The Ghost Town project was started the day Google Street View launched in Germany, in late 2010, by Arne Huebner, Daniel Stäbler, Chris Heller and Theo Seeman. Germany blocked Street view for a very long time, and when it was finally allowed, most of the buildings were blurred to protect the inhabitants privacy. Shocked by the look of their home town, Stuttgart – “a town filled with shower cubicles”, Seeman says – they decided to start an online project that poses the question about the sense/nonsense of this privacy mania:

“It started the day Google Street View was launched in Germany and is aimed to put focus on blurred real estates in Stuttgart to contribute to the controversially discussed question of privacy in a Google age. We started at Killesberg, where a quite high amount of blurred houses is located and interestingly the bold and the beautiful live. Step by step every blurred house of Street View in Stuttgart should be built as 3D model and put back in a Google Earth KMZ file, while their shapes are not original but geared to their blur layers. ”

Ghost Town is a project built at Merz Akademie during Attention Design workshop with Manuel Bürger in 2010.

http://nm.merz-akademie.de/ghosttown

Google is the main hub of an emerging data-driven world. It is a beast with many faces, impossible to grasp all at once and growing new limbs every day. It is also the name of many contradictions: a centralized traffic control in the (supposedly) horizontal and distributed Internet; a supporter of data openness and accessibility that relies on secret algorithms; and a ranking technology that is based on finding out popularity while it simultaneously determines it. “Google Variations” is a series of approximations of some of these diverse aspects of Google. It is a collection of formal and conceptual micro-experiments, a fly-eyed view of an entity so pervasive that it tends to be invisible while it radically changes our lives. “Google Variations” employs multiple strategies to de-naturalize our relationship with the brand, the corporation and the technology.
“Google Variations“, by Leonardo Solaas, is a 2010 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

http://turbulence.org/Works/google

How will be Gloogle Earth without Earth? Over Data, the latest video work by Marco Cadioli (aka Marco Manray) is a machinima shot in Google Earth, but the images of the Earth are extinguished, annulled in a white neutral surface. Data, information and icons are the only ones that design, define and create the new landscape.

http://www.marcomanray.com

http://vimeo.com/user3345994

The Most Boring Places in the World (a project by Angie Waller) is a Google Earth tour that pinpoints the location of bloggers, live journal-ers, and chat room commentators. These authors all claim that the city they live in or vacationed in is more boring than any other place they can imagine, at least during the time of their post. Most locations do not repeat (with the exception of North Carolina, Ohio, Zurich and Singapore). What these destinations share in common is their ability to inspire existential crises, home-from-college woes, and the suffering specific to beautiful scenery, suburban sprawl and shopping malls.

http://angiewaller.com/video/the-most-boring-places-in-the-world-2009

http://www.couchprojects.com/popups/boring/

[via the triangulatio blog]

“The Google Alarm Firefox addon visually & audibly alerts you when your personal information is being sent to Google servers.
Even outside Gmail and YouTube you are constantly sending information to Google through their vast network of tracking bugs: Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube embeds, API calls.. all of this data be used to monitor & track your personal web browsing habits.
Google Alarm shows notifications, plays sound effects and keeps running stats about the % of websites you’ve visit with Google bugs present. Stay alert – install Google Alarm today.”

Google Alarm was developed by Jamie Wilkinson during FAT Lab’s “FUCK GOOGLE” week in Berlin, Germany during transmediale 2010.

http://jamiedubs.com/googlealarm

Historypin is a like a digital time machine that allows people to view and share their personal history in a totally new way. It uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the world’s historical images and stories.
Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the  map.

http://www.historypin.com

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.
On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

http://www.streetwithaview.com

Remap Berlin, by Marco Cadioli aka Marco Manray, spreads a thin geographical virus in Google Earth and deals with different levels of reality. The project introduces a series of b&w photographs shot in Twinity, a mirror world that reproduces a realistic 3D replica of Berlin. The photos shot in Twinity, are then geo-localized in Google maps, re-mapped from virtual to real and positioned in the exact point where they have been shot in the mirror world. Once uploaded in the photo sharing community Panoramio, the pictures are mixed up with other ones shot in the same geographical point from real life users. Many of these pictures have been selected by Google and can now be found as “Popular photos in Google Earth”: his became a little geographical virus, parts of our memories of the real world. The photographs are cityscapes, shot by Marco Manray roaming around the still empty streets of Berlin in the beta version.

http://www.marcomanray.com/remap-berlin/

Stephanie Syjuco fabricated a selection of “sculptures” designed by anonymous users of Google SketchUp, a free 3-D modeling program: “Many–but not all–of the digital designs are created by non-artists who are just trying to figure out the software (”Something I made while I was bored”), but some are very earnestly made (”best sculpture ever!”) and all are lovely in their own way. Using their designs, I became the “unsolicited” fabricator of their work. The final sculptures are cleanly made from simple materials such as cardboard, plastic, Coroplast (a stiff, corrugated plastic material), paper, and tape.”

http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com

A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person’s name at Google.
Google Portrait is a project by Aram Bartholl.

http://datenform.de/googleportraiteng.html

The images in the Go ogle series, by Meggan Gould,  are composite images, mathematical averages of the first 100 images retrieved from a Google search engine query for a specific word or phrase. Each downloaded image relinquished its size, shape, and the clarity of its individual pixels in its merger with the other results from the query. The results, a visualization of intersections between Boolean logic and the popular imagination, are more often than not a hopeless jumble of unidentifiable pixels–but occasionally a recognizable form does emerge.

http://www.meggangould.net/site_seeingIII.htm

I Would Prefer Not To (A love story set in Google images) is the title of the first solo exhibition in Milan by Alterazioni Video. The relationship, both passioned and obsessive, which the group developed in a daily engagement with the web provides the backdrop of this project. For months the artists lived on Google-images and on different search engines appropriating the experiences and memories of other users with whom they shared a collective imagery in a continuous expansion and which is beyond control. Their expl oration led to a reflection on the “web 2.0” aesthetic wich is self-propagating within the world wide web and changing our way of knowing and perceiving the world. The artists have stated about this exhibition that:
“We spent hours surfing the net among thousands of images each day. We began to think that every smile, every glance we encounter might be intentionally dedicated to us. We bacame aware of living a shared intimacy in which small gestures and memories reproduce themselves ad infinitum and offer themselves to many without losing their freshness. Through the net we become closer to the other without intrusion and we can share with him a visual universe of unimaginable dimensions, a pulsating and vital place with which we are all madly in love with”.

http://www.prometeogallery.com
http://www.alterazionivideo.com

Jodi.org, the Belgian-Dutch duo pioneer of Net Art, explores the relations between the world we build through the Internet and the one based on our past mental and physical maps. Their latest project GeoGoo is connecting the long tradition of tracing geometry on the ground with the new geometries one can draw on the surface of the Earth as proposed by online tools such as Google Maps and Google Earth.

http://geogoo.net

The title of this work has been derived from a review of a book called Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison. This is basically a work dedicated to all those people living beside someone suffering or experiencing bipolar disorders.
Music for the film is by acclaimed composer Gabriel Yared (The English Patient, Cold Mountain) words of the voice playing over the film are taken from the last page of American Purgatorio, a novel by Brooklyn based American writer John Haskell, who also plays the text in the English version.

www.ThePossibleTies.com

www.stunned.org
www.stunned.org/bono/googlebono.htm

Exploring Imaginary Geographies

How do different places become interesting? Can a wet and dirty road running through a barren field be appealing? What are the common denominators between a heavy industrial harbour and a nature reserve? In the project Surreal Scania we examine these questions.

Digital technology, in form of video equipment and GPS-units has been used to look into how aura and attraction are connected to different places. Filmmaker Anders Weberg and cultural analysist Robert Willim started by visiting various points within a specific region. This time the region was Scania, located in southern Sweden. On the different locations video material has been collected, which was then used as the raw material for a number of short films. These films are now available for download. At the moment we provide six different films, but more will be added to the collection in the future.

The films can be seen as comments to process of place marketing and branding. In choosing the places, the aim has been to mix both geographical locations that are seen as tourist attractions and locations off the beaten track. In the digital manipulations, made by Anders Weberg, the visual raw material is transformed to highlight a dreamlike and surreal imaginary geography. All films are based solely on sound and video from the different geographical points.

All the films are accompanied with files containing the exact geographical coordinates for all the different places. By using Google Earth it is possible to view aerial photos of the points represented in the different films. Using a GPS-unit it is also possible to visit the locations where the visual raw material was shot. And as the films are provided in various file formats optimized for most mobile video players, it is possible to enjoy the filmic representations on the very spots where the material was filmed. In this way the imaginary can be compared to the real. But what is real or imaginary? With Surreal Scania we want to explore different visual representation techniques, and we also want to recognise the fact that our imagination has an important role in forming the experiences of these locations.

http://www.surrealscania.se

Anders Weberg
A seasoned film maker, he has specialized in the expressions that digital technologies provide. He directs movies from features to experimental shorts to music videos. The purpose of Anders´work is to mix genres and ways of expression to explore the potential of visual media.
More info about Anders: http://www.recycled.se

Robert Willim
Researcher in ethnology at Lund University. He has done research about the cultural dimensions of digital media and the transformations of industrial society. For the past several years he has channeled his research within this field to focus mainly on music and the arts.
More info about Robert: http://www.robertwillim.com

http://vispo.com/temp/Google2.htm
http://vispo.com

Stanchi di vedere sempre la pagina di Google con la stessa faccia? Per i maniaci del motore di ricerca più usato nel mondo, c’è un simpatico sito che permette di creare con il proprio nome un logo alla Google. Logogle, infatti, genera i marchi del noto motore di ricerca immediatamente e automaticamente, cosœ che in pochi secondi si può ottenere un qualsiasi nome o frase breve in perfetto stile Google.
Non si possono però usare tutti i caratteri: ad esempio apostrofo e under score non funzionano.

(licia mandrioli)

www.logogle.com

Links
www.c6.org/toogle
http://get.me.it/toogle2
http://grant.robinson.name/projects/guess-the-google
http://www.iterature.com/adwords
http://art.gen.nz/index.php?page=gs
http://googlehouse.net
http://www.gwei.org
http://www.thenetobserver.net/projects/nap_google/napoli_by_google.htm