Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, HD video, 63 min 20 sec, 2015.
"It’s all façade here. That’s what intrigues me about the city of Los Angeles, the façadeness of it all."
Ed Ruscha
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
John F. Kennedy
The Internet and social media have given viewers access to information, people, and places like never before allowing for their mythologies to be instantly explored, rewritten, or revised. The distinctions between simulated and lived experience, public and private information, and real and staged images are becoming more difficult to grasp. Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear is a video that explores these facets of our visual culture. The video was made using Google Maps Street View to simulate a drive around Beverly Hills and give a documentary-style tour of celebrity homes. In an attempt to locate truths and dispel myths, homes are closely examined by zooming in through fences and into windows. While certain things are evident such as street address numbers, mailboxes, and security cameras, others are inaccessible. Google's own blurring of their imagery includes license plates, pedestrians’ faces, and an entire house. Using star maps as references, text was added to "correctly" and "incorrectly" identify homeowners. Wavering between revelation and concealment, truth and fiction, realism and abstraction, and real and staged images, the video reveals the machinations of myth in our digital age and further extends the mythologies of celebrities, their homes, and Beverly Hills.
Ed Ruscha
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
John F. Kennedy
The Internet and social media have given viewers access to information, people, and places like never before allowing for their mythologies to be instantly explored, rewritten, or revised. The distinctions between simulated and lived experience, public and private information, and real and staged images are becoming more difficult to grasp. Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear is a video that explores these facets of our visual culture. The video was made using Google Maps Street View to simulate a drive around Beverly Hills and give a documentary-style tour of celebrity homes. In an attempt to locate truths and dispel myths, homes are closely examined by zooming in through fences and into windows. While certain things are evident such as street address numbers, mailboxes, and security cameras, others are inaccessible. Google's own blurring of their imagery includes license plates, pedestrians’ faces, and an entire house. Using star maps as references, text was added to "correctly" and "incorrectly" identify homeowners. Wavering between revelation and concealment, truth and fiction, realism and abstraction, and real and staged images, the video reveals the machinations of myth in our digital age and further extends the mythologies of celebrities, their homes, and Beverly Hills.