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Courtesy of Serpentine Gallery

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Google Art Project at
Serpentine Gallery

June 18 2012
8:14 PM

The recent collaboration between the Serpentine Gallery and the Google Art Project to provide online visual documentation of the eleven Pavilion commissions and the parallel event programs proposes a solution to the problem of access and documentation of architectural commissions and durational events. Each Pavilion is represented by brief descriptions of the architectural concept and interior and exterior shots. The more recent Pavilions also include descriptions and images of the Marathons, the two day, non-stop live presentations by various artists, writers, scholars, musicians, designers and scientists curated yearly by Serpentine co-head Hans Ulrich Obrist, and the Park Night events of talks and performances held within the Pavilion. Video extracts of the events, even as links to user-generated YouTube clips, would help center the viewer in the experience. Zooming in and out of the procession of images allows an often detailed close up of the architecture, but the lack of image captions or floor plans derail a understanding of the space. The effect is that of scrolling through a virtual hoarding, repeatedly figuring out how to decipher two-dimensional images as three-dimensional space. (Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja)