Both playful and disquieting, Local Guide by Grant x Wilkes interrogates the reliability of online knowledge in an era defined by surveillance capitalism — where data is mined, images are automated, and trust itself becomes a traded commodity.
Through a series of fabricated suburban landmarks covertly entered into Google Maps, the artists mischievously adopt the guise of everyday users who shape our digital environments. The project exposes the fragility of the mapped world and the seductive ease with which we accept what we see online.
We exchange privacy for convenience, feeding content to platforms that, in turn, train the very systems that observe us. Local Guide translates the immaterial traces of these digital interactions into tactile artworks, spanning digital photography, painting, 3D photogrammetry, and experimental analogue photographic techniques.
The result is an exhibition that playfully dismantles our faith in the image and the map — an irreverent game of trickery against the algorithms that harvest our attention and reshape our perception of reality.
