Mabel Palacín

María Isabel Palacín Lahoz (Barcelona, 1965) is a graduate in Art History and Cinema, Photography and Video from the University of Barcelona. Her research on the image, with photography at its core, has won her honors like her inclusion in Young European Photographers and the European Kodak Award. Her video art projects involve extensive preparation, with best known works including La distancia correcta, distinguished with a Premi Ciutat de Barcelona in Visual Arts and Altadis Award; Hinterland, about the representation of space in video games; and The Missing Link, a 16 m long installation incorporating 29 videos.

El trayecto is a film made using a system of cameras mounted in a prototype of self-driving car. A character drives round a town intervening in the machine dialogue maintained between the car and the cameras, whereby the world becomes a kind of game that the protagonist does not know he is playing. The car and camera share the fact of being technologies that change the way we see and live in the world. In the driverless care, the familiar narrative of the human gaze, the cinematographic tradition of images, comes up against the latest in data. El trayecto reflects on how today’s reality is the product of a dialogue between two gazes: our own and that of the algorithm.