Playing in cyberspace: the social performative on Heidelberg Street

Abstract

The Heidelberg Project is an outdoor art installation in Detroit, MI, which is frequently experienced through Google Street View, offering media and spatial scholars a fascinating text in which to explore the evolution of our experience of place in the face of new technologies. The author argues that the virtual space of Heidelberg Street articulates a transgressive rhetoric for virtual tourists through appropriation, juxtaposition, play with postmodern aesthetic codes, and ephemerality. These elements may help to disrupt the spatial politics which sustain economic, social, and racial stereotypes about the city of Detroit and encourage visitors to engage other places in similar ways. To further this argument, the author theorizes and conducts what she terms a virtual spatial study. This methodology introduces a less stable notion of presence and invites attention to a virtual analysis of emplaced aesthetics. Finally, this analysis offers scholars a useful perspective on how the slippage between materiality and virtuality embedded within new technologies frames our experience of reality, transgression, and social change.