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.

Photographer(s): Theresa Ganz
Text by: Joshua Chuang