Artist Pushes Phones in a Cart and Causes Chaos on Google Maps

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - Artist Simon Weckert walked the streets of Berlin pulling a red cart behind him. Wherever he went, Google Maps showed a traffic jam.

People using Google Maps would see a thick red line indicating congestion on the road, even where there was no traffic at all. All 99 phones had Google Maps open, creating a virtual illusion that the streets were packed.

"By transporting smartphones through the streets, I was able to create virtual traffic that would cause cars to be rerouted," Weckert told Motherboard in a direct message on Twitter.

„Ironically, this can create a real traffic jam somewhere else in the city,” he added.

Weckert said he performed this stunt to make people think about the space we leave for cars in public life, and the data we rely on daily.

„Isn't it crazy how much city space cars take up, compared to how much we use them?“, he says. „This hack shows us what is possible with this technology and what we all rely on”.

To pull off this trick, Weckert  rented 99 smartphones, all Androids, and bought 99 SIM cards online. He said he spent an hour or two at each location, walking up and down the street, to generate a traffic jam.

„My subjective feeling was that even that short time was enough to change the traffic situation on the street“, he says.

„The map is not the territory but yet another version of reality“, says Weckert, quoting semanticist Alfred Korzybski, one of the greatest influences on William S. Burroughs.

„Data is always transmitted onto what it could represent. Images, lists, graphs and maps that represent that data are all interpretations, and there is nothing that could be called neutral data. Data is always collected for specific purposes, by a combination of people, technology, money, commerce and government“.

Maps are their own territory, their own objective reality, not just a reflection of the real world, but a branch of it. Weckert showed us all how data and maps can influence the world whose blueprint they are supposed to be.

„Maps have potential as levers of power“, he says.

„They replace political and military power in a way that represents state borders between territories, and they can repeat, legitimize and create differences between classes and social self-understanding“, he adds.

Data is not objective and maps themselves are not impartial. Pointing out how data can be hacked and manipulated is the same as pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

„In this process, the fact that we focus heavily on data and tend to consider it objective, unambivalent, and free from interpretation is highlighted“, says the artist.

„When we do that, blindness arises to the processes that this data generates and the assumption that numbers speak for themselves. Space for further interpretations is given by both data collection and the calculation process“.

„Therefore, data is seen as a world unto itself, and it is forgotten that numbers represent only a model of the real world“, says Weckert.