Alice Dalgalarrondo

Images from surveillance cameras, these machines of constant observation, shape a reality that the human eye cannot apprehend in its totality. We cut and invent narratives that fit in the timespace of our perception. Google Street View cameras present themselves progressively as a surveillance tool, infiltrating in the cities’ daily life, capturing data ranging from faces to wifi passwords, which will constitute pieces in the puzzle of the surveillance systems' narratives - these indeed capable of a vast apprehension, provided with a powerful data storage infrastructure. In infinity of the generated images, how can we do our own cutouts in order to comprehend the meaning of these cameras’ persistence in our daily life? I propose a virtual tour, in one of the countless of possible narratives, which goes from the Cracolândia region in São Paulo to Namie in Fukushima, reflecting about the notions of privacy and identity in the context of this device and how it is becoming a tool that builds cities’ memories. The reality projected by Google Street View, with its miscalculations and invasion of the subject’s privacy, is dystopian in relation to the Flusserian idea of what the virtual reality might be. I investigate what constitutes this virtuality of photographic nature (the Memory freeze-frames, still signifying what is the photographic image for Susan Sontag) where the machine assumes the role of witness of the real and the human eye is placed as a mere a posteriori interpreter of this huge amount of generated images. 

Alice Dalgalarrondo holds a BA in Media Studies from the State University of Campinas, Brazil and is currently doing a post-graduation in Art and Media at the Universität der Künste, Berlin with a DAAD grant. She worked as an editor with Brazilian artists and filmmakers like Andre Parente, Arthur Omar and Joel Pizzini. Was editor of Escape From my Eyes, directed by Felipe Bragança, selected for the Berlinale Forum Expanded and for the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. Video artist, works with film and experimental documentaries. She had works screened in festivals in Barcelona (Video Akt), Mexico (Agite y Sirva Festival), Berlin (Platform Surreal) and Shanghai (N-Minute Festival). Her last works were exhibited at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, ACUD and Museum für Fotografie Berlin and selected for the Kasseler Dokfest.