In the first instalment of our gallery series, “Artists at Home,” we looked at how people’s relationship to private space, to their homes, changed during the epidemic, with viewpoints offered by four contemporary artists. The second part of the series presents a project each by an Italian and a Swedish artist, who use stills and film produced by Google to highlight changes in how the world is perceived, and how you can take a journey in virtual space.
The use of the photos that have been produced by the special camera of Google’s car is not entirely new in contemporary art: in 2010 American artist Doug Rickard published an album, New American Picture, which included exclusively images of Google Street View, as does the Canadian Jon Rafman’s ongoing project, 9-eyes, which was begun in the 2000s; both collections are meant to call attention to violence and social problems in the world. While these works thematize significant social injustices of our present, their interest in photography (and the perception of reality, and vision) also brings about an examination of the medium.
Double Sunrise is a performance and video project by Swedish artist Johan F. Karlsson, who used Google Earth’s flight simulator to fly around the planet. The virtual journey, which lasted almost 20 hours, was taken in the copied world with the use of a VR headset. The project was named after the two sunrises the artist flew through, and is also a reference to a certificate from 1943, the Secret Order of the Double Sunrise, which was issued to those who took more than 24-hour-flight between Australia (and Ceylon, Sri Lanka), during which two sunrises could be observed.
“Delocalized from space, my body attempts in Double Sunrise to allow my mind to flow freely in a cyber-environment constructed exclusively from virtual images and for the purposes of orientation. During the performance, my interaction with my surroundings was determined by what I saw around myself, which slowly transformed the room itself into a map. I leave my body as matter behind, and as it reflexively responds to the images and the movement, I draw the horizons I see during my journey.”
