October 03, 2010

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Morgan Meis in The Smart Set via 3QD:
You are walking down the street and there, at your feet, are two cobblestones that have been replaced with tiny memorials to people once living there, who were shipped off to Auschwitz and killed. Here's a memorial to Peter Fechter, the East German kid who tried to get over the Wall and was shot dead by border guards. Here are bullet holes in the side of a building from street-to-street fighting that doesn't seem all that long ago. Here's the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church far in the former West of the city, bombed to smithereens by an Allied air raid and left that way as a memorial. See the empty hole where the rose window once stood? Is there an emptier hole, a more desolate monument to destruction, in any city on the planet?

Every street in Berlin is ghosted. Every memorial is plastered in 20 layers of tragedy, heroism, and shame.

...

Behind a badly kept fence is a chunk of the Berlin Wall standing alone in the middle of an unused parking lot. Covered in the graffiti of its time, it is slowly being worn away by the elements there, in its final resting place with the weeds, amongst the ruins of a dying neighborhood. How can any work of sculpture, how can any installation ... compete with that?
Which would not be what we speak of when we speak of augmented reality.