taking it to the street 1 [23.11.2007]
Despite the popularity of air travel there's not too many people who could claim that the birds-eye view of the world available on google maps corresponds to their everyday experience of place.
Now there is an alternative view of Shanghai available (as an English demo) with panoramic (read: neck-craning) options:
Google have also dipped a toe into producing audiovisual support for their maps - prosaically called StreetView - which has, until recently, been resolutely 'driven' by the idea that streets are for cars (and not the specific viewing practices of pedestrians or cyclists). I wonder how different a bicycle-level view of the city might look in google. Now Google have also introduced panoramic views:
StreetView and City8 add another layer to how we experience particular places which are ‘accessible’ in a new way. We can now see select locations through the eyes of a google camera operator/driver - in addition to the view of say a novelist (like Iain Sinclair’s take on London's motorways for example) or of a filmmaker (like Wenders on Lisbon). Despite the anonymity of the google drivers, and the higher-than-your-average person position of their cameras, I’m not convinced StreetView is any less idiosyncratic or embodied than some of these previous meditations on place – a point made clear to me when the googlevan detours to MacDonald’s for a pit-stop.
In fact if it were a tad faster this idea of single shot capture of the city might rival the infamy of a Parisian predecessor: Claude Lelouch who, in the mid-1970s, mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the front bumper of his Mercedes and drove through the centre of Paris. The resulting movie has only relatively recently been released to DVD.
Alternatively, here is the more mundane car that google will use to capture Australian cities over the next few months (you can just make out the camera mounted on the roof):
