[Quote:]

Last night I went to a panel on cultural diversity, and I have enjoyed a very good discussion. The panel was done the Saudi style, with the only female speaker Dr. Khairia Al-Saggaf talking from another room, where we could not see her but only listen to her voice. This made Dr. Warner Dawm, the German speaker, says he wishes Dr. Al-Saggaf was sitting with them on the same podium. She did not comment on that, but one of the audience later told the German guy to respect our culture and traditions. I did not think he was being disrespectful, and I’m glad that he did not apologize.

There was a lot of extremists in the audience, who insisted that anyone different from us is an infidel, and that we have to deal with him on this principle. I liked it when Dr. Faisal Al-Muammar, the moderator of the panel, stopped the same man from talking in an offending manner about Shiites, describing them as rafidha. Shiites were the subject of a hot debate at the end of the panel, when Dr. Khaled Al-Dakheel said that Shiites are part of us. This was the point where the panel went out of control. Before Al-Dakheel was able to complete that sentence, a Sheikh from the first row interrupted and told Dr. Al-Dakheel that Shiites are not Muslims, and that he has to say this.

Joan Fontcuberta: Googlegrams

Fontcuberta uses the popular internet search engine Google to create large, colorful photo-mosaics that construct an elegant metaphor for the internet-era’s liaisons between mass media and our collective consciousness.

Fontcuberta takes a step further back from the process of photography, using the Google image search engine to blindly cull images from the internet by controlling only the search engine criteria with the input of specific key words.
These Google-selected images are then assembled into a larger image of Fontcuberta’s choosing, displaying challenging relationships between words and pictures.

Penny-sized portraits of the richest men and women in the world are pieced together into a mosaic depicting a homeless man; the iconic image of detainee tortured at Abu Ghraib is cobbled together out of images of public officials involved in the scandal.

As the artist notes, the internet itself is “the supreme expression of a culture which takes it for granted that recording, classifying, interpreting, archiving and narrating in images is something inherent in a whole range of human actions, from the most private and personal to the most overt and public.�?
World affairs and human sexuality are topics mediated by the cacophony of news, pornography, blogs and ads on the information-superhighway.

The thousands of images that comprise the Googlegrams, in their diminutive role as tiles in a mosaic, become a visual representation of the anonymous discourse of the internet.