Googlescapes

In this project I am dealing mainly with the understanding of space. It addresses the problem through the space mapped with the photogrametric map Google Street View. The map itself is obsessively engaging whit reality, ‘Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. [...] It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but its scaled-down refraction [...] Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself.’ (Baudrillard, 1994)1 The series is in fact an answer to a previously duplicated reality that creates hyperreality and devalues the original. The crash of reality and its image is showed in the new transformation of space in a new and subversive picture. I provide a new image that is a reaffirmation of reality itself and at the same time, because of the effect of duplication, it voids its referent - we are here talking about the before mentioned problem of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. 

The resulting images are produced through a performative practice. With the help of a projector I face the real with its virtual counterpart from Google Street View. This new formed landscape is then photographed. The performance is short lasting thus giving a unique position to the photograph. The image is pointing to a now nonexistent reality giving it a strange semiotic connection to its referent.