A textile print, created from a montage of screenshots taken from Google Earth’s 3D environment, rests on a slightly elevated, polygonal, light grey floor element. Fragments of an Unmarked Map by Kathrin Ganser, shown in the group exhibition Not a Moment, Not a Place at Villa Heike Kunstverein, situates photography between image, object, and spatial intervention. The print is based on digital imagery from the immediate surroundings of the Kunstverein. Yet the depicted location remains visually indeterminate; its geographic specificity is overridden by the abstraction logic inherent to digital cartography.
To engage with the work, I find myself repositioning my body within the gallery space. Placed on the floor, it disrupts the habitual vertical orientation of photographic viewing, introducing a bodily dimension. As I move around the piece, the folds of the fabric create gaps and blind spots that resist the seamless legibility promised by digital cartographic systems. They force me to continually reassess my own position: Where am I standing? What can I see from here? What remains hidden?
The image fragments show dissolved architectural structures, glimpses of blue sky, warped surfaces, and spatial breaks in which architectural forms at times appear sculptural or almost painterly. The instability of the image counters the algorithmic precision of platforms like Google Earth. Ganser’s intervention is deliberate: by translating a navigable, data-driven representation into a material, tactile object, she exposes the constructed conditions of digital mapping. Viewed from multiple angles, the object becomes a site of negotiation between the virtual and the real, between the distant perspective of the satellite and the grounded position of the viewer.
Ganser’s practice is rooted in the appropriation and transformation of technically generated images. Rather than producing photographs through a camera-based practice, she works within preexisting digital environments, capturing screenshots from navigable image systems. Her selections often focus on moments in which algorithmic processes produce inconsistencies, distortions, or ambiguous spatial information. This makes the constructed nature of digital cartography visible and calls into question its claims to objectivity and completeness. Images that might otherwise be dismissed as errors become the starting point and raw material of her work.
In Fragments of an Unmarked Map, Ganser isolates screenshots from the exhibition’s immediate geographic context, creating a recursive relationship in which the real site encounters its own digital double. I am confronted with a representation of the place I occupy, yet this representation has been fragmented through layers of abstraction, compression, and material translation. The effect produces subtle disorientation: while I remain physically situated in the gallery, I simultaneously encounter a digitally mediated landscape that emerges from the space outside.
Central to Ganser’s practice is the translation of these digital images into material form. The choice of textile as a support plays a decisive role. Fabric introduces qualities of flexibility, impermanence, and physical responsiveness, contrasting with the rigidity and apparent neutrality of computational images. The folds generated by gravity and installation conditions interrupt the image surface and undermine the authority of the technical image, which often presents itself as objective and complete.
Ganser’s work, in contrast, treats opacity—the folds, blurriness, and distortions—as a critical strategy. As Bruno Latour argues, the mediating processes of technical systems often only become visible in moments of disruption. Such “breaks” reveal the networks of data, algorithms, and infrastructures through which our perception of space is produced. In this context, Ganser’s work makes visible the contingencies inscribed in digital cartography: data gaps, algorithmic processes, and human and nonhuman decisions that determine how space is represented.
This approach extends across Ganser’s broader practice, in which fragmented architectures, floating textures, and warped terrains appear as by-products of computational image production. She treats these images as a form of found material, comparable to digital sketchbooks or accidental drawings generated by technical systems. Simultaneously, this produces what Ganser calls a kind of “archive of the archive”: a collection of image fragments extracted from preexisting, algorithmically generated image sets. Her interventions in this archive remain deliberately restrained, allowing the origins of the images to remain partially indeterminate.
Authorship remains intentionally ambiguous. It seems to me that Ganser neither seeks to fully separate her work from its algorithmic origins nor to fully foreground her own manipulation. Instead, she operates within a layered form of authorship, in which found digital material and artistic intervention coexist. This ambiguity challenges conventional notions of photographic originality, particularly in contemporary image cultures where images circulate, mutate, and acquire new meanings across different contexts.
The installation also resonates with the curatorial framework of Not a Moment, Not a Place. The exhibition aimed to trace a shift in contemporary photography: away from referential certainty toward a stronger objectivity, in which images occupy space as much as they represent it. Ganser's work exemplifies this transition, yet remains closely linked to the infrastructures that generate and carry digital images. Even in its most abstract forms, her work remains tied to the spatial and technological systems from which it emerges.
In this sense, I understand Ganser’s practice as a form of media archaeology. By isolating, materializing, and recontextualizing technically generated images, she interrupts their circulation and subjects them to a different temporal logic. The work foregrounds the conditions of its own production: the algorithms that generate the images, the materials that give them form, and the bodies that encounter them. In doing so, it invites a critical reconsideration of how contemporary visual systems construct knowledge about space and how these constructions can be destabilized through artistic intervention.