Clement Valla is the kind of curator the Flat Earth Society has been looking for.
The artist has taken endless screen grabs of squiffy bridges, melted highways and impossible mountain passes, collecting these errors of Google’s satellite-mapping before they disappear and collating them on his own site, Postcards from Google Earth.
The “postcards” represent the moments when Google’s software has glitched – inherent flaws in the way the system automatically renders the world – and pushed together structures that don’t belong on the same plane.
So you get the Golden Gate Bridge looking as if the San Andreas Fault has just created a 9.1-magnitude quake. Or the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona looking as if it were imagined in the 3D graphics engine of the 90s first-person shooter Doom.
Valla, who is based in Brooklyn, has long had an interest in what he dubs “computer-based picture-producing apparatuses”. In fact, his other projects include using Amazon’s human micro-tasking service Mechanical Turk to reproduce a Sol LeWitt drawing, with hundreds of humans each being paid five cents to draw a few lines, which a piece of custom software then reassembled.
Valla’s Postcards experiment began five years ago, emerging out of an interest in the way these images “focus our attention on that process itself” – the algorithms, computers, automated cameras, pilots, engineers and so on. In Google’s version of Earth, he points out, there are no clouds, no night, and there is an oddly geometrical grain to the invisibly stuck-together photos.
“These kinds of image types are increasing greatly in the digital era,” says Valla. “So we have to relearn how to read these hybrids. Are they flat maps? Spatial images? 3D objects? 2D images?”
Beyond directing us towards the uncanny, perhaps the simpler message to take from Valla’s project is the sheer fallibility of tech. In Google’s shiny wrap-around future, driverless cars may have to wait at least until the bridges stop falling down canyons.
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