They were collecting GPS data from helium balloons, that they let flap in the wind. They planned to visualize the GPS data in Google Earth, for a piece that would be part of an exhibition at HICA (Highland Institute of Contemporary Art) and a helium-balloon performance on the nearby Loch.
At that very moment and seemingly out of nowhere the Google Earth Street View car emerged and passed by silently. Three weeks later the artists found themselves and their balloons depicted on Google Streetview.
Exited by the premature exhibition of the work, they dived into the underlying visual and digital structure of the Googles Streetview panoramas that are projected into spheres and provide a perfect feedback loop to their GPS-work.
As a gesture to reclaim the image, the artist did hack the Google Streetview spheres: they fragmented the image, freed the spheres from their original location and forced them to float over both the landscape and loch as if they again were filled with digital helium. This resulted in a delicate dreamlike piece that consists of 12 stills of the hacking process, frozen in action. <click here or on image to view this exploration>
The latest exhibition was in Amsterdam, april 2011. The first <abstractview> exhibition opened on september 18 2010 in the Highland Institute of Contemporary Art. The opening coincided with the Great Glen Artists’ Airshow, a major collaborative event presented by The Arts Catalyst and HICA.
We developed our work for this exhibition during a short residency at HICA in 2009, focusing on two basic forces that mould and interact with the landscape in very different ways: the grazing of sheep and the movements and rhythms of the wind. Working with a local farmer, we traced the interaction between a flock of sheep and a sheepdog using GPS devices. The results have then been interpreted and processed to produce an animated projection.