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Digital Drifting

Digital Drifting

The streets look how I remember them but everything has come to a standstill.
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Time itself has stopped.
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Crystallised.
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Space and time have always been inseparable, but here the whole network of streets has petrified. Space captured in a single moment of time, though on closer inspection it’s not a single moment, it’s a patchwork of distinct isolated moments, stitched into a continuum from noncontiguous shattered fragments.

Are these the moments the streets ceased to exist? The moment just before a great flash of blinding light sweeps away everything in its path. SERVER CRASH, POWER OUTAGE, TERRORIST ATTACK. I hover above this final moment. Looking down on the world as it was. From this scopic perspective, I am a god but I cannot resist descending. I join the ghosts, I walk amongst them, stare for far too long at their blurred faces, look for signs of recognition, someone I know. What sort of world do I inhabit when the faces of its residents have been obscured, leached of detail? I spot a familiar outline riding a bicycle. Instant recognition but their deformed features make me feel uneasy. I travel down streets I will never actually visit in lumbering blurs of acceleration, anticipating the next scene to emerge from the slow blocky fog as the screen renders into focus. The streets are bathed in eternal sunlight. I can feel its heat penetrating my screen, forcing a hallucinatory pink hue onto my peripheral vision. I look at buildings I will never enter, stare at people I will never speak to. Two People Talking Behind A Wall. A secret liaison documented for any jealous lover to track down. Who needs the NSA, FBI, MI5? I remember Robin Bale, a friend of mine, once recounting how he had shown his Dad Street View. He described how he spent an evening scrolling up and down Ashford high street, ‘we knew that my mum, who had only died a month ago, used to walk here every day to get the papers and fresh bread … So we were looking for that digital smear… we were looking for that ghost.’. How many others have traversed the virtual streets looking for ghosts? Hoping for a last glimpse, the possibility of one last meeting, a final goodbye. I contemplate the possibility of the emergence of a street view cult of remembrance. I look up into the sky. The sun is still shining, COPYWRITE GOOGLE.

Published by

John Wild

John Wild is a London based artist who works across performance, sound, text, code, electronics and machine learning to carry out speculative research into the utopian and dystopian futures imminent within digital technology.

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