus unfolds like a lotus flower, while the graticule choreography of the urban cityscape is juxtaposed with the lysergic lily pads of circle-irrigated fields.

Each image is also freighted with the obliteration of scale, forcing the viewer to call into question their own impressions of micro and macro, frustrated by the stricture of the perspective prohibiting the customary zoom in or out.

The more they are observed, the more artistic movements seem to be subliminally embedded within each of the images.

From the luminous and brooding tones of a Rothko canvas; to the desiccated deserts of Max Ernst; the tessellations of M.C. Escher; the intensity of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Alchemy’, and the bold lines of Vorticism. Intentionally or not, several of the pieces seem to imply the grid-shaped tableaus of Piet Mondrian, equally illustrating the inexplicable spiritual structures thought to underpin the world of experience.

Being a political philosopher as well as an artist, it is hard not to ruminate on the wider connotations of Winer’s work.

So redolent of the contemporary is ‘Ultradistancia’ – satellites, drones and virtual mapping – that it’s tempting to pinpoint the series as a pioneering example of what could become an entirely new artistic movement, ‘dronism’ perhaps.

Art that encompasses the perspective of the ‘artificial eye’ roving at a remove from human influence, at the same time exploiting the new technologies of the masses to present a new and sublime interpretation of the world.

Indeed, what becomes quite striking about the 40 images is the lack of any captured human agency. Instead, human infrastructure and architecture are frozen in isolation as though they were ancient hieroglyphs left on cave walls for future observers, who may in their own way try and decode the true meanings and relevance of arterial slip roads and the uniformity of suburban street design.

In a shrinking 21st century world of ubiquitous surveillance and digital coverage, the omniscient vantage points of Winer’s online ‘trips’ provide a unique glimpse of a planet increasingly shorn of its secrets, only to reveal geometries that hold a mysterious ambiguity all of their own.