Abu Ghraib
March, 2008
The infamous photos of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004. Now, four years later, we are still debating the ethics of torture, and are still apparently unable to really process the contents of the images we received from the American dungeons of Iraq.
This software piece is based on the archive of 279 photos together with the captions assigned to them by the army investigative body, the CID. This is a video capture expert of the work.
In this work, the scrambled pixels from each image are bricks in a carceral globe. The software bounces from image to image sorting the pixels by color in a futile process that never reveals the original image. We never see the image, instead we see the caption it was given by the CID: that also futile ascription of meaning that failed to find its target in justice.
