With Google Maps as his canvas and a little red wagon filled with 99 phones as his medium, artist Simon Wreckert created a virtual traffic jam on the streets of Berlin.
While Wreckert walked up and down the street for a couple of hours, Google Maps reflected 99 cars moving alongside him because he had rented the phones and opened the maps application on all of them. The stunt was to make a point about how much space cars take up and the data we trust to reflect experience.
“By transporting the smartphones in the street I’m able to generate virtual traffic which will navigate cars on another route,” Wreckert told Motherboard. “Ironically that can generate a real traffic jam somewhere else in the city.”
The virtual traffic jam could lead to real congestion elsewhere in the city, if other map app users see the crowded route and divert their own. “My subjective feeling was that even this short time was already enough to change the traffic in the street,” he said.
