Picturing the collective face.
This experience blended concepts of art, technology intervention, GPS.Art, cartography, and education. The PublicMap project took place during a Virada Cultural in São Paulo, a large-scale event with music stages distributed throughout the city’s historic center.
For this intervention, the general public was invited to participate by using their smartphones. Our app worked as a pencil tool to generate dots and lines by referring to geolocation displacement within the city. The result was a sequence of participatory drawings ruled by the anonymous multitude’s displacements.
Conceptually, this intervention took place at the border between city geography, cellphone data, internet, and geolocation, revealing a puzzling relationship between power and privacy within the operational paradigms of today’s networks.
Therefore, we decided to build an app that is free to everyone and preserves one’s privacy by not gathering any information or data from the participant that is not strictly necessary to make the platform work. In this way, the intervention questioned and challenged the technological infrastructure that could naturally attend to a logic that is broader and free (truly open and collective) but seems to prioritize control and private interests.
We also gathered information on the origin of 50 participants to generate another map, a worldwide one. Both maps were shown on a house-sized LED wall structure in the middle of Vale do Anhangabaú, the largest downtown square in São Paulo’s historic center.
The project was in pursuit of the collective figure, the image of the crowd in movement, with the creative and libertarian essence that the internet has fostered since its inception.
PROJEC BY LAB*EXPERIMENTAL
Creative Concept & Coordenation:
Demétrio Portugal / Jonaya de Castro / Felipe Brait / Rafael Zenorini
Invited Artists: Vitor George / EduZal
Art Educators: Jana Tineo / Maíra Vaz Valente
/ Manuela dAlbertas / Luciana Nassan / Lucilio Correia
PROJECT BACK STAGE AND PREPARATION
THE LED WALL STRUCTURE
