The Art of Exploding Cityscapes

Glitch artist Clement Valla might be best known for his Postcards From Google Earth project, in which he manipulated Google maps to great distorted effect, warping highways in impossible ways across various landscapes. But, his more recent work, especially Iconoclashes, and the quietly launched 3D-maps-minus-3D, are equally mesmerizing.

For 3D-maps-minus-3D, Valla used Nokia's Here 3D mapping site's texture maps—the guts of the site's visualizations—to flatten and "explode" 3D visuals into two dimensions. For him, it was about making visual the images used to build 3D environments—visuals not meant for human consumption. As Valla recently told me in conversation, his motivations were many, from pre-Renaissance definitions of art to concepts that hew close to psychogeography, the playful, mind-bending drifting through cityscapes.

Motherboard: You're interested in texture maps, the bits and pieces of city images used to build 3D mapping systems. When exactly did this interest evolve into 3D-Maps-Minus-3D?
Clement Valla: When I first saw the Nokia texture maps, it was like, "Whoa, these embody a lot of the things that I've been thinking about." It happened around the same time I was starting the Surface Survey project.

You talk about images in limbo, and images not meant for human consumption. How do you access these images?
My good friend Kyle McDonald came in one day and said that Nokia was using 3D Javascript for their 3D-mapping app Here. So, if you're in Google Chrome or something and open up the web developer tool, you can see the images that the page is loading. All of the tiles are right there. He showed them to me and my mind kind of exploded.

If you go to Here right now, zoom into New York City, and then look at the resources tab in Chrome, you'll see all the images. All that 3D-maps-minus-3D does is pull images from Nokia's public, live data. They're right there out in the open.

What tools are you using?
I'm just using something called Modest Maps, a map application that can be used with open street maps. I used that API, and instead of feeding it open maps data, I just pointed to Nokia's data. It's really simple. Nokia's tiles are texture maps, and I just present them as 2D maps so that they're kind of exploded.

The idea of the exploded image is interesting. Can you elaborate on what it means in the context of your work?
One thing that is really fascinating to me with all of this is the technology of perspective, or optic space technology. Art was historically always related to the rise and development of capitalism, and to this idea of the first person point-of-view, which makes the viewer the center of the world. If you couple that with, say, aerial photography, that has traditionally been the god's eye view, which is now the government's point-of-view with satellites. There is a real implication of hierarchy in those modes of vision.

So, when you look at actual texture maps, what's interesting is that if you crack them open a little bit, there are these images that have no hierarchy and make absolutely no sense. There is a road that runs into a building facade, for instance. The whole world is made topsy-turvy, and there are no perspectives and hierarchies.

Aesthetically, what effect does this produce in your mind?
Another big argument made about perspective is that it's this distancing thing, this view from the outside looking at an object or a thing. What's interesting to me about 3D-Maps-Minus-3D maps, is that you look at these kaleidoscopic shards as though you were on psychedelic drugs in the city with all of these crazy points-of-view coming at you. It's fascinating that I found those images within this apparatus that is meant to create this very hierarchical, structured view, but houses within it this flattened, Cubist collage.

Some of what you've said has some echoes of psychogeography, where when you go on a derive, you strip the city landscape of its hierarchical power. Your map is sort of the technological version of psychogeography with these simulated images. 
That really resonates with me. I like that a lot, and I like the way you put it. It's that whole meaning-making thing. When you move from Rome to New York City to Los Angeles, you get these three completely different textures. I've had people tell me that the maps really revealed the texture of the city for them. It's these fragmented glimpses of things that form an ambient texture to the city. Part of psychogeography is about seeing what comes out, letting the atmosphere and texture of the city pull you, without trying to imply your particular reading on things.

Can you talk about acheiropoieta—images not made by the human hand—which you mention in your 3D-Maps-Minus-3D essay?
I came across it in that Bruno Latour essay, “What is Iconoclash?” It's a term with a really long history I was unaware of. It's this idea that when Veronica's Veil or the Shroud of Turin, and most of things in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, for example, operated in their social context it was important that they not be human-made.

It's a weird double-think, because obviously they are human-made, but they were supposed to be the embodiment of the divine in some way. It turns out that Veronica's Veil was simply made by a human, but it doesn't operate in its social context the way it operates now. That's the category of images and icons that are called archeiropoeta.

How does acheiropoieta make its way into your maps?
It fascinated me that after the Renaissance, with the invention of perspective and all of these changes that happened in the way that we think of and make art, that we completely lost this idea of an author-less creation. We lost this idea that anybody would want to make art in this mode where they don't want to be original, but stick as close as possible to the divine. Authorship had this very different function.

I found it fascinating to stumble back upon that, but start thinking about it with algorithms. With Google Earth it becomes really hard to say, “Who made these images?” Where does the authorship lie? It becomes what Latour would call an “apparatus”—not any particular human, algorithm, machine, or hammer, but all of these things acting together.

It's almost more advanced with language. We have no problem now believing that botnets can create poetry, as we originally thought with Horse_ebooks. Now we're jumping into the realm of the visual as well. Language either makes sense or it doesn't, whereas visuals exist in this gray area. With visual cues, it's much easier to read meaning into them as a viewer than it is with botnet language.