Preserving the Deranged Infrastructure of Google Earth
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Thursday, Jan 12, 2012
Clement Valla is an artist and coder fascinated by the processes that “produce unfamiliar artifacts and skew reality” Not in the primary race, but in things like Google Earth, where he enjoys discovering aberrant digital phenomena before they get corrected by humans. He explains his pursuit in a recent Rhizome interview:
In Hapax Phaenomena and other projects such as Google Earth Sites, you refer to your art objects as artifacts or curios. Do you see yourself as an observer documenting an endangered technological curiosity?
Yes. These things will all disappear, and probably soon, in the name of progress. These artifacts are atypical ephemera, and often accidental products created by various internet algorithms. There is very little direct human hand in these artifacts. Though the purpose in collecting them is not simply for their preservation. It’s more about framing them, allowing them to be seen, and showing a kind of bizarre byproduct of these super-functioning and useful systems, such as Google.
When did you first notice the glitch in Google Earth? What inspired you to begin capturing these surreal moments?
It was accidental. I was Google-Earthing a location in China, and I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked like they were upside down. I could tell there were two competing visual inputs here – the 3d model, and the mapping of the satellite photography, and they didn’t match up. The computer is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, but the depth cues of the aerials, the perspective, the shadows and lighting, were not aligning with depth cues of the 3d earth model. I figured that this was not a unique situation in Google Earth, and I started looking at obvious situations where the depth cues would be off—bridges, tall skyscrapers, canyons. Soon I noticed the photos being updated, and the aerial photographs would be ‘flatter’ (taken from less of an angle) or the shadows below bridges would be more muted. Google Earth is a constantly changing dynamic system, so I had to capture these specific moments as still images.
Visit Valla’s site, and put some of his historical screenshots of Google Image Search on your hard drive by becoming a member of Rhizome, (if you become a member today, you get another nice piece of digital art too).
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Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
