Artist brings war to peaceful corner of the internet

I found this fantastic work, ‘Shadows From Another Place’ by Paula Levine on Rhizome.org. Grounded in current global politics and geography, it uses the ephemeral space of the internet to propose a new approach to cartography through the amalgamation of the local and the foreign.

Levine has overlaid a map of San Francisco onto one of Baghdad, showing civilian and military sites related to the first U.S. attack on Baghdad in 2003 superimposed onto San Francisco geography. Literally bringing the war home, Levine used GPS technology to digitally relocate the Baghdad bomb sites within San Francisco. Each bomb site on the hybrid map is represented by a photograph of the corresponding location in San Francisco, and a soundtrack on the website plays a looped recording of the explosions in the March 2003 attack. Sounds of shattering glass make the images of the sunny, peaceful streets of San Francisco seem surreal.

I can imagine that this work would have a severely disquieting effect on a resident of San Francisco; however for an Aucklander, there is simply the by-now-familiar feeling that it’s all foreign from here anyway. Levine’s work proposes the integration of a local sensibility into humanity’s global dealings, but it also creates an incoherent non-place where time and geography cease to make sense. The serenity of the photographs of San Francisco juxtaposed with the violence of the events in Baghdad, through the distancing of the internet seem to suggest that the viewer is somehow looking back in time, at representations of a single locality before and after a traumatically violent event.