“Today Is a Good Day” is a short-term residency project the artist undertook in Regensburg. Using Google Earth’s 3D city simulation, she roamed the virtual city in first-person view, documenting her route along with the AI-blurred or distorted street scenes she encountered. She then retraced the simulated route through the real urban space with a camera in hand, photographing the details unfolding there.

She knew very little about Regensburg and wanted to “get to know” it in this state of unfamiliarity, within a virtually constructed online space—through Wikipedia, social media check-in photos, Google Street View, and the like. This mirrors how people tried to understand the world during that peculiar period, or conversely, how that period reinforced the internet as a primary means by which modern people perceive the world. The approach felt clean and efficient—just like being inside Google Earth. She needed no other tourists; from the simulated architectural details alone, she could already sense Regensburg’s history and its present-day vitality. Yet she knew this was far removed from the real city. On the other hand, spending a day wandering the actual Regensburg as a tourist—seeing the newly restored Stone Bridge, the cathedral covered in scaffolding, the cafes lining every street—could not be equated with “knowing the city” either. Both approaches lose the city’s details.

What is interesting, however, is how the gap between the virtual and the real became blurred by memory and imagination. The empty 3D streets, for instance—scenes that played out for real during those desolate months—stir something in people’s memories of the city and of the times.