Performing Place in The Tempest

Abstract

In 2008, Google started rolling out its “Street View” technology in Google Maps and Google Earth, making it possible to navigate through various positions in an “immersive” photographic view of designated streets in the world. The possibilities of disembodied virtual travel enabled by such technology would seem to anticipate what some have described as our transhuman future; that is, when humans will transcend biology and consciousness will be absorbed into virtual environments, a moment that advocates for transhumanism have described optimistically as “the singularity.”1 Far from detaching us from our physical surroundings, however, the technology has raised more immediate concerns about the consequences of increasingly sophisticated imaging technologies for our lived places. These range from concerns voiced in the media about the violation of individual privacy and fears about the exploitation of global imaging by terrorists or foreign governments,2 to more pragmatic concerns about how such technologies support or mitigate our ethical commitments to the preservation of places of cultural heritage or the integrity of local ecology.3