2025中国台湾短片
Look up is a video installation that explores video as a portal for revisiting the homes I’ve lived in and the digital presence of those places. These include my childhood home, the first place I moved out to in college, my grandparents’ house, and my first home in Los Angeles.
The work consists of a ceiling video generated through the Google Maps API, alongside a live camera that detects and blurs viewers’ faces using Mediapipe, echoing the anonymized figures in Google Street View.
As viewers look upward, they see their own screen-based reflections doing the same. The way we look up at the moon, toward light, at places we long to enter, or at people we miss. It mirrors how I “look up” homes that no longer exist in my physical world but continue to live on in Google Maps, a public archive where personal memory and public data converge.
Google Street View is not a neutral space. It is a strategic simulation of reality composed of flattened and selected images rendered into a 3D illusion. My memories function in a similar way. Fragmented yet dimensional. Spattered across a map. I zoom in to find the place, the photo, the people. To remember is to locate. All are mapped.
In this archive, my grandmother and the blurred passersby are rendered equal, just one entry among many. We can always return to a cleaner, more permanent version of home, not through our own eyes, but through the lens of shared digital landscape.
- Wei-Fang CHANG