Grand Illusion is a photographic series of screenshots from Google Cultural Institute's "Museum View" of Baroque European palaces—objects of beauty and manifestations of power whose gold encrusted ornamentation points to the colonial activities abroad that made this kind of wealth possible.
While the monarchies and empires of the past used beauty as an expression of their authority, technology, in its mediation of the world, often operates without an aesthetic agenda. Throughout this series, the covert power of technology makes itself visible only through accidents such as glitches, a glimpse of the machine in the mirror, the AI blurring the faces of statuary.
"Since 2015, I have wandered virtually through the halls of Versailles, the Château de Fontainebleau, the Schönbrunn Palace, the Palazzo Madama among others. As I moved from room to room, the software would glitch, forming accidental collages. It's impossible to reproduce the same glitch, and so these screenshots are chance encounters. The software has since been updated to fix the glitching issue and I can no longer make more, so the glitching is now a record of the past. This series also embraces other oddities that occur as the digital platform transposes physical locations: the Google camera taking self portraits in ornate mirrors and landscaped palace grounds with statuary faces blurred by AI which mistook them for real people. Rather than a comprehensive scholarly exploration of the Baroque style, the series is a loose meditation on an aesthetic deeply aligned with power. As such, there are some images that come from later Baroque pastiche."
Theresa Ganz (born 1980 in New York City) works in photo-based collage and installation. She has shown her work nationally and internationally in group and solo shows.
