One theme of 2005 appears to be online mapping, something I’m very into. Google’s maps product arrived on the scene with amazing operability incorporating a clever tiling scheme to quickly render both traditional and satellite images with anchors at numerous levels of zoom and with dragability. And Google have included an API that even I can work out. MSN Virtual Earth is launching their mapping scheme tomorrow, I hope it’s more than a copy of Google’s implementation and I guess we’ll have to wait for MS’s blogger to tell us it’s, err, not.

IMHO, artist Seyed Alavi one-upped both aforementioned mappers with his public installation of “flying carpet” at the Sacramento airport. Alivi’s project consists of an aerial view of the Sacramento River woven into a carpet, one you can experience from eye-level above. This is fun stuff, like Google’s magic only you smile at this one without the intermediation of a browser.

Alavi’s carpet is like a fly-through in a video game, he renders the magic in bits of nylon woven into carpet paving the passageway connecting the terminal and car park.

photo credit: Seyed Alavi

A bridge is a connection between two destinations; it is not a destination in and of itself; it is neither here, nor there. In this way it is similar to an airplane, or a river connecting one place to another; here to there; a moment of flight frozen in mid air; a flowing river that takes us along with its current to another destination. In this way, the piece also creates a koanic relationship between a river and a bridge, since their ordinary position have been turned around, and it is now the river that is on/above the bridge.