andres salgado

Installation - holographic device,

1m20 x 1m20 x 2m40, 2017

Open Sea was inspired by the interest of players in the digital world for the high seas, an offshore maritime area that escapes the legislation of all States, which implies that the data hosted by servers in this area would be outside of law and that no State could have a right to oversee them. Different projects have been formulated by different organizations, from large digital companies like Google whose engineers have imagined an offshore platform of servers powered by solar energy and ocean currents, cooled by sea water, to computer hackers like those of the free download site thepiratebay which has a time called for donations to buy a platform in the high seas.

To achieve this work, we wanted to do something like a sample of this high sea which takes the form of a fragment in synthetic images developed from algorithms which make it possible to simulate the sea in the special effects of cinema and video games; however, if we use these artifices to symbolize the high seas, it is not a question of making a trompe-l'oeil, of giving the illusion of an infinite sea, but of delimiting a geometric piece whose limits appear and which forms like a map animated by the swell.

This image of the coveted high seas is placed in a minimalist structure inspired by the storage bays of computer servers; this sort of tower, erected like a lighthouse, emits, in the manner of electronic indicators, a weak light which increases and decreases, recalling the movement of the waves. It is also accompanied by a sound reminiscent of the sea, but which comes from the recording of the sound environment of data centers.

This fragment of the high seas is an inverted utopia, an island of water that floats like a phantom image inspired by the holographic devices of the theater, inside the computer structures that it could host.

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This work was produced and presented by the Hors-Pistes festival for the Traversées exhibition (Centre Pompidou - 2017).

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The high seas holographic fragment visible in the box (preview):