Pazooki, Leila »Moments of Glory« (2010). Installation view. Detail. © Leila Pazooki

What Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin were actually looking for was a digital Mash Up capable of narrating a visual world history in 100 seconds. What their computers then found after having evaluated over 15.000 items of historical data from the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and locating them on a world map, was something else: were one to ask this global internet databank, it would then take, from the earliest registered event, more than 1.100 years before something of historical relevance beyond Europe would happen. In the humanities, the idea that history is able to describe the world with 'pure vision', that it is neutral and objective, has long been controversial. However, in modern art history nobody asks whose history of art one is, in fact, writing. Continue reading ...