Googled Earth 2019-2021
by Negin Ehtesabian & Patrick Lichty
Two artists from Iran and the USA, try to explore each other's lands through Google Earth VR; and find a way to complete the image they have had about each other's countries.
But as they soon find out, the Google Earth VR 3D images are also as deformed and distorted as the information they have about each other’s culture and society as seen through mass media, books, films, and the Internet. These 3D images add another “not quite real” information to their shared experience. And with the tendency to fill in gaps in an unfinished story, each frame is completed with images and ideas drawn from the imagined scene based on their previous information. They try to show a clearer image of their country, talking via Whatsapp and gathering information that seems so obvious to them, but they find out it’s all a new world to the other.
The project is research-based documentation consisting of a collection of visual artworks, including machine drawing (robots), drawing combined with embroidery on textile, weaving, and a video, with the discipline that each artist would make at least one artwork based on their image of the other countries, and one talking about their own personal perception of their own country: plus the documentation of the process.
The process of the project is to travel to these countries by Google Earth, using VR glasses and recording the video, or using Google Maps following the other person's location and screenshot them. Then, each artist review, collect and selects the visual frames and objects, might combine them with his/her past information, expectation and imagination about that place, and makes a visual not-exactly-real image of each country.
In the end, this is a project talking about this intercultural today’s life and we believe that the internet is now the only place that we can share our life in any part of the world, and as a couple, since we have to wait for the visa process, it is the only place we can have a home together in.
**2021, September, Has been shown on
Critical Abstraction New Media Art show, University of Wyoming/ USA
