Ingrid Kristensen Bjørnaali

Oslo National Academy of Arts

Con Fusion

video 02:54

The video “Con Fusion” shows the landscape of Lofoten, Norway from three points of view; Google Maps’ Street view function, based on 360 degrees photographies taken from the top of a car, Google Earth’s animations of the earth based on satellite imagery, and my own video footage from travelling in the area. Throughout the video, the rhythmic sonar sound of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit earth, is continuously kept. The three different visual inputs are shifting rapidly according to the beat, inspired by the “flicker films” of the 1970s, in an attempt to connect or merge the physical experience from my travels there with the more objective data perception of the place. The sonar sound, used in technology to navigate or measure landscape, works as a reminder of the physical distance between the place we are looking at onscreen, to the signal sent into outer space and back again, and the actual geographical place, as well as the distance in time from when Sputnik 1 was sent out in 1957, to the satellite technology of 2019. However advanced it may be today, there are still a lot of glitches, appearing as grid shaped holes in mountains and sudden textural divisions in the landscape, which create non-places and distortions of an otherwise realistic map.