Exe0.2 Geraldine Juárez

Geraldine Juárez - Artist

Master in Fine Arts / Valand Academy

_{Portions of this abstract are part of previous texts such as "Technocolonial Intergalactic" (forthcoming Intercalations 3) and A pre-emptive history of the Google Cultural Institute (2016) (forthcoming Constant)}

• Execution as deterritorialization

Introduction

Screenshot Google Cultural Institute (search:executions)

The Google Cultural Institute is a complex subject of interest since it reflects the colonial impulses embedded in the scientific and economic desires that formed the very collections which the Google Cultural Institute now mediates and accumulates in its database.

A critique of the Google Cultural Institute where their motivations are interpreted as merely colonialist would be misleading and counterproductive. It is not their goal to slave and exploit whole populations and its resources in order to impose a new ideology and civilise barbarians in the same sense and way that European countries did during the Colonization. Additionally, it would be unfair and disrespectful to all those who still have to deal with the endless effects of Colonization, that have exacerbated with the expansion of economic globalisation.

The conflation of technology and science (technoscience) that has produced the knowledge to create such an entity as Google and its derivatives, such as the Cultural Institute, together with the scale of its impact on a society where information technology is one of the dominant form of technology – but not the only one -, makes technocolonialism a more accurate term to describe Google's cultural interventions from my perspective. But what is technocolonialism?.

Technocolonialism: a definition

To my knowledge, there is no official definition of technocolonialism, but it is important to understand it as a continuation of the idea of Enlightenment that gave birth to the impulse to collect, organise and manage information in the 19th century. My use of this term aims to emphasize and situate contemporary accumulation and management of information and data within a technoscientific landscape driven by “profit above else” as a “logical extension of the surplus value accumulated through colonialism and slavery.”

• How do you produce a defintion?
• Elements of a definition
• Defintion vs deterritorialization

Relevant concepts & differences with

What is the relation as well as difference of technocolonialism with:

• Management
• Solutionism
• Spectacle
  • Thesis 24: But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content.