Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

Check it out. The band Editors recently released an impressive campaign for their new album In This Light And On This Evening that integrates a fully functional Google Street View of London along with music and images from the band. We often experience the city with music via our headphones or car stereos so this makes perfect sense, and man, London is gorgeous.

I’m kind of using London to talk about Vancouver though, since Vancouver was just inducted into the Street View canon along with a select few other cities in Canada. Since it became available just last week Vancouver blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts here have been abuzz with this new way of experiencing the city.

It’s one thing using Street View to walk around some exotic place I’ve been before, like Paris, but now I can actually use it for its intended purpose, to familiarize myself with an address before I arrive there. (That’s what it’s for, right?) I used it to find the office at Ecotrust on Homer Street last week where I was attending a cross-discipline brainstorming session. What a different experience it was to be so familiar with where I was going by visual reference rather than street numbers, even though I had never been there before.

Editors use of Google Street View is more of a campaign based take on using the application for innovative experiences not necessarily tied to destination finding, and I’m sure we’ll see more of this in the future, which is great. Artists, however, have realized Street View as a venue for art making since its introduction a few years ago. As if a massive database of location based imagery organized into a presentation of Human existence caught in a fleeting moment would go unnoticed by artists. For a great presentation on Street View in an art context, check out Jon Rafman’s essay which has been getting a lot of press lately.

Now that Street View is available in Vancouver we expect all kinds of interesting things to come about once we all get over the initial euphoria of seeing Vancouver like this and get past the obvious one liner of discovering accidentally captured pictures of people in their underwear. The games have already begun too, with one ambitious fellow visiting in Street View several of the locations used by Vancouver’s #1 Conceptual Art export, Jeff Wall.

If you have any other examples of great campaign based uses of Street View, or some interesting projects that have incorporated the application into an art context I’d love to see it. Just drop it into the comment section of this post.

For now though, I’m going to take a walk around London listening to that Editors album, but I might switch it up with some Sex Pistols, or Clash, or maybe some Amy Winehouse. Oh the possibilities!

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