MIND GAMES

Mind Games is the result of recycling the unlimited visual heritage available on the Internet.

Mind Games is the result of recycling the unlimited visual heritage available on the Internet, which helps us to reflect on the uses and meanings of photography, its validity as a record, and the relative importance of authorship and originality. It addresses the photographic representation joining the guidelines set by Joachim Smichd, who establishes that "everything in the world has already been photographed, and it should not contribute to its oversaturation, but rather a recycling task is imposed".

To do this, a root image from our personal archive is searched for its analogous through the “reverse search” tool for Google Images. Each of these searches, interpreted by an algorithm, produces a limited number of other formally similar images -labeled for reuse with modifications-, which are recycled in layers superimposed on our own image, generating a new image with another dimension and meanings.

Google has created applications to train the algorithms of Google Photos but asking the users themselves to collaborate identifying what they show under the premises of "Tell us about your photos" and "Understand your photos", trusting them to educate a technology whose intelligence is always questionable. The resulting image in Mind Games encompasses the formal fades interpreted by artificial intelligence, and the title of the same, the possible suggested related searches that, rarely, coincide in background and form with the root image, and with our primary intention as creative authors of a meaning.

Working during confinement was a break and a breach in every way, even in our visual production. It was a period of time that, vaguely, allowed us to reflect on the challenges of postmodernity, thinking about the image and the participation of the author and the viewer in its new meanings, amplifying our way of understanding photography as a carrier of meanings that underlie aesthetics.