Transcript of presentation at Pecha Kucha

1.

The last 3 or 4 years (or the last two for Mac users like myself) have seen a noisy and relentless explosion in geo-locative data mapping. Google Earth , through its various iterations, has established itself as a stable, widely accessible platform with a huge variety of APIs delivering a vast amount of commercial and cultural data, from Californian real estate, to excerpts from Google Book Search and embedded YouTube video. As the accessibility and near ubiquity of the interface has grown so has the sheer diversity of information presented on this platform.

The Invisible Kiez

The Invisible Kiez was a KMZ project to be presented at Art Claims Impulse in Wrangelkiez, Berlin, in the summer of 2008. The project consisted of a large archive of photographs of the neighborhood, or Kiez. These photographs were annotated and accompanied with links and short texts.

The objective was to build a three dimensional ‘text object’, a subjective impression but also a narrative with multiple points of entry, in which fact and fiction overlaped with history and highly specific (geo-tagged) information, visual, textual and audio material.

Amongst the emergent themes in this project were:-

1. The idea of graffiti as ‘a layer of metadata written across the real’ – (with reference to pseudo-occult practices of sigilisation and magical thought within an urban context).

2. Specific historic resonances, The Ghost Wall, The Dry Canal, The Ruined Fountain

3. The Temporary Autonomous Zone

3. The immanent threat of aggressive property and land development (Mediaspree)

4. The relationship between virtual and real space

5. The function of Niemand's Land in the urban context.