juxtapose

Google Maps is the world’s most widely used mapping service. It influences our perception and understanding of the world and its geography, and since the technology was introduced in 2005, has become a ubiquitous day-to-day tool. Modern life is now unthinkable without it.

Although the satellite images give users a godlike power in jumping from one continent to the next in the blink of an eye, they are also highly abstracted from time, nature and their interrelationships.
Google Maps images are not updated in real time, but instead stem from several months or years old datasets. Their exact dates remain unknown to the user.

‘juxtapose’ is a series of images taken directly from Google Maps that expose distant places, far from society, shown simultaneously under the force of contrary seasons and weather phenomena at varying times.
The images arise from glitches which are created automatically when Google Maps’ algorithm stitches images of updated photos with prior recorded ones together in a grid- like view.
The glitched images force viewers to interrogate how technology changes our understanding of time, space and place.

All images were taken directly from Firefox 16.0.2, without subsequent postproduction, editing or color correction.

 

Exhibited at the Fach & Asendorf Gallery, NODE13 – Forum for Digital Arts in Frankfurt and Enter 6: Biopolis in Prague.