|
The Transparency Grenade! A name like that was bound to get my attention.
It might look like a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, but what the Transparency Grenade contains is 'just' a tiny computer, a microphone and a powerful wireless antenna. No explosive then! Except maybe the information that the device is capable of blasting to the world. The Transparency Grenade fights against the lack of corporate and governmental transparency. It captures network traffic and audio at the site of closed meetings and anonymously streams the data to a dedicated server where email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice are extracted and displayed on an online map.
The device was created by Critical Engineer and artist Julian Oliver, author of works such as a modified analog colour television able to capture and screen images downloaded by people on local wireless hotspots, a wall plug that messes with the news read by other people on wireless hotspots and a software platform for replacing billboard advertisements with art in real-time. Now i'm left wondering why i didn't try and interview him for the blog before...
Hi Julian! What strikes me with your latest project is the way it looks. It is miles away from the 'bastard in beige' newstweek. Why did you decide to give the work such a threatening design? I gave the Transparency Grenade this design to signify some of the conversation around cyber warfare, 'information weapons' and the Cyber Soldier divisions marching out from national defense budgets worldwide. It can be considered a functional weapon in a symbolically representative container. We've seen the transformative power of network-leveraged leaking in the last decade, first with the incumbent Cryptome and then much more recently with Wikileaks. The very idea of an immaterial explosion with the power to shake the walls of institutions, businesses and political cultures - moving matter and people in its wake - is naturally attractive, not only in the conceptual sense. The volatility of information in networked, digital contexts itself frames a precedent for clamouring (and often unrealistic) attempts to contain it. One could even say it's this desperate fear of the leak that produces images like my grenade, images that will continue to take violent forms in popular culture, journalism and Presidential speeches in time. In fact the metaphor of a Transparency Grenade is itself not new, first used publicly by Mike Taylor in the Observer, a few months after I drew up this project. A timely coincidence. Most importantly however it is the hyperbole and fear around containing these volatile records, of the cyber burglary, that increasingly yields assumptive logics that ultimately shape how we use networks and think about the right to information. Just as record companies claim billions in losses due to file sharing, the fear of the leak is being actively exploited by law makers to afford organisations greater opacity and thus control. This anxiety, this 'network insecurity', impacts not just upon the freedom of speech but the felt instinct to speak at all. All of a sudden letting public know what's going on inside a publicly funded organisation is somehow 'wrong' -Bradley Manning a sacrificial lamb to that effect. Meanwhile civil servants and publicly-owned companies continue to make decisions behind guarded doors that impact the lives of many, whether human or other animal.
All we have left from the Bin Laden assassination, for instance, is that photo from The Situation Room, a bunch of contradictory reports of what actually happened and a body being eaten by sea lice somewhere in the Indian Ocean - or was it the Indian Ocean? How much did that assassination cost American tax payers? Of course we wonder what was said in that room! Somehow such a significant event has now been reduced to a little black box and scrapbook.. I believe quality journalism has never been so important as it is today yet at the same it's never been so threatened, both in and out of a democratic context. Given great reductions to the freedom of the press recently it's only natural that we see them adopt guerilla tactics - especially given new discovery vectors opened up by digital communications. It should come as no surprise many of their tactics will be technically illegal or even ethically corrupt! As we saw with the News of the World scandal, they are competing within an economy where news has capital value, itself a deep and driving flaw. Under such conditions, and baited with possibility, news corporations will increasingly look for points of exploit with exit strategies (and/or apologies) prepared. With the Transparency Grenade I wanted to capture these important tensions in an iconic, hand-held package.
Has anyone tested it in some corporate or governmental place? Is this something you plan to do one day? Even if I planned to I certainly wouldn't mention it here! It is perhaps worth mentioning however that from the software side I haven't implemented anything new. Network packet capture has been around for decades, digital audio streaming for quite some time and TCP stream reconstruction also. Rather, I've wrapped up a variety of command line utilities in scripts that allow for the whole thing to work, both on the device and the server. An upcoming project 'Covert Peripherals' will explore this, as a canvas for productive paranoia. You'll never trust your mouse again.. Because of the simplicity of the design it is relatively trivial for me to port the Transparency Grenade back-end to the Android platform, something I'm working on currently thanks to a generous hardware donation from Australian based developer Scott Robinson. This will allow activists (or those simply sick of the relative opacity of their organisation) to deploy Transparency Grenade like functionality on their rooted Android phone and send the data over an encrypted channel via their GSM provider to a publicly available map, displaying the detonation as data from that site. I will not offer the public map interface and data mining parts as a service (that'd be illegal, wouldn't it!). I will however provide code for people to install on their servers and or study.
Who'd be your dream 'target'? Who do you think has secrets worth unveiling? Governments aside I certainly think we need a great deal more transparency in the Agricultural sector. A lot of effort is being exerted, including laws written, to ensure we don't know where our food comes from, alongside the impact of that food on the environment and our bodies. A year ago Senator Jim Norman of Florida proposed a blanket ban on video or photography of farms, even from the road! We have to wonder why. The meat industry is especially aggressive in this regard, their lobbies very powerful. The arms industry, the rampant privatisation of publicly owned infrastructure, pharmaceutical industries, are also increasingly opaque in their business dealings. Why are cures, for instance, such highly guarded secrets? Symptom relief is often vastly more profitable. What has been the reaction to the Transparency Grenade so far? Newstweek garnered much media attention and i suspect the TG, because of its functions but again also because of the way it looks, might distress and worry some people. I've heard words like 'gorgeous' often enough for fearful responses to not dominate, thankfully! We had around 2000 people to the exhibition opening of our show I wanted it to look elegant, a bottle of high-class perfume, as much as a weapon. Thanks to Berlin-based Susanne Stauch, who modeled the metal components in high-grade sterling silver, that aesthetic carries across I think, at least when you see it in the flesh. I'd like to add that my conversations with writer and journalist Marta Peirano greatly nourished my thinking around this project, this interview alongside. Thank you Julian!
The Transparency Grenade was created for the Weise7 Studio exhibition, curated by Transmediale 2012 Director, Kristoffer Gansing.. You can visit it at Labor Berlin, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, until Feb 20, 2012. |
|
Walk the Solar System is probably the last project i'll blog from the Design Interactions show i saw at the Royal College of Art in June. It's also one of the most charming.
Despite many a primary school drawing or text book illustration, a true scale model of our Solar System is unfeasible on paper. Over the Summer, Louise O'Connor gave Londoners a chance to walk the Solar System and get a sense of its true vastness. A walkable scale model has been installed along the road which begins at Kingsland Road in Dalston and finishes in Stamford Hill. During last Summer, local shopkeepers at appropriate points on the route have been acting as guardians to the planets - hosting models represented by everyday objects, at their correct sizes on this 3.1 km scale. Passersby were invited to enter the shops and ask "the planetary guardians" to be shown the planet. Although her project challenges school books representation of the solar system, Louise didn't have the heart to deprive Pluto from its planet prestige. "Pluto was actually demoted from planet status along in 2006 and is now classified as a dwarf or minor planet along with Eris and Ceres," Louise told me. "However, after growing up with Pluto as a planet, the model just didn't seem right without it..."
How did you get interested in the solar system and its physical representation at a more human scale? Louise: Much of current design practice increasingly contains speculations borne from more and more complex and abstracted scientific developments, and fascinating as they are, (and I sincerely mean that!) I wondered whether, against this complex background, we can truly comprehend even the 'simple' things? And recognize that these 'simple' things can be truly wonderful and inspiring in themselves. So in terms of the Solar System, the simplicity and almost prosaic nature of it as a concept, coupled with a typical lack of true conceivability of the scale in physical form, made it a good candidate and a very evocative thing to connect to and experience physically. Personally, I remember particularly my own primary school solar system project, drawing similar 'scales' as I mentioned before in class, and then later that day, looking at the sunset in my grandma's garden, trying to imagine this thing called 'space', with such a massive sense of awe, which I haven't forgotten! In terms of my wider practice, I am interested in how physical experience, and re - presentation (of both the 'everyday' and intangible concepts) can be used as playful tools for debate, engagement and shifting perspectives, as well as 'human' and hence absurd yet genuine ways in which we can attempt to connect to natural phenomena outside our physical experience. And so over the course of the year, as a project, this has included many investigations into ways we may experience a variety of fascinating phenomena from different scales more physically and intuitively; incorporating singing, listening, animating, wearing, and of course dancing, and so this particular outcome came also as a natural development from these.
Why did you decide that the solar system walk would follow a straight line? Why not distribute the planets over a non-linear walk that would reflect the fact that some planet are on the east of others, etc. not sure if my question makes sense though... Louise: Yes that definitely makes sense and is a good question! Well, there were a few of reasons: Firstly, despite the fact that the planets very rarely all truly align, the diagrams we typically draw as children or see around us predominantly show this image, so I wanted to reference that, and expand it into reality. It also demonstrates how even at their closest - if they were aligned - just how very far apart they still are, so of course usually they are much further! Secondly, on a practical and experiential level, I felt it would be more fluid to connect and feel the distances through a straight (ish) line, as in, if people had to navigate around blocks etc, they might get lost, or take longer routes than needed. Similarly, my choice of using everyday objects rather than abstract spherical models came from similar reasoning - that it would be a more graspable idea if it were based on a size we already roughly know.
Lastly, I really like the idea of these historic routes of transit in the City, and repurposing them for my own absurd ends! The road this walk takes place on is part of what was Ermine Street or Earninga Straete (in 1012), one of Britain's major Roman Roads, going from London to York. Saying that though I have been thinking about future scale walks (for other 'un-draw-able on paper 'scales) and I think that they certainly wouldn't have to always be in a line, perhaps the planets orbiting and moving location will be my next step!
Thanks Louise! Walk the Solar System is part of the Psychomythic Nature Quest series which aims at finding ways of representing and physically experiencing scientific knowledge and in particular the most unimaginable aspects of the natural world. |
|
Remember that Tuesday post? I was sending you to London on a mission to visit Constructing Realities, an exhibition that showcases the best work from the Postgraduate Certificate Course in Advanced Architectural Research, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. I also promised i'd come back with more projects from the show.
This one is, imho, equally as fascinating as The Fortress of Senses but it is also strikingly different. Subverting the LiDAR Landscape: Tactics of spatial redefinition for a digitally empowered population is a speculative project which questions the way we interact with digital and physical versions of our cities. The project is based around LiDAR technology - 3D scanning but on a city scale. Google Earth and Streetview have now become people's most trusted tool for exploring and researching urban space. Moreover, the tools are now taken as virtual fact by a global internet population. They will soon be replaced by intricate 3D modeled versions of our cities derived from mobile 3D scanning units - LiDAR equipped vehicles. Matthew Shaw's project aims to subvert this mapping, by arming the population with the tools to edit the way their city is scanned and recorded. These tools are not digital hacks but physical interventions. They manipulate the scanning process and act as waypoints and markers linking the physical world to the digital.
I'm leaving you with Matthew's description of the project:
The Surveillance series are drawings that explore the city from stealth locations. They see what a LiDAR unit sees, what through wall radar can sense, what an IRA bomber may have thought, what AL-Qaida may be watching. They hide, see through walls, bend light and look round corners.
The Scan series are hybrid landscapes of real and imagined LiDAR data. They take actual 3D scans of the parliament area of London and breed them with speculative LiDAR blooms, blockages, holes and drains. These are the result of strategically deployed devices which offset, copy, paste, erase and tangle LiDAR data around them. They show the route of stealth drills carving LiDAR data in the public redecoration zone. They show boundary miscommunication devices - hotspots of spatial truths and mistruths. They show the deployment of flash architecture and toolpaths of stealth mechanics. Parliament is offset to St. James Park; protestors shelter under a LiDAR shield on the Mall, an urban transplant replaces Downing Street with an insurgent gateway and a Huas-MattaClarkian vista.
A series of prototypical objects explore the form and materiality of stealth and subversion. Each object starts life as an intuitively carved wooden sketch. These then become 3D notebooks on which to design precise insertions and additions. The objects are then 3D scanned using a self built scanner to enable precision inserts to be machined and added to the originals. These objects are then scanned and their digital siblings cast and machined from the scanned data.
The Surface Error series compounds the slight errors implicit in the scanning process and shows the distortion, mistruth and beauty that repeated error can create. A base SLS printed target is repeatedly scanned, 3D printed and re-scanned for 12 iterations. This micro test of distortion could be applied on a city scale, altering its digital appearance .
The Parliament series is made of subverted terrestrial laser scans and their respective tools, tool paths and deployment diagrams. Scans taken in Westminster, London between 7:23pm on June 3 and 11.56pm on June 17 showing pointcloud data collected near the Houses of Parliament. The facade of Parliament is visible in a swarming clouds of scanned noise and subverted data. These mistruths are engineered through a series of strategically placed disruptive objects positioned in the scan path.
--- For further information please contact matthew.shaw at ucl.ac.uk. Thanks Matthew! The exhibition Constructing Realities runs until October, 1st at PHASE 2 Gallery, 8 Fitzroy St, London W1T 4BJ (map.) Related: Book Review: Digital Architecture - Passages Through Hinterlands. |
|
The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon with essays by Gayle Clemans (available on Amazon UK and USA.)
Princeton Architectural Press writes: Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.
The British Library in London is running until mid-September Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art . The stunning exhibition demonstrates that ancient maps were far more than two-dimensional representation of geography, they were also instruments to intimidate, educate, or inspire pride. If that wasn't enough for a piece of paper, each of them also ventured into artistic territory. Today's cartography is far more composed, and eager to present itself as objective. However, Harmon's book establishes in 360 maps that maps, plans, atlases and other topographical depiction still inspire artists. Artists play with both the material and the content of the map. Paper plans are all over the book but so are maps made of artist's hair, drawn on the body, printed onto the sand or turned into large-scale installations. Some maps have a clear activist agenda, others are infused with mental visions, covered with alien-abduction sites, etc.
Map As Art is a well-documented, surprising and fascinating book. There is just enough text (lazy bloggers like me jump in horror at the sight of image-less pages): a general introduction to the volume, an essay for each chapter and a brief description of the artworks included in the book. The rest is images over images. A few map-related works i discovered in the book: At the heart of Enrique Chagoya's lithograph, Road Map lays an egocentric American point of reference that dwarves neighbours Mexico and Canada as well as the rest of the world. The map is populated with images of cultural and ethnic stereotypes as well as tankers, whales, fighter planes, religious figures, dynamite, submarines and oil wells. The two figures in the lower corners represent "Hope" and "Hopelessness".
Ingo Günther has been using illuminated globe sculptures as mean to investigate and represent "global" issues, from access to drinking water to rain forest leftovers, from nuclear explosions to death from tobacco use, etc.
In June 2005 Francis Alÿs walked through divided Jerusalem leaving behind him a trail of green paint from a leaking can. His route was the Green Line, drawn on a map after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. The Green Line has since been considerably altered, mostly by the Israeli invasion of 1967. Btw, the best thing you can do if you're in London,is to run and see his retrospective at Tate Modern.
Abigail Reynolds's Mount Fear series gives a physical, tangible visualization of police statistics relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain.
Harriet Russell sent herself 130 letters. Each envelope was a challenge for the Royal Mail, the address was written in an eye chart, as a colour blind test, a crosswords, on a hand-drawn map, in dot-to-dot drawings, experimental fonts, anagrams and cartoons. Only 10 failed to complete their journey back to her. (more images.)
Mark Bennett draws blueprint architectural renderings of the homes of American sitcom and film characters. For cult tv series The Fugitive, he broadened his field of investigation and tracked Dr. Richard Kimble's relentless quest for the one-armed man all over the United States.
In 1988, Cheng installed a giant concrete roller on the beach in Santa Monica. The roller is engraved with inverse 3D plates that print a map of Los Angeles in the sand.
Related stories: Conflux 2008: notes from the panel Cartography of Protest and Social Changes, Situation Room, You Are Not Here, Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze, Real Time Rome. Related books: Book Review - An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. |
|
A few weeks ago, and against my better judgment, i stopped by Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the Victoria and Albert in London. The exhibition showcases recent developments in digital and interactive design through three themes: Code, Interactivity and Network. I have nothing particularly flattering to write about the exhibition. I wish i had done like Furtherfield and visited the Digital Pioneers exhibition instead. The exhibition takes place at the V&A as well but doesn't benefit from as much advertising as Decode.
In theory, Decode looks like a very glam affair. In reality, it has a bit of a fancy thrift shop feeling with all the works crammed in a confined and confused space. I was left in shock when i saw how little space each work had to breathe while all around me a group of school girls were laughing their way from one work to another, frantically waving their arms/head/some bathroom appliances in all directions in order to trigger some kind of reaction... sorry "interaction" from the works. The code section of the show wasn't a much more pleasant experience. I had to fight my way through a narrow corridor jam packed with people taking pictures or videos of the strikingly beautiful works on screen. I'm glad the exhibition is such a success. I'd even go as far as confessing that i'm perversely happy that interaction and digital design are being thrown in the direction of the broad public in such an informal way. Damn! it's not like me to bad-blog an exhibition like that. Maybe i was not the right audience for that kind of exhibition but then maybe i am because some artists whose work i admire are participating to the show. Stanza is one of them. As his bio says, Stanza is an expert in arts technology, CCTV, online networks, touch screens, environmental sensors, and interactive artworks. Recurring themes throughout his career include, the urban landscape, surveillance culture and alienation in the city.
His artworks have won prestigious awards and have been exhibited all over the world, from the Venice Biennale to the Tate Britain, from the State Museum in Novorsibirsk to the Biennale of Sydney. I blogged so often about his work, it's quite embarrassing. Stanza is exhibiting Sensity at Decode. Some 20 custom made environmental sensors units are distributed in the V & A Porter gallery and around the city of London. They measure, light, noise, sound, humidity, and temperature. The data is turned into a online real time visualisation of the space for everyone, whether they are gallery visitors or city planners, to see and ponder on. Sensity V & A opens up a discourse about networks and surveillance technologies and questioning the social political fabric of the landscape around us (more details and pictures about the V&A version.) The Decode exhibition wasn't that bad. After all, it gave me an excuse as good as any other to blog this little interview with Stanza about his work. How visible are the sensors in the city? Actually I don't advertise where they are exactly, they are too expensive to loose. The visability is virtual and presented via its GPS location. All the data is presented online via XML feeds that are open source. Do you have to keep them hidden lest they get stolen or damaged? How do you select the location of the sensors? The location is based on the network and the distance apart one can place them so that they still transmit and send data. But you're right, having them stolen is a big issue since I cannot afford replacement
Do you need a special authorization to place the sensors and collect the data? In theory yes, in practice, I don't. There are more complex issues about security of space and surveillance. In fact because of the potential of this project for larger scale urban monitoring, noise and pollution monitoring in real time I am surprised I haven't been approached to develop this on a larger scale. By measuring all sorts of physical data the sensors reveal also some social aspects and variables of the environment. The text that presents Sensity states that "The output from the sensors display the "emotional" state of the city". The condition of change of time represents the emotional state as measured by the varying sensors.
Do you perceive patterns according to the time of the day for example? The patterns and shapes in the visualisation are what is being affected by the real time environmental conditions. Well the time of day affects the patterns that are relayed to the screen. The sensors have time stamp, light, temperature, humidity, GPS, noise and sounder What can the 'general public learn from Sensity? I want the public to explore new ways of thinking about interaction within public space and how this affects the socialization of space. The project uses environmental monitoring technologies and security based technologies, to question audiences experiences of the event and space and gather data inside the space. The project also focuses on the micro-incidents of change, the vibrations and sounds of the using these wireless sensor based technologies. Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted, and logged. The world we will live in seems to be a much bigger brother than the Orwellian vision, its the mother of big brother. Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control up, separate us, divide us, create more borders. With the securitzation of city space create digital borders that monitor our movement and charge us for our own micro movements inside the system.
The data is also used to create visualizations in an open source environment. Other online users can also re- interpret the data and interrogate the various sensors in the network as this is open sourced as well (xml streams). How about you? What I have learnt from mixing the cities and creating mash-ups online with the data from various city set is that there is a new space, a 4^th space, a new world of possibilities. These works are focused on the wider picture of city experiences which are being played out in real time. This sort of experience of multi nodes and multi threaded spaces, demands a refined gathering of data, a sensitive accumulation which can then lead to some kind of modeling and visualization. [audible and visual (mils)-representation] of the social network as it exists and is impacted upon.
Image copyright stanza Do you navigate cities differently after you have submitted them to Sensity? Within this project no.....and it's a good question. However within a project like soundcities.com the experience and the relationship to place is different. Soundcities is my online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. The project soundcities is completely made up of found sounds and soundscapes from the thousands of samples I collected. The sounds of cities also give clues to the emotional and responsive way we interact with our cities. Cities all have specific identities, and found sound can give us clues to the people that inhabit these spaces, as well as provoking us and stimulating our senses in a musical way. Within soundcities the aim is to create an online aural experience that evokes place, both as literal description but also developed musical composition. The sounds of cities evoke memories. So this idea of assent gathering of sounds creates a different feeling that the gathering of data. With sensity although we are the body in the data space; we again control it but because its on a micro scale it's harder to relate to. That's why a project like Sensity is so important. You've installed Sensity in many cities around the world. How is the V&A one different?/ The way Sensity is exhibited can be scaled up and this depends really on the commitment of the host organization. I now have several version of this artwork. A local version can be made and then projected and also shown online. I have already made versions for several cities. In this case I test and deploy my sensors and make the visualisation. Making it real time so sensor data isn't recorded but real time. This involves set up of technology, adding some code to router, using my sensors, using my computers, set up of the sensors in the correct location, programming them, replacing batteries and care for the duration of the show and insurance. In this case I test and deploy my sensors and make the visualisation and leave the sensors and the computers running all the time. How it looks in the gallery or the actual displays ie, what it is seen by the audience. It can be experienced on plasma screens, projected or shown on 3d globes. Once the visualisation is made there are a numbers of ways to present it. The Decode show is a much longer term real time colloborative deployment of my two networks in the gallery and across the city. I can monitor all the sensors remotely tell the gallery to change batteries, etc. The issue is that the V & A and their technical team has to be able to support the technical needs of the work. What becomes of the data once the show is over? None of the data as the system is set up is archived.... it's all real time. I do plan to allow the database to have a history but this now requires further funding and development. Thanks Stanza! All text copyright stanza. Pictures i took in the Decode exhibition. Decode: Digital Design Sensations continues until the 11 April 2010 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. |
|
The worst way to kick off a new year for an art blogger is to see an exhibition so good you're left wondering if the rest of the year won't be a 12-month letdown. Manipulating Reality, a show running until January 17 at CCCS in Florence, is brilliant. The exhibition explores the theme of the manipulation and reconstruction of reality through photographic images and videos. Because my blogging slowness is becoming legendary and the exhibition closes real soon, i thought i would be best to post a quick entry about one of the artworks i discovered in the exhibition before coming back with a much wordier report.
Street With A View addresses the tension between surveillance concerns and the triviality of the images captured by Google Street View. As most of you know, this online service is based on photo material gathered by a panoramic camera attached to the roof of a vehicle driven at slow speeds through city streets all over the world. The mapping system has given rise to debates about privacy and the right to publish and use for commercial purposes the images of individuals and of entire neighbourhoods.
With the complicity of both the inhabitants of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh and Google Street View, artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett staged collective performances and actions that took place just as the Google Car was driving through the neighbourhood: a 17th-century sword fight, a lady escaping through the window using bed linen, a gigantic chicken, a parade with a brass band and majorettes, the lab of the inventor of a laser that makes people fall in love, etc. The images that document the events have become an integral part of the Google image archive.
The Street With A View is an ironic comment on the idea of access to reality through mass-media images. Users of Google Maps can have the impression that they have seen (and therefore know) the streets of Paris, New York or Pittsburgh without ever having set foot there. With their series of collective performances and actions, Kinsley and Hewlett create an analogy between their carefully planned and coordinated artistic events and the equally fictitious reality presented by Google. As images cannot replace direct, physical experience, they always constitute a reconstruction, if not indeed manipulation, of the real world, but one that we are led to regard as real in today's media-driven society. According to Paul Virilio, the representation of reality in an image then becomes a reality in turn, but of lower degree. The image has replaced the word, thus creating a visual truth that has become the contemporary language most used and of most importance in the globalized world.
Manipulating Reality is open until January 17 at CCCS-Strozzina in Florence. |
