Check out this thought-provoking project locating Facebook interactions in the real world

It’s weird that so much of our lives are lived online, while they’re actually, physically lived in the real world, seated behind a desk or walking around on our phones.

That’s the idea Brooklyn technologist Rebecca Ricks, a student at NYU’s ITP program, takes on with her interesting new work, Logged In From:.

“I’m interested in exploring the concept of ‘digital dualism’ — the habit of viewing the online and offline as largely distinct,” Ricks wrote on her website. “We are actively constructing our identities whether behind a screen or in person.”

A strange project in which I inserted my Facebook metadata into the physical landscape where each activity occurred. #Unity #GoogleMaps pic.twitter.com/HBvgEvCqS5

— Becca Ricks (@baricks) March 25, 2017

In the project, Ricks tracks down the metadata of her major interactions with Facebook: changing profile pictures, creating new passwords, etc. She got the exact location where she was and wrote a program that would take those coordinates, find them on Google Maps street view, and create a GIF of the landscape of where she was.

“I wanted to try re-inserting the digital world into the physical world,” Ricks explained. “I decided to locate specific actions I took on Facebook within a physical geography and landscape.”

The results are neat. The GIFs evoke a realization that reality is complicated and that, for whatever exists in the ephemeral online space, we are still people living in places.