John Craig Freeman’s Imaging Beijing, part of the 2008 Mixed Realities exhibition at Turbulence.org, uses remote sensing technology and place-based narratives to examine the effects of electronic and cultural globalization. Moving across satellite images of the city, participants encounter spherical virtual nodes that give them a first-hand experience of the sights and sounds of the location–transcending scales as they explore the city’s growth and physical mixture of generations of memory while seeing specific locales on a more detailed, personal level.
As a visitor moves beyond the initial broad images of modern Beijing, the local experiences are given individual faces in two ways. Visually, the work uses web cams to capture images of the visitor that appear as the head of the avatar in each local node. Experientially, Freeman’s project relies on the life of Beijing resident Peter Guo to provide a personal-level context for the city’s evolution.
Share this:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
. Historian Shae Davidson's research interests include public policy and the relationship between culture and civil society. His publications range from articles on industrial history to absurdist poetry.
