google earth

“Buscando Al Sr. Goodbar” is a journey through Murcia, Spain that involves a search for the locations and authors of various YouTube videos produced in the city.

If the longitude and latitude coordinates are included with a video when publishing it on YouTube, then this video automatically appears on a GoogleEarth map and connects it to a physical location. A link is therefore made between the YouTube video and where it was produced in the city.

A bus tour was organized by Michelle Teran, who visited Murcia repeatedly via GoogleEarth and started to get to know intimately some of the people living there through the YouTube videos they produced. As the bus moved through the city, its movements along the streets were mirrored on a GoogleEarth map. YouTube videos were played corresponding to where they appeared on the map and could be viewed on a large flat screen.

In this way the audience on the bus witnessed short glimpses of what the city had to offer and started to meet some of the people living there. Somebody solved a Rubik’s cube in under 2 minutes, a young man played the piano, a group of friends drunkenly sung together, a 14 year old boy showed off his headbanging skills, somebody choked his friend and caused him to pass out, somebody played a video game,  a man taught himself Arabic, two people fell in love, a festival happened on the street.

At certain points during the performance  – led by Irene Verdú, an actress from Murcia –  the bus stopped and the public met some of the YouTube authors who presented them with a reenactment of some of their performances.

Through this intervention an intimate encounter was created between video producer and public by entering into people’s homes and the various sites where these videos were made.

(Source: Website)

This poetic Internet artwork makes a visceral connection between the documentation of frags in Counter-Strike multiplayer servers and the military actions documented in the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary database. As it connects the fake videogame death to military actions that usually resulted in the loss of one or many real human lives, it performs Google Earth searches to display the location of these actions. By presenting three events and locations at a time, it allows for the visuals to load and creates a time buffer to allow us to focus our attention on a particular location for longer than the few seconds between frags allow. And since we are unable to control anything in this piece, except the choice of server at the beginning, we become powerless spectators of violence made abstract through terse language and eerie landscapes devoid of human beings. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)