Postcards from Google Earth

Abstract

This article explores Google Earth as a new aesthetic form of the visual, which has the power to influence our perception and understanding of the planet by expanding and complexifying our visual experience. While considering the cartographic projection used by Google Earth, I focus on the acts of selection and of re-contextualization—through human choice and intention—of images captured automatically by machines. My aim is to demonstrate that this hegemonic technology can be potentially subverted through the augmented interactivity of its users. Following the idea that Google Earth is a new model of representation of the world—aggregating cartographic, photographic and satellite images—this paper first describes Google Maps as a flexible and portable map that can be modified, enriched with data or audiovisual content and associated with GPS. Then it explores a number of artistic projects which present themselves as collections of images captured while travelling through Google Earth or Google Street View, in order to examine how they both reveal and divert the “machine vision” underpinning its hybrid system and the aggregated form of its interface.I employ a “media archeology” approach to identify the ancestors of Google Earth, Maps and Street View (maps, aerial views, road photographic guides), to see the continuities and the ruptures in this new aesthetic form of the visual, which is based at the same time on the virtualization of the geographic experience and on interactivity, as well as on a new level of fluidity among different types of images and layers of reality (the experience of the globe, aerial and street views). Devices developed mostly in military or territorial expansion contexts contribute to the constitution of the contemporary screen multiple visual and temporal perspectives.