Art installation and public works have become an enormously popular movement within public spaces, as graphic design and virtual spaces have become enormously popular online. A Berlin based artist by the name of Aram Bartholl has been marrying these two movements for several years now and he's recently announced his most ambitious project to date: recreating a video game map on a 1:1 scale.

     In 2010 Bartholl received enormous praise from the online community for his project named "Dead Drops". Dead Drops was a bit of a public art installation that was also an offline, person2person data sharing network. Bartholl ins erted 5 flash drives into public spaces; curbs, brick walls, steps, with the input jack jutting out. He then invited any and all (in the NYC area, where the Dead Drops were placed) to freely share information; PDFs, videos, pictures, and any other files, via these guerilla flashdrives. In this way he was able to merge the free, open, and community-drive culture of information sharing and innovation that has existed for years in the virtual world, with the concreteness of the virtual world. A friend of mine that participated in one of these Dead Drops described it as, "a crazy real life portal into the virtual world"; a USB drive sticking out of a step under the Brooklyn Bridge.

     In addition, Bartholl has created a number of other public installations that seek to bring the virtual world into the physical. He attempted to challenge many individuals conceptualizations of the cities they live in by creating public installations called "Map"s. He build enormous "location pins" modeled after Google Maps  location markers, and placed them where Google Maps indicated the center of several given cities were. Often they would appear in a patch of grass off a highway, or in some inconscpicuous corner of a park (though made far from inconscpicuous by these enormous "pins"). On his blog, Bartholl elaborates on his mission with this project. "In the city center series 'Map' is set up at the exact spot where Google Maps assumes to be the city center of the city, "relates Bartholl, "Transferred to physical space the map marker questions the relation of the digital information space to every day life public city space. The perception of the city is increasingly influenced by geolocation services."

    The most recent foray into blending the virtual and physical comes with Bartholl's announcement to recreate a full mapped level of the incredibly popular first-person shotter video game, Counter Strike. Bartholl has previously experimented with recreation of aspects of this game, making a public installation of the ubiquitous crates distributed around the video game's environment, and he even created a pair of "First-person shooter" glasses that mimics the experience of the video-game's HUD (Heads-Up Display). However, this time around he wants to recreate one of the most popular maps in the game, Dust, at a 1:1, real-life scale. According to Kotaku, the dimensions of the space will be roughly 377' by 360' and roughly 50' tall and will be both an art installation and a "museum". Bartholl says of his prospective installation it, "will represent a petrified moment of cultural game space heritage."

     An online copy of Bartholl's proposal to the Rhizome Commission for a grant in helping him build "de_Dust", so named because it is the sourcecode of the original game map from 1999, shows an intricate model of the space with screen shots from the actual video game for reference.

     Attempting to resolve the physical world with the virtual one is an important step in our cultural acknowledgement of the interactivity of both realities. As is so often the case, cultural change and acceptance begins with artistic endeavors to illustrate the change. Aram Bartholl, and other artists are creating installations and works that allow us to view our world as influence by the virtual, and the virtual influenced by the physical. It also results in some incredibly cool art.