Guernica. Spanish Pavilion 1937, 2014

Over the past year Daniel G. Andújar has stolen one million email
addresses on the Internet. During the exhibition he will send the
same message to each of the addresses at a rate calculated to finish
the project by the end of the exhibition. Visitors to the exhibition
can follow the sending of the email on a small monitor in the
gallery space. The email message contains a private (i.e., unofficial)
photograph of the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair. Only a
few official photographs of the pavilion exist, and the private photograph
included in the email is not one of them. Andújar purchased
the photograph on eBay and then cropped the image to show only the
pavilion, thus making it his own work. By distributing this image,
he enables the global public to “visit” the pavilion and reflect on the
message of Guernica.

Guernica. 1/1.000.000 Spanish Pavilion 1937, 2014

Glossarĭum, 2014

Unfiltered access to knowledge in the digital realm of the Internet
is merely an illusion. Every piece of information obtained online
has been processed by a machine and its algorithmic procedures.
Most people probably do not pay any attention to this filtering, but
even those who do have no way of understanding the logic behind
the procedures. The algorithm responsible for the filtering remains
hidden and obscure and therefore all the more powerful. Glossar˘ıum
points to one of the most widespread yet disguised of these filtering
machines: the Google search engine. By performing an image
search on words taken from Friedrich Engel’s discussions of science
from a Marxist standpoint in the unfinished manuscript Dialectics
of Nature (1883; first published 1925), Glossar˘ıum shows how Google
Search conceptualizes political concepts in misleading, strange, and
absurd ways. Moreover, the work gives visitors access to the actual
manuscript through images of the search embedded in a QR code.
The work thereby reverses the procedure and uses Google Search as a
visual interface to a discussion that is critical of authorities such as
Google Search. The work suggests that filtering can be appropriated
and used as a means of liberation rather than as a means of control.
The work is also accessible online at www.glossarium.danielandujar.org.

e-projects, 2001

Representative democracy arguably has an inbuilt mechanism that
works against its very foundation. The common understanding of
a well-functioning democracy is based on discussions and negotiations
among different political parties. However, if one group of parties
in agreement reaches absolute majority in the parliament, they
do not have to discuss or negotiate anything. Such coalitions can
simply pass any law they want without including parties that might
disagree with their proposals. Such was the political situation in the
region of Valencia around the year 2001, and one area where this
situation manifested itself most significantly was the cultural arena.
Spectacular projects were commissioned to promote the region—
including to its own citizens—and to create the idea that the region
was thriving and on the forefront of the new experience economy. In
reality these projects were the products of scams, nepotism, and bad
judgment and caused huge deficits. e-valencia.org was a response to
the situation; it took the form of an online platform that encouraged
and allowed the public to discuss the cultural politics of the region.
Moreover, the identities of the contributors were automatically deleted
from the server the moment their comments were posted, making
it impossible for authorities to identify the contributors. The local
public was thereby empowered with the means to openly discuss cultural
politics without fear of persecution. The solution was radical,
but when democracy is not democratic, alternative methods need to
be applied to secure it. TTTP would later produce similar platforms
for Madrid, Seville, and Barcelona, and e-valencia.org was featured
in an issue of the magazine Mono edited by Daniel G. Andújar.