120 Rue Lafayette, Paris. Communist Party Headquarters 1936. International Headquarters for the recruitment of the International Brigades. Building reconstructed in 3D.
Facade Rue Lafayette 120. Modified with posters of that time calling for the recruitment of brigadiers and with images of brigadiers that, like ghosts from the past, seem to inhabit the interior of the building, bringing together the past and the present.
Virtual Time
2010. Experiment Digital media.
Virtual Time is an experiment on digital memory and the possibility of reconstructing the past of places within the virtual space of Google Earth.
The project retraces the journey of the International Brigades to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Some of the places and buildings connected to this journey were reconstructed in 3D and inhabited by digital ghosts drawn from historical archives, bringing different temporalities together within the same virtual space.
The journey and the buildings were published on Google Earth, where they remained accessible until Google discontinued the system that allowed these models to be viewed in 2013. Paradoxically, a work created to recover and preserve the past ended up disappearing through the obsolescence of the very technology that made it possible.
Virtual Time thus makes visible a contradiction at the heart of digital memory: as we entrust an increasing part of our individual and collective memory to private technological infrastructures, we also lose control over its permanence. What is preserved, what remains visible and what disappears increasingly depends on platforms, formats and corporate decisions. Digital obsolescence becomes not only a technological problem, but a question of who holds power over memory.
Website by MARÍA MOLINA PEIRÓ