Imaging Beijing

"John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty-five years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. His work seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place.

Imaging Beijing is the latest installment of Imaging Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. . . .

When a denizen of Second Life first arrives at Imaging Beijing, he, she or it can walk over a satellite image of central Beijing where they will find a networks of nodes constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoramic photographs texture mapped to the interior. The avatar can walk to the center of one of these nodes and use a first person perspective to view the image, giving the user the sensation of being immersed in the location.

Streaming audio is localized to individual nodes providing narrative content for the scene. This content includes stories of formative memory told by Peter Guo, a resident of Beijing, who appear in the images. The work is projected nine by twelve feet in a darkened space with a pedestal and a mouse placed in the center of the installation enabling the audience to interact with it. A web-cam captures live video of the user and transmits it to the head of an exhibition avatar. Dated links in the virtual space launch a browser, which opens a web journal of the Imaging Beijing field research." -- from Turbulence