John Zissovici teaches architecture at Cornell University. For the past nine years he has been investigating the evolution of Google Earth and its potential use as a new medium for looking at and communicating about our environment. He has made four videos in this medium, one of which received the Jury's prize at the Black Maria touring film festival. He has presented his explorations and discoveries at international conferences and published them in academic journals like Threshold (MIT) and the Cornell Journal of Architecture. He also works on architectural projects, both built and theoretical.
At MacDowell he began work on a moving picture called Walk With Your Head Down Poet, based on a poem by Matthew Yeager, whom he met in residence. Like his last four moving picture works, this one exploits a particular aspect of Google Street View to create a new vision of our mediated life in the city. His previous moving picture, s.light drifts, was an official selection in the SUBURBINALE film festival in September 2017 in Vienna.
