‘This is Now’ Websites Show Off Cities’ Visual Hallmarks

When 5 million Instagram photos, and 400 million tweets are cast out daily, information overload starts to sound like a serious problem. Making tasty fruit-filled sangria out of a fruit basket is This is Now, a project by Australian startup Lexical Gap. Developers Marcio Puga, Mauricio Massaia and Per Thoresson’s first project was to use geotagging information to sort Instagram’s photos by location, and then filter those photos into a non-stop visualization stream of onto citycentric sites. The aggregated photos for each of the nine featured cities—Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo—show a remarkable resemblance to our visual stereotype of each city’s culture. On “This is Now Los Angeles,” for example, one finds images of empty McDonald’s French-fry boxes, palm trees, tattoos, graffiti, the Hollywood sign, bikinis, sunsets, airplanes, and rearview mirrors. • now.jit.su