Habeas Corpus: Under_Pixel
(2019)
The images in Adrià Guardiola’s ten minute video Under_Pixel are derived from footage taken by the Spanish police, the Guardia Civil, of their search for the bodies of refugees, drowned in the sea while trying to enter Spain. We see as well dead bodies being sent back to Morocco, and crowds of refugees interacting with the police. The voice-over narration, meanwhile, is a complex theoretical text, analyzing the nature of contemporary digital media and its relation to the current understanding of social reality. The text is read by a synthesized computer voice, which emphasizes the tendency of digital media to masquerade as impartial, neutral information, hiding both the agenda of the speaker, as well as the even more hidden voices of the shapers of the technology, who set the boundaries of contemporary perception.
The footage, like most footage from security cameras, is heavily compressed, blocky and blurry with compression artifacts. Guardiola repeatedly zooms in on the details, showing us small clusters of pixels, and closeup shots of the individual pixels visible on a display.
The text makes multiple, overlapping, and subtle arguments, but one underlying theme is the essentially weightless and substance-less nature of digital information. Actual dead bodies can be hidden, made to disappear, if they are left underneath the water, but no matter how deeply you probe into the screen on your phone, you won’t encounter the physical reality of the deaths of refugees. With the extremely low level of engagement of social media, the screen only asks for a tiny portion of our awareness, bestowed for a few seconds on each item, as we are constantly tempted to click on new links and open new windows. In a key phrase, we hear that “the image is nourished by indifference to reality.”
These thoughts were undoubtedly provocative in 2019 when Guardiola made the film, and the public was just learning about the complicity of the Guardia Civil in refugee deaths. It has only become more relevant in 2022, with a gathering worldwide movement to de-platform all voices which disagree with the central authorities, labeling any opposing views as “disinformation.” Under_Pixel offers no program, no creative solutions to the difficulties of our media environment, but it combines theory with residual visual evidence in a way that, at the very least, points out to us where we will definitely not find any answers, no matter how much we zoom into the details.
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