Making your mark

A couple of interesting things we found this week: Real Google Map markers (thanks ADA/LM); and the following call for participation.

QUERY in situ and online art project
http://www.query-online.net/

DATES:start for Application: August 20th, 2009

in situ project in Munich: September 12th, 2009

BACKGROUND: This project consists of two parts. Part 1. An installation in Public Space in Munich, Germany taking place in September 2009. This part is a prelude to the online project. Google Maps will be taken from the virtual into real space: big balloons, shaped like Google marks, floating above two churches in Munich (St. Anna -christian and St. Lukas - evangelic), visible day and night, with questionmarks/querys on them. Part 2. takes place in Internet and is meant as an open art project and discussion platform.

It's unlikely but would be great if both real-space manifestations found their way back into the virtual map.

On the QUERY website, we recommend going to the FAQs for a 90second summary of 5000 years of religious development and geographic expansion.

Lots

We thought we were being clever with last year's virtual homage to Ed Ruscha's Thirty Four Parking Lots, but it seems we're not the first, and others have even been to the trouble of finding the original sites (thanks J+MB).

Eric William Carrol has used Google Maps to create this flickr album, and now there is Pascual Sisto's automatic version, which rolls through all 34 locations live from google without you needed to so much as click a link. Nice.

Image: Eric William Carrol's Lot 32.

The Big Bang

Shared links on Facebook are proving a great source of material, far too much to keep up with given the pathetic output rate this blog has recently slumped to (hello, hello?). Today's gem (thanks JP) is a Guardian article on a 55m Manchester sculpture, which has had its difficult life brought short and is being dismantled due to safety concerns. Needless to say, the work still exists HERE in the parallel universe of google maps where it will remain until the next update. At least, that's the story we would have liked to have told but it seems the sculpture was never even built in google land. With little obvious connection beyond its large size, it seems through repeated comparisons that Big B was doomed to live in the shadow of Antony Gormley's ANGEL OF THE NORTH.

Image: A deactivated bang. Photograph by Mike Peel (http://www.mikepeel.net/).