Worlds largest self portrait: Hoax for art’s sake
By Alfie • Jan 4th, 2009 • Category: GPS, imagingThis video of the art students elaborate idea of using GPS to trace his self portrait across the world was at once a glorious celebration of technology for it’s own sake, and a statement of how ubiquitous connectivity can allow one person to make a grand, global statement.
it was, unfortunately, a hoax. If you just dug a little into the project, as many did, you’d see that it was highly improbable – you can’t get DHL to deliver things on time, let alone plot crazy circuitous global routes thousands of feet in the air over Nova Scotia. But for me, watching that video trace the artists self portrait out over the world was really quite a beautiful experience; soft and quite wonderful at once. It was effective art.
So the question I have to ask myself is: “Is it that feeling of wonder and ‘wow, that’s really cool’” that I should keep, or the deflated sink of knowing that it was yet another hoax perpetrated on a reactionary global blog-net for no obvious reason. What was the artists intention? Was it to realise this idea which could never be achieved because, well, DHL just would never do that (or would they? They’ve got some great free PR in any event) in order to give us that moment of wonder? That moment when the impossible or highly improbable seems achievable through determination and technology? I prefer to believe the latter.
Alfie is a web and mobile troublemaker.
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