google parade on google street.

Image: Chicken by Nicolas Lampert,
via Street With A View.

Pittsburgh artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, with help from a mattress factory and a local gallery, collaborated with Google last year to inject performance and street art into Google map's street view feature. Giving the usually utilitarian (but often novel) feature a sense of culture and community to the streets(view) of Pittsburgh's Northside. They posed various scenes, an artist's chicken sculpture, a faux marathon, band practice, rapunzelesque mattress factory escapes, and in some cases the locals of the community caught on and joined in with the spectacle.

No doubt, this was somewhat inspired by the various unintended scenes that have been found on Google maps or street view, most of which have been removed. The topless sunbathing Dutch woman, a drunk Australian man passed out in his own gutter, crimes in progress, adult movie/market follies, and spectral looking entities open to interpretation, are a few of the things that have been found by street view wanderlust.

Soon enough, a schedule of google's street view-mobile will be blogged. Local business people, artists, exhibitionists, and nutjobs will take to the streets to pimp out their wares, creations, and ideologies for you to find while looking to get directions. David Koresh wannabe's with John 3:16 signs. Liquor stores advertising a 'street-view extravaganza!' of 2-for-1 Budwiser tall cans. Daniel showing his girlfriend how much he 'loves' her by getting a picture of them making out on google.com. Budding architecture firms throwing up guerilla installations to show off their design talent.

This is clearly the age where privacy dies and transparency reigns. Your identity can't be stolen, the world knows exactly who you are anyways. Everyone knows everything about you, your face is slapped across the internet, including a picture of you waving from your stoop on google street view when friends attempt to find where you live.

Image: Marching Band,
via Street With A View.

send in the decoys.

Image: A German bus station, by Stacey G..

I came across a delighting article a few days ago in the Telegraph how German senior citizen homes are using decoy bus stations to head off wandering alzheimer's patients, before they get too far away. Not being able to come up with the image of a German bus stop in my head, out of curiosity, I asked the internet to find one for me, and one of the first good images I found was of a Peter Eisenman designed bus station in Aachen, Germany (below). "But of course this is not the type of bus stop branded into the brains of these seniors with alzheimer's!" I immediately told myself. Erect a bus station like this in front of the senior home and you might find the wandering patients gazing at it with confusion, but you certainly wouldn't find them waiting for a bus that will never come, even with one of the signature yellow and green transit signs posted next to it.

Image: Aachen Bus Shelter, by "perpetually dishevelled".

This makes me wonder of the culture that would be produced by a people who have everyday architectural iconography like this, associated with 'getting home'. What would real architectural icons, such as the Eiffel Tower or The Empire State Building, end up looking like with such design making up familiar and utilitarian infrastructure. Maybe rebellious architects would have to draw up elaborate theses of organic structures designing themselves like cancer or this cultures version of Archigram would look behind them with fantastic visual theories rooted in the past, something resembling the native American teepee or possibly a south American monolith... quite possibly, radical designers of this other dimensional culture would design bus stops to look like those in the first and last pictures of this post.

Image: German Bus Stop, by "Casper Kongstein".