Wellington Cançado Federal University of Minais Gerais, Brazil inhame@hotmail.com Renata Marquez Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil renamarquez@gmail.com This film is accompanied by an essay, Myopia Index @ http://www.surveillance-and-society.orgGlobal Safari (Powered by Google) If The Eames’ Powers of Ten was a visual fable about scientific optimism and the consequences of changes in scale, Google Earth is an immersive demo on the spreading of technology and the exponential dismantling of the notion of scale in the era of googols. And if 1024 meters, equivalent to a million light-years, was enough, according to the Eames’ film, to move us vertically onto the limits of the galaxy into the unknown, what will be the possibilities of exploration of a world turbined at 10100? What are the limits of a global safari powered by Google? Testing these limits, we experienced Google Earth and drew a script for a cinema-safari made exclusively by the movement of our navigation. Rather than fixing coordinates and sites, we focused on the movement, on the dynamism of the device in order to create a narrative in several cities such as Chicago, Belo Horizonte, Dubai, Mexico City, Istanbul, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, London and Tokyo. Round the World in 12 minutes! The route departs from the exact location of the Eames’ picnic in Chicago: a park on the banks of the lake that three decades ago was nothing more than grass and is now an accumulation of landscape design, infrastructure of all types and generic architectures. From there, we make an expedition moving horizontally, parallel to the surface of the globe, and through the dive of a hybrid vertical eye – our natural eye superimposed on the mechanic eye of the satellite – in a vertical distance of 10 to 10 meters. Powers of ten: powered by Google. During the expedition, we noticed that Tokyo is one of the cities where people can be perceived performing daily activities, and we were surprised at a perfect sunshine forming perfect shadows of those people. As during a walk, we are able to see the frozen records of the frailty of human acts in public spaces in Tokyo. We meet couples, parents and children, sportsmen, travelers, cyclists, solitary Japanese and a group having a picnic. We can also understand the film Global Safari (Powered by Google) as a kinetic mapping that, like the pre-modern-maps, includes in its intertextuality obscure zones, unknown and ignored areas, transposed to the present myopic space of Google Earth. This kind of mapping refers to the notion of “performative mapping” proposed by Denis Cosgrove and Luciana Martins to designate and introduce the relational thinking in place of the stable or universal. “By this term, we refer to the ways in which genius loci, the capacity of particular places to communicate intense and unique meaning across space and time, is actively made and remade.” Amplifying the ability of communication of a specific place beyond the conventional maps means adding present but invisible information to the territory. A nomadic narrative, which structures the notion of place not spacially but intertextuality through a route devoid of innocence but full of surprises.
