Narrative Map of Cities

Short narratives on Google Maps describing moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between — tied to a specific place.

Wonderful waste of time

Here's a wonderfully mad game that uses Google and YouTube amongst its backdrops.

Need For Streetview

There's a promo version of Need For Speed Undercover in Japan that uses Google StreeetView.

Google Earth on Your Coffee Table

Google Earth on your coffee table.

Tilt Shift Frisco

Tilt Shift photography using Google Earth:


Flight over Miniature San Francisco (Tilt-Shift) from Inoue_k3D on Vimeo.

Litter arty

Two posts in a row from the land of the chewing gum ban.

Titled simply as “Singapore”, this is an installation piece by Thai artist Wit Pimkanchanapong (sounds like popcorn in a microwave oven), created for this year's Singapore Biennale.



The interactive artwork allows visitors to write their own notes on stickers provided by the artist and paste them onto a Google Earth image-map of Singapore. So kind of Web Minus 1.0.



So the artist is getting everyone else to a load of work, basically, just to create a roomful of litter. My father was right - all artists are lazy workshy fops, living in squalor.

And The Google Oscar Goes To...

Google has launched a creative awards competition in Singapore, to recognise the most creative uses of Google tools. Those Singaporeans only need look to this very blog for inspiration. Or drugs.

I couldn't think of anything else to say or show, so here's a random picture:

Street With A View

Like most people, I often find myself spending hours walking around the virtual streets of Pittsburgh in Google Streetview. It's not like there's anything else to do here in London. Well I thought I had stumbled upon the world's most exciting street, but then I discovered I had been conned.



I'm disgusted.

Two American artists have created what they term 'the first artistic intervention in Google Street View.' Yes indeed. Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley approached Google with the idea of creating a series of staged tableaux along one street in Pittsburgh.

They include firemen rescuing a cat from a tree, a giant chicken sculpture, a woman dressed in a ham suit, a fake marathon, a rehearsing garage band, a mad scientist lab complete with "love laser", a high school marching band, a woman escaping from a window using a rope made from bed sheets and a medieval sword fight.

The project, called Street With A View, "introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View", said Hewlett and Kinsley on their website.

I can see cities 'managing their brand' (yuk) in this way in the future. But hey - the world always needs more giant chicken sculptures.

Ooh, I'm really scared

(Not so easy to convey sarcasm in the written form.)

Here are a number of Halloween related Google Maps mashups.



None are tricks, but none are really treats, either.

Bah humbug
(wait... wrong holiday).

James and Joe

James and Joe are a young creative team who deserve a plug.

This is partly because they've used the Google Maps interface in a really fresh way, but more because they are at my hometown (Leeds) university.

Oh, and they also look to be really talented creatives too.

Book relief

Books would be great if they weren't boring.

They're really hard work. You have to use your imagination. It's not like watching a film where they show you the setting so you don't have to think about it for yourself.

Well, fellow literature intolerants, I'm here to help with a couple of creations that might take the hell out of Othello.

Google Lit Trips uses Google Earth to map out and bring to life a whole host of literary journeys.



Littourati does a similar thing with Google Maps (though seems to be pretty Kerouac-obsessed).



I'd like to see them map Jules Verne's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'.

Cook-along-a-YouTube

We all like to cheat a bit when we have friends over for dinner. You know, like buying ready made meals from the store, but hiding the packing before your guests arrive. Everyone does it. A new TV show started in the UK on Friday night, and it will expose our laziness. It's called Cookalong with Gordon.



In case you don't know, Gordon Ramsay is a huge celebrity in the UK... he's the world's top paid chef, has loads of posh restaurants, TV shows, books and all manner of other cash-cowery in his name.

The show invites you to video yourself cooking along with Gordon, then uploading it to a special YouTube channel. The best ones are shown on the show the following week.



And there's a Cookalong Google Map too:



Those chefs' hats look a bit sinister to me.

Who lives in a house like this?

Here's a piece of Google-based art from a few years back.



Googlehouse animates images into a house, which consists of rooms that are based on a relevant keyword search in Google Images.

What?

Oh shut up and just look at it here.

It's hard enough to get teenage boys to leave their bedroom as it is, but imagine if it were decorated like the sex room?

Please wash your hands after reading

For most posts on this blog, I tend to reference tools that are more funny than functional. But hey - if something is both, then high fives all round.

There's nothing funny about being absolutely busting for a leak, with no apparent hope of lavatorial relief for miles (well, it's funny if it happens to someone else).

Relief is at hand, if you'll pardon the double pun, because there's a new Google Maps based tool that shows the location (and rating) of hundreds of thousands of public toilets. Particularly gloriously thank-you-so-much-you've-saved-my-life helpful on a mobile phone. I can hear the universal chorus of relieved unzipping and 'aaahhhs' as a I type.

Toilets are naturally funny, so it's great that the creators have stayed on-brand by calling it Sit Or Squat.

Bob The Browser

The 'Human Browser' art project has been going for a few years now, and was recently featured at the Biennale of Sydney, 2008.

It's a series of live performances, with an actor playing the role of a web browser, taking a live feed based on a Google hack.

Here's the artist's description of it:

As the world-system reaches its limitations (depletion of natural resources, expected end of low-cost labour, the end of the ideology of liberalism, the fading of desire, etc.), capitalism uses the irony of history to try to relaunch its paradoxical machinery by pushing back its internal limits: freedom of speech is revealed to be the prerequisite for the scientific colonization of intimacy; global terrorism and reality TV feed a spectacle regulated by the panoptical enslavement mechanism of the blogosphere; "Irational Behaviour" that was for long seen as the limit of any economical theory becomes the new field for the externalisation of advertising costs.  Human Browser, the perpetual dandy, embodies this 'Irational Behaviour''.

I tried to make sense of this at Google Translate, but unfortunately they don't yet have a setting for the language of Art Wank.

For gramaphone grandads

I know it's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people bought music in things called 'shops'. Music took on a physical form (rather than the melodiously magical string of 1s and 0s we know and love today). The discs that the black and white music came on were wrapped in albums with images on the cover.

The Word magazine has created a Google Maps mashup showing where classic album cover photos were shot.



The cover for the Specials' album Specials was shot in Coventry. The least special place you'll ever go, or be sent to.

Google Gallery

Valery Grancher is a French artist who has painted a series of Google paintings called 'Google Paintings'.  Not very artistic with the naming there, Valery.

The concept is described as:

'the global speed of the internet is challenged with the slowness of painting tradition'.

He could have saved himself months, if only he'd looked down at his keyboard.  Then his concept could have been:

'the slowness of painting tradition is challenged by the existence of the 'print screen' key'.

Bush Votes for The Google

Corbijn Collection

Anton Corbijn has directed loads of music promos over the years, for great artists from Depeche Mode to The Killers to Johnny Cash. He's also worked with Coldplay. Well, we all have to mouths to feed I suppose.

Well, now some bloke called Soren Johannessen (presumably Italian) has created a Google Maps mashup (here) that has most of those videos geotagged. Well worth a play.

I see he's also done a Bryan Adams video called 'Do I Have To Say The Words?' I think you can insert your own joke here.

Higher purpose

I started to write out a description for something, then halfway through thought, 'why am I bothering? Someone else has already done it.' Besides - it was too hard. And there was no comedy in it.

So instead I'll just post the link to it in The Guardian.

And I'll show a picture too, because even I'm not too lazy to do that:

Homepagerotica

Scientists have shown that the internet was invented for porn, as well as to prove that people have too much time on their hands. Not that those two are unrelated.

Anyway, here's an example of the latter, and very very definitely not the former. Unless Google logos get your naughty bits tingling.

If this is what passes for American college humour these days, then I'm rather glad that I'm British and old.

Around The World in 80 Seconds

Jonathan Ahlbrand is an educational consultant with a focus on technology.  He has recreated the first ever solo circumnavigation of the globe (by Joshua Slocum).  Only this couch-loving lazy-arse has done it in Google Earth, rather than a boat.  No wonder we have an obesity crisis.

Not In My Book

Books.  Let's be honest, people only buy them for one reason... to put on shelves at home to impress dates.  Why else would we keep them after we've read them?  For wall insulation? Please.

Anyway, I've just remembered this book from ages ago, and it doesn't even perform that function:

The author Charles Cumming created a story called 21 Steps which unfolds as you go from place to place around the world on an interactive Google Map.

I beg of you, please don't let this be the end of real books for our shelves.  What?  Like I can rely on my looks?

Dubya redub

Forget about laughing at Sarah Palin for the moment, there are still a few pips of comedy to be squeezed out of George W. Bush's lemons. 

Oliver Stone is actively inviting people to make YouTube mash-ups of his new new film 'W.' Even the tools have been provided.  Here's the link.

Let's face it, people were going to do it anyway, so it seems like a smart move for Mr Stone to get in there first.

It's hard to get funnier than the actual George Bush, but this could get close.

The Googling

The Vacationeers are a comedy group, who earlier this year made this:

It got a lot of hits, so since then they have created a whole web series called The Googling, which can be found at their YouTube channel here.

Sunroof

A new service called Roofray uses Google Earth to let you work out how much solar energy your house could capture, via panels on your roof (and so how much you could save on energy bills):

The energy you capture   =   your roof size   x  hours of sunshine in your location.

I don't really need this service, because I live in London, and 

anything   x   zero   =   zero

Outside the box thinking

I'm not sure how I feel about doing an ad for an ad for a product, but here's something pretty cool.  Besides, this whole blog is one huge set of ads for Google products, so I should get over myself.

Nice creative use of YouTube:

This post was brought to you by YouTube (a Google product, owned by Google).

YouTube gamefoolery

To play the Grand Theft Auto and FIFA-type games these days, you need to have genetically modified hands with eighteen fingers.  At least.  And then you need to be one of those lucky people with a few extra eyeballs, to keep track of everything that's happening on-screen.

Now, in the first interactive YouTube game, that gameplay complexity has been pushed to a whole new level of rock-hardness. Have a go, but be warned. You're unlikely to be ready or to cope.  Your fingers are going to bleed with the speed that you need:

(you may need to double-click to play it, within YouTube)

Actually, it's quite charming really.  If that doesn't sound too patronising.  Do you know what patronising means?

Anyway, here's a significantly more surreal interactive YouTube game, that's closer in spirit to the breakthrough classic Dragon's Lair that I wasted all my pocket money on back in 1927.

Google Maps moves in mysterious ways

A rather contrasting use of Google Maps here, versus the last post. But I'm confused.  As a devoutly atheist liberal Obama supporter, what do you think - should I support a Pray For Sarah Palin initiative?    

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  Actually, yes I do.  Sniff.

Pot plot

If you're in the police, then please stop reading now.

OK, good.  That should do it.  I would hate to be the one to spoil the fun for thousands of college kids.

Potlocator uses Google maps to show you where you can get marijuana.  

How did these dudes stay focused enough to actually make this?

In no way do I condone this appalling atrocity, or the taking of any illegal drugs whatsoever.  On a completely unrelated matter, I need to go now because I'm really hungry.

Foreign places suck

We all love to splurge 52 weeks of hardly earned cash to spend 2 weeks a year getting mugged, skin cancer and diarrhoea.   Beats working, right? 

Well, just in case you're mad enough not to want all that, there's help at hand.

Mike Moran has used Google Maps to create a World Atlas of Disappointing Holidays.

He has also written a book called Sod Abroad.

They say that planning a holiday is half the fun.  Well, why not plan two holidays and go on neither of them?  You'll get one full holiday-worth of fun, and save yourself all the cash.  

Giant hide and seek

Growing up in Britain, and being a million years old, I never really had the presumably hilarious and endless fun offered by 'Where's Waldo'.  We had to make do with throwing stones, because even sticks weren't invented back then.

Anyway, here's a big new twist on the wonderful world of Waldo.

Melanie Coles is a web designer who 'hid' a huge painting of Waldo on a rooftop somewhere in Vancouver (and later, another one in San Francisco), to be found on Google Earth.

 

Attention all school night boozers

Let's say you were out drinking one night, reached a very advanced state of refreshment, rolled home at 4am, then got up three hours later to go to work. Chances are you'll be craving a bit of glorious shut eye on the train.

Well, someone has created a pretty cool iPhone app to help, using Google Maps.

It's called iNap.

You plot your destination on Google Maps, and the iPhone will use GPS to sound the alarm and rouse you from your slumber, just before you get there. Sure, you'll still need to drink four Red Bulls and grab naps in the toilet cubicle throughout the day, but at least you won't have your pay docked for being late.

Hi-res walkabout

Mapjack uses Google Maps and borrows just ever so slightly massively heavily from Street View.  Only, this is Street View after laser eye surgery... the image quality is amazing.  Only a few places have been snapped so far, but it is well worth clicking here and taking a stroll over The Golden Gate bridge.  

Eggs not so easy

Good morning sir, how would you like your eggs?

Oh, about 90 feet wide and served on concrete, please. 

Yum.

Henk Hofstra is a Dutch artist who likes to use a fairly big canvas.  So big, in fact, that he creates it to be best viewed on Google Earth.

Surreality show

You thought Google art was when leprechauns are drawn into the logo on St Patrick's Day, right?  Well, yes, but in addition, Jeremiah Palecek is an artist who has used Google stuff quite a bit to inspire his work.

Last year he created a gallery of images by using a Czech to English dictionary, Google Images and dice.  Yeah, like we haven't all seen that a million times.

More recently he has created two YouTube-centric projects.  In the first, he creates pop surrealism paintings of famous YouTube moments.  Like the not-at-all-to-be-laughed-at Tom Cruise Scientology video:

Or the splurgetastic: Coke-mentos thing:

Secondly, he has a YouTube channel (called Pothead Pundit) where he invites people to tell him what to paint.  Here are some of the results:

We like him on this blog.  He can come again.

Ethical cleansing

Never let it be said that rich people don't give back to their communities.

In a tale that warms the cockles of the heart, people swimming in cash are now opening up their swimming pools to the great unwashed.  Read it and weep, here.

It's good work you do, people, it's good work you do.

Well, there's good news, and there's good news

News isn't news unless it's miserable.

Economic meltdown, climate disaster, genocide and global poverty.  THAT's what we want from our news.  Nobody wants to hear uplifting chronicles of kaleidoscopic optimism.  The Pollyannas of this grisly world are mere fictional confection.

No news is good news, right?  Wrong, according to Google News (well, a reskin from Fugue).

Earth Sandwich, Anyone?

This is from a few years ago, but it's a funny enough use of Google Earth to deserve another airing.

What's the biggest sandwich on planet earth?  Why a planet earth sandwich, of course.  Pieces of bread laid down at opposite ends of the planet.  Here's the zefrank movie.

And here's the Google Earth app to find the polar opposite of where you are right now.

This reminds me of the wonderfully ludicrously hilariously pointless app that lets you find out where you would pass through if you walked in a straight line around the world.  Useful for crows.

Disneyworld For People Haters

It's great that people are starting to render 3D buildings within Google Earth (e.g. with Sketch Up).  Great possibilities.

There are various YouTube clips of the Disneyworld world that Disney have created.  I like this version best because it has the 'It's A Small World Music' in French, for some reason.  Makes it a bit weirder. Shame there's no virtual Donald Canard or Mickey Souris.

What's great about this is that when I have kids, I can just sit them in front of this instead of taking them to Florida, and spend the money I save on drugs and hookers.

Baby Retard Poodle

Funny:

http://www.searchenginerapbattle.com/

Treadmill 2.0

OK so this is a post about running naked through the streets of Tokyo.  Come on, we've all been there.  Well now you can do it with fewer people pointing at you and laughing, with you insisting that it's really cold.

This is a mashup between Google Street View and the Wii Fit, that allows you to run round a city from the comfort of your own boudoir:

Pretty crude at this stage, but it could be the start of something amazing.  How about linking a real bike up to the Tour de France Google Maps app:

That way you wouldn't have to be seen in public wearing lycra.

Good Chemistry

In case you didn't catch it, here's the Chemical Brothers' Midnight Madness Google Earth video.  They got their fans to upload video clips and photos, geo-tagged on Google Earth, and themed around 'midnight madness'.  

So the fans created the band's video.  Pretty innovative.  Or lazy.

Google Omniscience

Oddly interesting:

http://www.whatgoogleknows.com/index.html

But do you think Google knows what whatgoogleknows knows about what Google knows?  Who knows?

Google Earth Got Game

You're setting yourself up for a fall by prefacing something with 'here's a pretty cool thing'.  But what the hell.

Here's a pretty cool thing.  It's a Google Earth/Sony Playstation mashup.

Yes, I know, this came out a few weeks ago, but I'm populating this blog from scratch, and I love this thing too much to leave it out.  This is just the start.  I want to see a London version where the whole crowd just stop at the nearest pub.