untitled streetview by Walter Langelaar (NL)

Africa elena @ 10:52 pm

In relation to the ‘City Walk’ initiative and in anticipation of doing

one of these walks ourselves with Doung and Rike, Walter decided to prepare

for some mobile exploration of Durban’s aether; meaning he was interested in seeing how

wireless fidelity (WIFI) would be spread around the city of Durban, and what conclusions could

be drawn from the data when moving from ‘white suburbia’ into the areas which are generally

understood to be ‘no-go zones’.

Over the course of collecting the data, via a mobile Android device with

WIFI and GPS enabled, differenty interesting topics came up when

discussing the layout, and access to technology in general in SA with

people in the project group. It turned out that because of the FIFA

World Cup event, Google had put it’s view on the country as well -

resulting in large scale mapping efforts for the Google Street View and

Maps application, and many added 3D renderings of buildings and sites in

the cities where the matches were to be played…

Having worked with similar Google tech and API’s (from a critical

perspective) before, he decided to dissect their recent practices around

Durban and turn this into a visual work – which to him made total sense

as opposed to all the fairly general ‘FIFA-bashing’ that went on, since

obviously a big multinational (or should that be ‘online’?) player like

Google also brings with it it’s own politics and dubious decisions.

The resulting work in the Durban Art Gallery shows a story of two people

in Durban’s newly built football stadium. It follows a young, white male

and female, both wearing Google t-shirts, moving around the stadium

taking pictures – all recorded via the Google Street View application.

Interestingly, the narrative is coloured by the fact that the Street

View technology, and it’s interface limitations, clearly depicts a

suspicious desire of the camera-person to stay focused on the Google

employees, instead of also engaging with the local, native SA workers

that can be seen viewing the spectacle all around the stadium.

As an installation this video-narrative was combined with two additional

screen which show online articles and websites, dealing with

controversies surrounding Google’s move into South Africa…

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.