Artists like, Jon Rafman or Paolo Cirio, who work primarily with Google Street View, have created images that are evocative and disturbing, often blurring the line of legal privacy issues. While capturing the individuals who fill the streets, alleys, and lawns of the world is captivating, these artists have drawn on the public and an additional tool to conceptualize the public sphere. Since 2007, the launch of the panoramic technology featured on Google Maps and Google Earth, has become an eccentric and often easy way to view places one may never go or places one desires to see.
In June 2014, Fischer began to riffle through music reviews of underground musicians and discovered band addresses from demo tapes in the fanzine Maximum Rocknroll, a publication which was a punk hub for music reviews. The conception of his project, Hardcore Architecture, begins here. Essentially, young underground musicians would mail in demo tapes to MRR through the U.S. postal service and the tape would be reviewed and published. Fischer collected the addresses of the musicians and began to plug them into Google Maps Street View for a closer look of where the underground music scene was rooted. “I liked seeing where the bands I listened to came from.”
The exhibition, open until August 29th, features memorabilia that is encased in a display box, similar to a merch table, and includes band t-shirts, cassette tapes and photography from the bands Cryptic Slaughter and the The Dead Kennedys. Fischer says, “I’ve collected and saved things since childhood, and I definitely have a pretty hefty collection of records and ‘zines,” which have contributed to the physical exhibition in the gallery space. Hanging in the back left of the space, adjacent to the display box, is a correspondence between bassist Rob Nicholson and Marc Fischer. “Marc, what’s up?” begins the scratched note beneath a flyer that reads “Cryptic Slaughter Wants You”—an accompanying cartoon of Uncle Sam centers the piece for anti-establishment humor. To the right of the flyer is an address located in Santa Monica California—the urge to type the name into Google Maps suddenly becomes suspiciously evident.
