Mario Santamaria took the audience through his subversive interventions in Google’s mapping platforms. Sharing his experience crawling through the walls and imaging underwater cables, the artist reflected on physical infrastructures and their relations to networked spaces via online interfaces. Finally, Santamaria showed his attempts at becoming a Google Street View Trusted Photographer, asking the viewers to help him getting officially recognised by the company.
Mario Santamaría works as visual artist and university professor. In recent years his work focuses on tactics to embody distribution protocols, performing actions such as physically travelling to his website by repeating the data path; going for beers around the city as a Google algorithm or founding a tour operator based on the physical infrastructure of the Internet. His work has been shown among others in: ZKM Karlsruhe, WKV Stuttgart, MACBA Barcelona, CENART Mexico, Arebyte London, Les Rencontres d'Arles and C/O Berlin.