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n argues that visualization of data that would otherwise remain visually inaccessible is the new aesthetic and accordingly it has provided us with a new realm of images into which we can include the global image of google earth 109 lyotard makes a similar claim for narrative that it now consists of arranging data in a new way connecting together series of data that were previously held to be independent 51 52 if data is available it can be mapped therein lies google earth s revolutionary potential as we saw with the fly over function the program visualizes the distances we cannot perceive at 500 miles an hour 32 000 miles in the air scholars currently at work documenting the various networks through which finance capital flows the hands through which it is exchanged the physical spaces through which it passes the ethernet it transverses the accounts in which it rests the blockages it encounters seek to comprehend how this monetary system functions once this data set becomes available its mapped visualization will provide a powerful means of grasping the totality of capital if visualization is the new aesthetic then layering a structural tool key to google earth might prove to be the means by which to create this aesthetic google earth articulates sites through layers of data roads traffic flows weather historical maps historical sites military bases utube videos photographs crime statistics etc that can be added or subtracted over an area resulting in a kind of virtual geology through this process of layering a locality that is linked to multiple narrative networks emerges and the compiling of data by the users of space the numbers images models and notes they post to the community makes google earth an interactive map that functions as a collective political and aesthetic project our altdurham is meant to be such a visualization an attempt to render visible the actions of a vibrant community of artists educators farmers business owners and volunteers working at the micro level of the city references baudrillard jean simulations ny semiotexte 1983 bukatman scott terminal identity the postmodern subject in postmodern science fiction durham duke university press 1993 de certeau michel walking in the city the practice of everyday life trans steven rendall berkeley university of california press 1984 91 110 jameson fredric postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism durham duke university press 1991 lyotard jean the postmodern condition a report on knowledge trans geoff bennington and brian massumi minneapolis university of minnesota press 1997 51 52 december 19 2007 google earth and virtual reality posted by traxus4420 under aesthetics virtual actual tags baudrillard bergson deleuze leave a comment from any perspective native to the world of electronic images jean baudrillard s theories of simulation have perhaps never seemed more like simple description even to the point of banality and yet their implications remain uncertain and underdeveloped of particular relevance to our project is the new relationship he attributes to map and territory in a hypermediated environment abstraction today is no longer that of the map the double the mirror or the concept simulation is no longer that of a territory a referential being or a substance it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality a hyperreal the territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it it is the map that precedes the territory it is the map that engenders the territory it is the real and not the map whose vestiges subsist here and there in the deserts which are no longer those of the empire but our own the desert of the real and later for it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory the magic of the concept and the charm of the real this representational imaginary which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer s made project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory disappears with simulation in other words the map form becomes productive of the territory it purports to represent pushing unmediated reality to the margins this map is coextensive with the reach of empire or global political and economic control the world becomes post referential is this the aesthetic and therefore if one fully accepts this discourse the literal function of google earth this interpretation would certainly match the kinds of changes google earth makes to the standard indexical map of colored lines and place names that we are accustomed to and which perhaps reached its peak in complexity and functionality with programs like mapquest and google maps by using genuine satellite photographs user generated 3 d models and user uploaded photos google earth approaches the simulation rather than the abstract referential marking of real space the distance between direct experience and the view framed by the digital interface shrinks knowledge of the world is not given by this experience but by information provided by google the branding of the planet by a single corporate logo but to say that simulation extinguishes the real that signs of the real are substituted for the real itself is either to veer dangerously close to a kind of magical thinking whereby reality immediately and effortlessly conforms without remainder to social technological determination or to argue that previous modes of epistemological justification have been infinitely suspended that it becomes impossible to prove the real baudrillard seems to argue the second while flirting with the first while he presents the regime of simulation as a liberation from all imposed order based on the divine referent this suggests that the process does not need to be reproduced that it is automatic privileges no one and that its particular details are inscrutable what this odd conclusion reflects is a widespread confusion as to where the emphasis should land in the many definitions of reality is reality primarily the universal divine system of reference or is its source direct personal experience is its fundamental determination political epistemological a product of competition between empiricism rationalism etc or phenomenological put in these terms the problem appears to have no solution let us try looking elsewhere the logic of simulation especially as manifested in digital technology is also sometimes referred to as virtual reality in the post phenomenological tradition of philosophy spearheaded by henri bergson and come into its own with gilles deleuze the virtual is something like an effect separated from its cause another way of putting it is that it is something that has not yet entered the realm of ordinary cause and effect for bergson virtual describes the realm of pure memory a discontinuous collection of images that through unpredictable routes work their way back into consciousness whether by focused recollection or something like proust s involuntary memory the virtual then mediates as memory our experience of reality which in turn suggests that human consciousness is essentially mediated by virtual images even prior to all technology theoretically we said the part played by consciousness in external perception would be to join together by the continuous thread of memory instantaneous visions of the real but in fact there is nothing for us that is instantaneous in all that goes by that name there is already some work of our memory and consequently of our consciousness which prolongs into each other so as to grasp them in one relatively simple intuition an endless number of moments of an endlessly divisible time matter and memory consciousness is both the work of memory and through concentration the extension of individual moments within the temporal flow of memory laden experience leading to the simple intuition that allows the other moments to be organized from this state of comprehension the spatialized system that we call knowledge can be derived this picture is complicated further by bergson s claim that matter itself is also made of images the difference between mediated consciousness and immediate experience of matter then involves a dual potential of the image and not a fundamental ontological division between subjective perception and objective existence what this in turn suggests is that all experience whether mediated only by memory or also by technology is equally real and that reality is nothing other than the procession of images the difficulty is in relating the memory image to the matter image without slipping back into the terms of subjective objective opposition deleuze condenses this relation into an image that is simultaneously virtual and actual that which unproblematically exists and contends that this dual image is the nucleus of reality or as he puts it in his second book on cinema the indiscernability of the real and the imaginary or of the present and the past of the actual and the virtual is definitely not produced in the head or the mind it is the objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double 69 one could argue that it is an experience of the cinema which allows deleuze and perhaps bergson as well to make such observations in the cinema every image is at once a bit of matter a memory inscribed on it and part of a technological medium if writing also removes the monopoly on memory by consciousness cinema captures and objectifies its temporality the movies at once represent repeat and reframe the work of consciousness immersed in cinematic images deleuze is able to say subjectivity is never ours it is time that is the soul or the spirit the virtual 82 time is not internal to the subject the subject is internal to time space on the other hand is consumed at a rate of 24 frames per second if we follow new media theory in understanding digital representation as a remediation or reframing of old media via the computer interface see jay david bolter and david grusin also lev manovich then we can understand how the representational strategies of google earth are an evolution and or repurposing of cinema where the cinema condensed space into movement and time the basic vocabulary of the computer image is the graph the diagram the map the visual presentation of already mediated information in google earth every satellite image can contain multiple user generated images as well as words every image is simultaneously a database time is not presented indirectly by a sequence of movements in space since google earth s images are presented as always already available only the camera moves new data electronic memory if you like emerges in virtual space according only to the actions of anonymous users of which the present user counts as one virtual space is then one of absolute openness to becomings in the form of alterations and uploading of information a space opened up in time inside the realm of electronic images movement is controlled neither by the will of a director cinematographer nor by the movement of a subject but by the actions of the user within parameters determined by the interface this deterritorialized cinematic apparatus functioning via pan zoom and tilt is able to undermine all hierarchies of scale allowing the user unlimited access to a virtual space nothing remains to mediate our control over the aesthetic of mapping google earth makes possible our actual limitations are only those of the program itself this brings to mind certain hypothetical statements made by bergson about the unity of subject and object that would follow if memory were eliminated and deleuze on the possibilities of cinema opened up by modern european filmmakers such as alain resnais what he calls the time image as distinct from the movement image or the classical cinema of sergei eisenstein and buster keaton the cinema is going to become an analytic of the image implying a new conception of cutting a whole pedagogy which will operate in different ways even when it is mobile the camera is no longer content sometimes to follow the characters movement sometimes itself to undertake movements of which they are merely the object but in every case it subordinates the description of a space to the functions of thought this is not the simple distinction between the subjective and the objective the real and the imaginary it is on the contrary their indiscernability which will endow the camera with a rich array of functions and entail a new conception of the frame and reframing hitchcock s premonition will come true a camera consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make but by the mental connections it is able to enter into and it becomes questioning responding objecting provoking theorematizing hypothesizing experimenting in accordance with the open list of logical conjunctions or therefore if because actually although or in accordance with the functions of thought in a cinema vérité cinema of truth which as rouch says means rather truth of cinema 23 in the movement image time is subordinate to movement as the rhythm of an ordered sequence of shots that follow physical movement in the time image movement is subordinate to time as the interval created by non sequential discontinuous camera movement cutting and splicing becomes the direct presentation of time roughly analogous to the effect of the dj s free manipulation of the record in the digital image as framed by a computer a purely synthetic space time is subordinate to thought and the commands of the user whose attention is fully absorbed by it the camera has grown a brain in the form of the interface and this is what the user manipulates the extension not of his or her senses but of his or her thoughts in relation to the senses the interface is always already theorizing the images it presents shifting between layers marking places these are all theoretical adjustments the emphasizing of one data set over another finally anything resembling an interval a gap in presentation vanishes virtual space is itself a gap a hole in reality from which the impossible can be prepared and can as the externalization of speculative thought expand the limits of what is considered possible with google earth the mapped locations literally consist of an actual image and a virtual image though the boundary between them is always porous if we think the virtual and the actual as having replaced the old dichotomy between possible and real then we can no longer say that reality has collapsed into hyperreality but that the space of the virtual has materialized within the space of the actual just as the cinema materialized the virtual subjective flow of temporality digital media materializes a virtual space within the flow of images by means of which they can be broken down and reconstituted in google earth a location can be digitally mapped imaged described historicized advertised criticized and ignored by multiple use...