Eclipses
Collaboration with Marina Camargo
- Eclipses is a web art work that grabs maps from Google Maps and uses them to create images, mixing the maps together.
- This is the second version of Eclipses. The first one, developed in 2007, was Flash-based and used the Google Maps Flash API, now deprecated. The work was rebuilt between 2015 and 2016, using the Google Maps JavaScript API.
- We made made three editions of Eclipses. To create the first one, we listed the streets that were inside the area occupied by Percursos (Paths) art project, realized in September, 2007, in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
In the second version of Eclipses, we focused on the streets surrounding the Funarte (National Foundation for the Arts) space in São Paulo, where, in 2011, was presented the exhibition Lugares/Representações (Places/Representations). - Finally, in the third one, we researched the streets of Recife around Torre Malakoff, an old astronomic observatory where the exhibition A cidade, as ruínas e depois (The city, the ruins and the aftermath) took place in 2016.
- For each selected street, we searched for the occurrences of streets with the same name in other brazilian cities, using Google Maps. We paid attention to search for the same kind of street: if, in São Paulo, there is “Angélica Avenue”, we typed “angélica avenue” in GoogleMaps; we ignored “angélica street”, “angélica square” and so on.
- The work begins with the names of three cities where Eclipses has been presented. After a city is selected, a list of streets of this is presented. The viewer has to choose some street to continue. When a street is chosen, Eclipses shows the map of each occurrence of the street, one after another.
- Each map is centered at the street with the name chosen by the viewer.
- After all the maps are shown, Eclipses creates an image, mixing all the maps, overlapping all the occurrences of the streets with the chosen name in Brazil. This image is generated by the software, in real time.