I recently found Remap Berlin — its an art installation that had been launched for the first time in Second Life, at the Odyssey art+performance simulator in July 2009 and at the exhibition hall “Altes Museum” in the virtual world Twinity, March 2010 . It’s an experiment in layering the virtual onto the real.   It’s so often that I only think the other way around. I loved working on the Twinity project for just this reason. Marco Cadioli here has mapped Twinity snapshots onto google maps and then massed it up with other aggregated photos from Panoramio. In his words…

“Remap Berlin” spreads a thin geographical virus in Google Earth and deals with different levels of reality. The project introduces a series of b&w photographs shot in Twinity, a mirror world that reproduces a realistic 3D replica of Berlin. The photos shot in Twinity, are then geo-localized in Google maps, re-mapped from virtual to real and positioned in the exact point where they have been shot in the mirror world. Once uploaded in the photo sharing community Panoramio, the pictures are mixed up with other ones shot in the same geographical point from real life users. Many of these pictures have been selected by Google and can now be found as “Popular photos in Google Earth”: his became a little geographical virus, parts of our memories of the real world. The photographs are cityscapes, shot by Marco Manray roaming around the still empty streets of Berlin in the beta version”

Check out the video:

Remap Berlin from Marco Cadioli on Vimeo.

Anita