May 27

Mapping advertising, Ad-busting, and the future of interfaces

Filed Under ideas, web 

(By Nicola Bozzi)

Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb. As a consequence, the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the graphic ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity: when all information is common, to filter, choose, and even discard it, is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information itself. So, the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts over the internet becomes the world wide web’s most relevant content.

Maps and geo-referenced meta-data are the pulp of the new information aesthetics: with Google Maps, the most famous map-based online service, we’re able to leaf through different layers of interpretation – map, terrain, satellite, traffic, photos, etc – each one projecting a different visual rendering on the same geographical structure.

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The emerging of geo-savvy tools for open development gives way to countless possibilities for combining data and maps (creating mementos for endangered buildings included), but it’s a fact advertising is one of the most relevant – proof be the fact that Google has just made AdSense embeddable into Google Maps.

Curiously, an interesting event involving both advertising and Google Maps happened some time ago in New York City. As the guys at Urban Prankster put it: “Tons of documentation is coming in from last month’s incredible New York Street Advertising Takeover, where hoards of artists and every day people came together to reclaim the streets by covering over 120 of New York’s illegal billboards with art.”
From Daniel Buren to Ad-Busters (including this great New Museum campaign), advertising has been one of art’s favorite targets for a while, so the project (made ecception, maybe, for its networked, collective actualization) is no headline material for art magazines. However, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of the Public Ad Campaign-managed project is rather the online mapping of the whole action.

Geo-referencing illegal ads in physical space is particularily ironic, since the first thing to be geo-aware on the internet – apart from your browser’s language settings – are commercial banners. They’re the ones knowing where we’re from, to better seduce us, and for once it’s our turn to know where they live. Mapping real abusive advertising landmarks is a statement against the systematic parcelling out of space happening in our cities as well as in the world wide web, both more and more divided into consuming targets.

This gets us back to interfaces, the political intersection of public service and corporate needs. Let’s make a few examples: on one hand, the intertwining of the “physical sphere” with the “internet sphere” (it sounds stupid to me to talk about “real” and “virtual” nowadays) is rendered SIM City-style on YouCity, which the Public Ad Campaign guys optimistically call the “new generation” of Google Maps, but in other places there is a little less irony and, probably, a little more income. A sexier feel is instead provided by UpNext, a 3D interface to cruise New York City from your iPhone, pointing its focus more on sharing than advertising. But we could go on and on.

I don’t know to what extent the spectacular – and rather processor-consuming – interfaces multiplicating on the web (from Google Earth to the bulky Second Life) will get to envelope the usability and the necessary functionalities to make them mini-internets on their own (which was Facebook’s luck, for example), but, despite light and mostly textual websites are ruling the internet right now, we shouldn’t forget the impalpable omniscience of companies like Google on keywords and statistics might be by far more exclusive and invasive in their satellites and in their 360-degree picture-taking cars, cruising right under our window.

To shop accurately is nice and all, but to know everything carries a weight not everybody wants to take (or wants you to take) and, although Google Maps and similar services, as far as geo-specific advertising, are accepted as valuable tools, when mapping goes street-level people might get mad (which happened in the UK and Greece).
Both mapping and advertising are growing more pervasive and precise, pinpointing us and our consuming habits. We’ll see how far it will get. And let’s hope, whatever it will be like in the future, that we’ll always have the right to choose wheter to buy or not, if not to close the shades to the camera’s eye.

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