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.
