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Ê .art
02.04.03 Annotations, narration by a photo album.
Annotations is the first web work by Glenn Ligon, an artist who loves african-american culture and who, until today, had used more traditional techniques to share its material. In his latest project for the Walker Art Center, he gave to some children books depicting icons of the black americans' history for them to color and used some of these pages as a starting point for his paintings. In Annotation, on the other hand, he made a twenty-pages-long virtual photo album with photos degraded by age (polaroids gone red, old faded or stained black and white photos, dazzling flashes typical of the Seventies). These photos can often be read on many levels which reveal the fatal disease of the depicted person or hidden shots (such as the guy taking off his clothes on an armchair) or pop songs of the Seventies and the Eighties sang by the author in endless improvised a-cappella medleys. It's a perfect narration by images, a simulation of real life, more than a flawless realist novel, with associations and concatenations of memories, just like it normally happens when someone leafs through an old family album. The eternal conflict between public and private, omnipresent in the web, also emerges, because the personal images are archived by the search engines and are therefore available even after being removed.