WWW (World Wars Within)
BYRON GAGO
Red Circle · 2025
WWW (World Wars Within) is a video work that grows out of the research behind Guerrero Viejo VOL.II and then departs from it, leaving real geographies for a fictional, immersive landscape built through 3D reconstruction. It proposes a world in slow submergence: cities unravelling into water, architectures in ruin, borders dissolving beneath rising tides. The title turns on the cyclical violence of modern state formation: not only the historical wars that redrew borders, but the internalised conflicts carried in response to the erasure of memory, land and community. No single narrative prevails; the camera drifts across loosely connected terrains, assembled from digital modelling, photogrammetry, and fragments of archival debris.
The debris is not what it seems, and that is the point. The world is built from a deliberately contaminated mix: the photogrammetric scan of the drowned town of Guerrero Viejo, open-source datasets of damaged sites, and generic stock 3D assets folded in among them, unmarked. No fragment in the work can be reliably told apart as documentary or as model-library, and the refusal to label them is the strategy, not an omission. The viewer cannot trust what comes from a real place and what comes from a catalogue. This is the work's epistemic ruin: a ground that will not certify itself.
The work does not pretend to refuse the beauty that photogrammetry makes. Instead the beauty is a trap it asks the viewer to walk into and back out of. The first minute is the most seductive: the camera moving through a half-submerged structure in gorgeous light. The middle three minutes expose the mechanism: the textures begin to glitch, the geometries reveal their reconstruction errors, the surfaces show their seams. The last minute returns to the seductive register, but now with the seams visible. Across five minutes, too short to inhabit and exactly long enough to feel the seduction begin and break, the work tries to teach the eye to see what it was being seduced by.
The title is not a coincidence: World Wars Within is also the World Wide Web within. The fragments circulate through the same network that delivers the war imagery the work is made of, and the wars carried inside us are, increasingly, the wars the network has delivered. WWW is finally less about the sites it shows than about what the witness becomes after years of seeing them. The submerged geometries are an interior topography, a portrait of the digital subject's inner ruin made out of the very materials that ruined it.
"Photogrammetry and digital modeling produce spatial regimes that assert total knowledge of a site: they imply completeness, legibility, mastery. The form contradicts the content."
Critical review, 2026
I want to keep that contradiction, because it is the method. To use the technology of total reconstruction to represent the impossibility of total reconstruction, the technology has to fail visibly inside the work. The glitches and texture errors and reconstruction artefacts that commercial 3D quietly cleans away are kept here. The form does not contradict the content; it performs the content's collapse.
WWW (World Wars Within)
2025
Final work
- Video — 4K, 16:9, stereo sound, 5'02"
- 3D reconstruction · photogrammetry
01 / 04
WWW is the speculative half of a pair. Guerrero Viejo VOL.II traces submerged histories and forced dislocations in real geographies; WWW takes that research and builds from it a fictional world. The two are not only documentary and speculative. They are positional: VOL.II is what is outside, WWW is what the outside has done to the inside. The drowned town VOL.II documents becomes, in WWW, the first source-material of an interior landscape.
The method is borrowed and then turned against itself. Photogrammetry, the reconstruction of a site from many overlapping photographs, is the tool Forensic Architecture uses to rebuild scenes of state violence with evidentiary precision. WWW takes the same instrument of total reconstruction and keeps it broken, so that the precision performs its own limit: the reconstruction is made to show the threshold past which it can no longer reconstruct.
The five-minute length is a constraint set against the immersive logic of CGI environmental cinema: long enough to feel the world, too short to settle into it. What the work leaves the viewer with is not a place but a condition: the slow recognition that the catastrophe on screen has already been ingested, that the network delivering these ruined geographies is also the one that builds them inside us.
WWW (World Wars Within)
2025
Method / source
- Process documentation
- Photogrammetry · GV VOL.II scan
01 / 04
