Reversing the Google Car,
2009
Looking back at observational culture around us.
(Photo Artstation)
Glenn Davidson (Artstation) is commissioned to create a ‘sousveillance’ exploring what a Reversing the Google Car (RGC) might mean and look like. Leading up to the Festival Glenn has been blogging to discuss the RGC with a diverse range of invited ‘guests’ to find out how to reverse the Google Car, starting off by looking at its various effects upon us. The conversations will contribute to a public workshop and drawing to evoke the issues of e.g. being mapped with out being asked.
A complimentary Festival commission for investigating the golden standard of maps
Visit the blogsite:
http://reversingthegooglecar.blogspot.com
Thank you to everyone who blogged up to the festival - the project remains open so please carry on.. A Blog on the outcomes of the presentation will follow shortly.
The appendage Google equipment which makes a Google Car
And the Googlebike
lecture performance in Chapter snug, 2.00pm Saturday 14th October 2009 - For Mayyouliveininterestingtimes festival.
1.00 I came to RGC because of www.artmap.org.uk in which I created the " the man in the map ", a conceptual device and a metaphor for our own participation within an environment - a species in its habitat.
1.01 The way I have approached RGC is from the perspective of the man in the map, who is able to comprehend the map he is part of, he can see him self within the map in his minds eye. And from here he can cleave experiential extracts from his experience within the map with which to construct meaning...
1.02 This is a phenomenological perspective and a practice led approach. The art is the attempt at deconstruction and reverse engineering, perhaps also constituting a form of literalism.
1.03 The first dilemma is that there is no one in the map, no visible person in the Google apparatus to take care and through whom all the corresponding attendances, a 'point of view' affords upon a scheme, can happen. - Image theft seems the least but start of it.
1.04 By inserting the concerns of man and woman into Google Street View, a critique emerges and plays out - these are the discoveries and expectations of one who finds no end of reason to Reverse the Google Car...
As Usman Haque says maybe google-hacking / reverse-engineering become a genre of its own right!
Google Travelogue
Oct. 2009
07:11:00 ( clocktime has gone bananas )
Whilst visiting the captal a narrative arose.
a white mask.. ? the Google Ghosts
heading further south....
Jaunt 1
Landscape with Google skies ...its easy out here on my own ...somewhere in France ?... I am reporting back.
"...There are Google tattoos on the clouds here ...
...they've had the car out late again...".
The subject of angelic disembodied control has been raised in the blog.
On the left we get a 'real' sense of that.
04:12:57
4 Route des Corbières, Paziols, Aude, France, Address is approximate
I am composing from the road...
It is beautiful here. It is, really, absolutely beautiful here.
I was just looking and saw this driver swerve to avoid the self effacing Google Car - shocked to find it following them I guess ! .
It Is the omnipotent ..The Gaze.. rather like an early - Dr Who video effects.
15.08.31
This is of course a fiction.
At this moment I seem to be exploring the notion of travelogue within Google… the gaze travels and composes..
No idea where it is going yet but that’s actually the fun – I seem to be using the RGC blog as a sort of Muse ... A way of looking and thinking whilst travelling Google… I am actually in South of France right now …beautiful landscape ... I was trying to get to Spain I think – thoughts of Nicholas with the Google problem in Las Pinedas … I cant get there … I came to the end of street view ... They stopped the frieekin map!
Traveling here, like everywhere takes much time ... you have to look at everything on the way. Landscape moves past you but is inherently dead . This however takes nothing away from its beauty. Iam finding travel satisfying. I might take this sky home.
13.10.30
You can explore the space of the road only.
GC and street view have provided corridors of earthly imagery.
21.13.01
look at that! ... Google planning a new road - is this how they let us know?
...they've been out in the rain....
In Google Street View you get lonely.
56.73.00
I am imagining ears... hands... and eyes of the landscape !!
Jaunt 2
On the RGC blog there is an item about how you can ask Google to erase you.
For the purposes of art, deconstruction and reverse engineering and the new literalism ...
02.17.60
I am at home.
I awake to find tattoos on the front of my house.... my house!. These have become real events they begin to really matter...
I had thought the terrible noise was a dustcart lorry or removal men in our street that morning ...
I had no idea ...It was control by Google !
Google control ...a graphic imposition...was all over our house!
The navigational technologies are a precursor to removal
10.24.76
Fragmentation and noise followed ...we stayed inside ...Make it stand out
The atomisation intensified
...we could not see out of the windows we could hear nothing ...
suddenly ...Its all over.
All worldly goods and chattels, friends and family
................gone
obviously here we are seeing the interdependence of ones self and ones stuff ...
45.61.21
BEWARE - a void to... to carefully explore ...oblique reference to the turbine hall.
end.
The creature is separated from its environment..
I didnt like this Jaunt much but it is growing on me now
The emergency road triangle appears most advanced in China where they have ones that flash and can be seen for 1000m and 1500m according to the adverts.
These are a little like the ON OFF boards - I like them, however they appear are not to be legal in Europe. Imagine that - the legality of a red triangle
21.90.51
Now if street view was in china...
* These could be very useful in a literal way in Reversing the Google Car.
THE MIRROR
Vzdálená, Prague, Prague, Ceská republika Address is approximate
The reflection of our environment but what is that in the mirror?
new territory is opening up in the Czech
Man
sits patiently
awaiting
the Google Camera Car
he is wearing the latest in mirror technology
keeping out rain, cold and Google
as he reflects on his environment ...ehem thankyou.