Theresa Ganz

Sans Souci Google Robot Selfie | Zelensky in the Oval Office

The thesis of my book Grand Illusion is more or less that excesses of gold in architecture are a direct indication of despotism. As the White House festoons itself with golden doodads and proposes a gilded new ballroom, I think the thesis holds. Every day until I get bored of doing it, I am going to post a page from the book in no particular order. (Missed a couple of days but, oh well) Book is available through DAP, Mousse, various small book sellers or on my website. Link in bio. 💛⚜️💛

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.

Edited by Theresa Ganz and Joshua Chuang. Text by Joshua Chuang.