Following the trajectory established by photography, film and video have become our most relied upon methods for documenting the visible world, from TV news to home videos. Of course, the reliance on photographic truth--which is really just an index of visible light on a reactive surface--is now being displaced by more abstract and mathematical forms of depicting 'reality,' like global positioning systems. And just as photographic reality was toyed with from the early days of the medium--see Hippolyte Bayard's 1840 photo of his own 'death,' for example--contemporary artists are challenging the new truth tools. 'Surreal Scania,' a new work by the Swedish team of Anders Weberg and Robert Willim, fuses a series of lush and seductive video montages with geocoded data to examine 'how aura and attraction are connected to different places.' All of the videos are available for download, as are corresponding sets of data that can be used to 'locate' the video's geography in 'real' space and on Google Earth. For those with portable video players, you can take a clip with you and compare it to the 'real' N 55 37.501/E 013 02.215. - Ryan Griffis
