Not an update of the current nasty geopolitical situation, but something from The Google CityBlock Project [found via ChrisDodo’s del.icio.us]
This aims to produce a visual search of the urban environment. In one of their presentations they have an estimate of how long it would take to acquire images of the US’s entire commercial streetscape:
- “~2.4 million miles of paved road in the U.S.
- We estimate that about ~1% are commercial
- With a high speed camera (~250 fps), we can capture driving at about 10 mph
- It would take approximately 100 days worth of driving time to capture the entire commercial U.S.
- Spread among 20 vehicles and allowing 6 hours of capture time per day, it would require approximately 20 days of acquisition”
So, very impressive in capturing images of the city; but what about the Image Of The City that we actually perceive? Schyuler and Rich’s excellent tutorial at EtCon made this distinction plain.
However I guess – as ever with Google – worth keeping a close eye on.
Petafloptimism 
RealStreets have been doing a similar thing in Brighton, with mad artistic tangents. They’ve got a couple of giant prints up behind the tills in Habitat and M&S.
Oh, did my hyperlink get eaten?
http://www.realstreets.info/rspreview_1s
t_page/rspreview_1st_page.html
Ideas about how we perceive, imagine and conceptualise the geography of urban areas are fascinating me at the moment. The reason is probably Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, which is a travelogue of a walk around the M25, with reference to numerous aspects of psychogeography, a theme that runs through his work. Great interview here: http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/147_iainsinclair.shtml
Hi Matt –
The Roadworks crew down in New Zealand have been doing these “Street Scroll” interactive panoramas for a while now as well :
http://www.streetscroll.com
Enjoy!
Olli
They did this in Madrid a few years ago, a photo every 10 meters in every direction:
http://fotos.qdq.com/x/home_madrid.htm
-Russ