Window Blinds from the GIS (Google Image Search) Series
The GIS (Google Image Search) Series by Filio Gálvez is the result of his experiments with the bandwidth of his Internet connection, which affects the speed and efficiency with which content reaches the screen. Gálvez slows down the strength of his Wi-Fi signal to search for images that relate to certain words or phrases of conflicting meaning (for instance, words extracted from the social media, in contraposition to others which were fashionable in the past). As images delay in loading, colorful squares with different patterns show up to take their place. Gálvez captures them through screenshots to later reproduce them individually, at a larger scale, in different mediums that go from paintings to prints. With this action, he is not only sublimating the glitches of the network, but also presenting to us another form of (aesthetic) perception of the digital content. In this sense, Gálvez’s works appear as reenactments of the experiments of net artist pioneers, from Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon in the sixties to the Vuk Ćosić of the nineties, who looked at the computer code, especially ASCII, not as an intermediary between the machine and the user, but as an element intrinsic of the medium itself, with its own potential for communication.