During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time watching publicly accessible webcam streams. There are a lot of options out there: the penguin tank at the Kansas City aquarium, the student quad at the University of Illinois, a botanical garden in Tokyo… Being able to remotely ‘experience’ these locations was as fascinating as it was frustrating, but this sort of remote tourism has no gift shop - There isn’t a t-shirt to buy, there is no commemorative plate.

A Snow Globe from Places We Couldn’t Go is a computer program that uses frame differencing to analyze multiple live webcam feeds from popular tourist locations around the world. Unique movement ‘blobs’ are mapped, extracted, and spatialized as animated textures in a virtual sphere. The swirling, chaotic amalgamation is projected onto the inside of a 4' dome. The dome sits inside a box, styled like a shipping crate, surrounded by pink packing peanuts. A small orange plaque is located at the back of the crate. Laser engraved on it are the GPS coordinates and names of the various webcam locations
being sampled by the program.