#digital body

Digital Body

The Digital Body is a Glitch Body [2015]

Á. Birna Björnsdóttir, “how rocks move? they don’t move. the rocks don’t move”

Á. Birna Björnsdóttir, “how rocks move? they don’t move. the rocks don’t move”

In 2011, Google began offering the opportunity to "Look Inside" participating businesses, many of which are in my immediate neighborhood. From the point of view of a Google Maps user, this simply represented a magical addition to the availability of StreetView imagery, an expansion of access no different from that already granted so far. But as Joanne McNeil noted in her New Aesthetic talk at SXSW that year, this move had entirely different and more complex implications for the people and spaces caught on camera than traditional StreetView did. It is also produced differently, usually by a person entering the space with a tripod. Now, if one scrolls down in one of these businesses, there appears to be a sort of singularity or badly-healed scar at the center of the image-- or in the case of outdoor panorama points, a black void reminiscent of of a Mandelbrot set. But, just barely, you can see the tripod legs sticking out from that void: the last reminder of how each and every one of these images was produced by a certain person at a certain time under certain circumstances. The practice of collecting these accidental footprints is meant as a metonym for the ability to find the same seams everywhere else. While we walk through a series of produced realities, that production is often right under our feet.

Davide Sisto, Online Afterlives: Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture

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