Since the arrival of Google Maps, the world around us has become almost instantly retrievable, in great detail and at almost any desired moment. The images we see however, are static and don't reflect the state of flux that characterizes the public arena we inhabit.
What if Google Maps went live… makes the all-too-familiar view from the top come alive by using inserted film fragments into a huge collage photo of Strijp-S, a neigbourhood in Eindhoven which was being developed at the time.
During the arts festival Flux/S Square One in Eindhoven, a local audience gathered to playfully appropriate the public space under the direction of choreographer Katja Heitmann and composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven.
Dancing and playing within the contours of recently dumped sand on the clean concrete pavements and alongside the newly planted grass, they created a dynamic real-time version of Google Maps.
Several performances were filmed from top by a team of camera operators. Their cameras were mounted on the top of fishing rods.
In order to track the recordings we placed 1125 pylons in a perfect aligned grid on the strijp/s area. (across the streets and on the roofs of buildings) This turned out as a piece of unintended land art.