Colors Spirits is a cross-media ecological project made in Norilsk city. It consists of the legend, 360 video, costumes, and a series of street performances uploaded on the Google Street Views service. In Norilsk, many colored buildings decorate it and help stand extremely long and hard winters. At the same time, the Nornickel factory creates a lot of pollution in the city and the surrounding tundra. Occasionally, one can see yellow smoke from the factory or even red rain. If you look at the surrounding tundra from the Sputnik maps you can see red, green, and yellow laces in several areas. Norilsk is a half-closed city, so it is hard to get in.
Moreover, there are no Google Street Views, so you can’t walk its streets even virtually. That's why I created my own Google Street Views and uploaded them to Google Maps, hacking this capitalistic service and making it an arena for art. To do this, I walked with a 360 camera on my head surrounded by four characters — spirits of colors.
Those characters were Norilsk citizens whom I asked to wear colored chemical protection clothes referencing bad ecology. Now, everybody who wants to see Norilsk on Google Street Views also sees those “spirits” — they are present in each picture. I also launched a website with the legend about colors spirits, on which I tell the fairy tale of the origin of white color and snow. some words from the website are hyperlinks that lead to pictures of the chemical lakes, or the news on ecological situations. Some also lead to my street views.
The project was presented in Norilsk as an exhibition performance. Google street views panoramic pictures are functioning in their usual way, you can walk around: 1, 2, 3 …
So far, these street views have gained about five million views. Strangers from different countries regularly write to me asking about weird characters they found on the map.
Discussions of panoramas and characters periodically appear: www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/1209268/Google-maps-street-view-russia-mysterious-beings-reddit-funny