Google Earth

In my MA thesis project at SAC I have approached the methods of the digital representation of the physical world (Google Earth, Instagram, etc) that can back-fire into the architecture.

The medium specificity of the Internet, as a multimodal platform, which consists of a variety of mediums, provides a new endless amount of raw image material and different tools of their combinations. Moderated platforms superimposed by diverse content uploaded by users. Overlaying of the photo-documented memories of millions of people blend through applying geotags and hashtags create a scattered on the first view layer of representation of the real. This produced amount of visual data with no hierarchy: the food in the restaurant, the restaurant itself, and the building in which it is located being of equal value I produced a set of objects by projecting the site plans, blending them in two directions. These objects become containers for the second layer of the representation of the city – the data which I collected from the users’ images around it. I picked up three different blocks as case studies. Each of them becomes a solid representation of the city block which they belong to. Each of them becomes a small world of itself. The content which is provided by the user’s photos became the pattern on the surface of the containers, articulated their points of attraction by ornamentation. The photos of the architectural elements by losing their function got the same value as the photos of food or trees or any other elements which get into a focus. Each pattern’s location on the surface corresponds with the photo geotag or how the object, from which it was taken. The second part of my project is bringing back the produced containers to the context from which they have emerged. I visually adapted them by changing the colors of the textures to the color pallets taken from platforms, I used its’ layouts, frames, and photo filters. And as the last step, I made a public group on Facebook. I used 3D scanning software to produce a similar effect of the distortion of the shape and texture with the Google earth 3D. New contextualism or platform contextualism provides content and apparatuses for the production of new meanings, describing how the world looks.