The genesis of this piece is a series of images of different urban maps with different
kinds of information: transportation, weather, geographical, statistical, and historical.
The maps come from three different cities where I have lived: Bogota, Buenos Aires, and New York.
The sound is generated from a forced raw reading of the binary data that composes the digital
images on which it is based. The data contained in these maps (names, lines, addresses, images, colors)
is interpreted in its most essential computational form through audio. Each bit from the original map
is deciphered as a sound, its technological coherence and primary function are perverted to create a
new register —which even though it contains the same binary data— points to a radically different
sensory perception. The construction of
Bit Map is not aleatory. Instead this reinterpretation
permits infinite possibilities, so there is a total awareness of the choices made. Accident disappears,
but its basic principle remains in what is chosen: an image that was deliberately created to be read by
a machine in a specific way is dislocated at its most basic level so that it says and shows something
totally different but which is latent in its fundamental structure. The titles of the movements are
quotes from Hito Steyerl.
An interactive desktop version can be found at
andresmartinezruiz.com/bitmapv2/