Mon Jul 27 09:40:36 2020
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“`I still remember using Google Maps for the first time. In fall 2010, Maps was already five years old and it had been almost six years since Google acquired the California-based digital mapping company Keyhole (which had received “strategic investment” from In-Q-Tel a year prior). “The Wilderness Downtown” had recently launched; after hearing it featured a new Arcade Fire song, I visited the website.
“`
— ▓ Dark Data & the (Un)knowns ▓
— This is a sequel to “On The Shores of IRL and URL,” on resisting surveillance in the attention economy.
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I still remember using Google Maps for the first time. In fall 2010, Maps was already five years old and it had been almost six years since Google acquired the California-based digital mapping company Keyhole (which had received “strategic investment” from In-Q-Tel a year prior). “The Wilderness Downtown” had recently launched; after hearing it featured a new Arcade Fire song, I visited the website.
‘The Wilderness Downtown,’ an interactive multimedia video by Google Creative Labs “to show off the capabilities of the new Google Chrome browser.” A Grand Prix Winner at 2011 Cannes Advertising Awards.
With tiny digital birds already taking flight from my cursor movements, the page prompted me to “enter the address of the home where you grew up.” For a privacy-conscious person, a cardinal sin. I can’t remember what address I entered, but as it auto-filled upon typing anything, it was easy to avoid being “geopersonalised.”
“The project uses the Google Street View API to integrate images of this home into the music video, along with a letter the user can write to their childhood self.”
While at the time I saw this experiment as artistically and technologically interesting (especially the creative use of pop-ups), I’ve always thought their choice of musical accompaniment was rather odd…
I used to write
I used to write letters
I used to sign my name
I used to sleep at night
Before the flashing light settled deep in my brain
… that to advertise a new browser and “the interactive possibilities of the Internet,” they would create an audiovisual experience intended to provoke nostalgia for childhood, handwritten letters, wilderness, sleep, a “hope that something pure can last.” There was a poetic irony in the black birds, alighting from computer-generated letters, dove-tailing into the pavement around an anonymous hooded figure, and from their disintegrated pixel bodies growing a forest that spread to obscure the surveilled streets.
We can only move forward
Only turn back for a time
Now the only sacred space left
In the world
Is our mind
Another digital art project using Google Maps was “Invisible Cities,” an interactive 3D display of geotagged social media activity by Seattle-based designer & Schema Design founder Christian Schmidt and NYC-based artist & programmer Liangjie Xia. Inspired by situationist theory and the concept of psychogeography, their city maps were not composed of digital representations of real hills or buildings, but an “emerging information landscape” of “high and low densities of data” and meta-networks of narrative pathways.
“Real-time activity is represented as individual markers that appear whenever a Tweet or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain—the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.“
In an article published in the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping (PJIM), they described cities as an “outcome of collective memory” and “shared thematic associations.” The name ‘invisible cities’ reflects the “infinite number” of social microcosms, or “sub-cities,” based around the activity they attract and “the trajectories created from emerging topics.”
“Invisible Cities makes the claim that there is another, emerging form of architecture in the urban landscape that merit[s] attention: the architecture of social networks.”
Those who remain largely or entirely unmapped can nonetheless still be greatly affected by the perspective of maps and their creators. The American idiom ‘falling off the map‘ is used to describe someone or something that has lost importance or ceased to exist within collective memory or focus.
The digital homunculus of memory is gorged on attention…
The success or failure of businesses and political campaigns, the accessibility and development of remote areas or ‘blandscapes,’ can now all be impacted according to factors such as ease of virtualization and suitability for route-planning queries, heavily dependent on the accuracy of GPS technology (which had its own military and geopolitical history play out long before the conception of Maps).
There will always be choices; things ignored or thrown away or not included yet. There will always be gaps. And the more complete the archive, the more invisible the gaps become.
While all search engines and web map services could be seen as “deeply political operation[s]” with “an agenda, an argument, a proposal about what the world looks like,” Google has secured the lead in virtualizing all of us (including themselves), “virtualizing for all of us,” motes of dust made significant to ends known and unknown.
I thought I could escape Google in a remote Central Asian steppe, but the blue dot followed me
— Brett Scott (@Suitpossum) June 25, 2017
In a time of the ‘big data’ inflection point, we are all prosumers now.
Search Results Not Found
Finding unmapped and undermapped places is also becoming more difficult, but cartographic holes in our digital “God’s-eye view” still abound. One such place that has recently captured my attention is the Houari Boumedienne agricultural village, after a picture of one of its geometric entryways was shared by Archillect.
Named after the second president of Algeria, the village is an incomplete housing project by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), a Spanish architecture firm commissioned by the Algerian government’s Ministry of Housing in the 1970s. They do not specify the village’s location in Algeria beyond “the south-eastern part of the country” and “ABADLA, ARGELIA” (Argelia is Spanish for Algeria), which is odd because the town of Abadla is on the mid-western side. This is the only description of its vernacular purpose and design:
“The composition of the urban nucleus on the basis of the combination of single-family dwellings offered infinite possibilities, which had to be limited and serialized in order to keep the cost of the operation as low as possible. The geometrical forms chosen, drawn from Arabic and Mediterranean traditions, made for a first grouping of two or three dwellings laid out around a courtyard to compose a block. A grouping of several blocks composed a neighbourhood, and several neighbourhoods, a town, with the proportion of built space to open public space being kept constant. A large central square, such as is found in all Arab towns, serves as marketplace and meeting place, setting for festivities and spectacles, and is the vital axis articulating the town.”
Considering it was built by the same firm as the Turia River Gardens, 77 West Wacker Drive, the W Hotel Barcelona, and other iconic buildings around the world, I was a bit surprised to find this village was so imprecisely located. Captured by an artificial intelligence, it nonetheless remains a mystery to it. The village may not even be inhabited; only one of the four pictures features people. An old version of the website includes more pictures — aerial and perspective sketches of the village and prospective flora, labeled in French — published in May 2014.
The tone of this architecture is one of community cohesion. With multiple apparent entrances spread evenly around the protective but permeable outer rim, one can imagine locals stream…
