IMD _Institute of Media and Design
copyright _IMD
MEDIA DESIGN | Locative Virtuality _TransForming Google's street view
With the implementation of a freely accessible version of the program, Google Street View, in the online maps and aerial services Google Maps and Google Earth, a wide range of users have been given the possiblity of visual navigation in urban areas on the basis of photographic images.
The spherical photo panoramas are at eye level at a distance of 10 to 20 meters on roads and streets with 9 cameras recording simultaneously in all directions. The user of the service moves by "jumping" from ball to ball gradually away in space and time. The result is an unusual, temporal-perceptual ability of a place, whose appearance at the same time combines aspects of free navigation, oriented film and static images together: The viewer can move with self-chosen speed, dynamicly looking into a previously held photographic time-space.
The seminar participants are under the sole use of Google Street View images provided to explore an urban self-selected location. In one of a variety of media transformation and abstraction processes, collages, drawings and models are to be applied in constructing multi-perspective and multi time-frame reality of urban space anew.
Directed by: Philipp Reinfeld