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Notes
Oliver Wendell Holmes presents the idea of a visual library (an “Imperial, National or City Stereographic Library”) and of a “Bank of Nature” in the articles he wrote between 1859 and 1863 in the Atlantic Monthly, in particular in “The stereoscope and the stereograph” and “Sun Painting and Sun Sculpture, with the Stereoscopic Trip Across the Atlantic,” quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 18. Later, just before World War I, the ambition of a photographic inventory of the surface of the globe was at the origin of Albert Khan’s “Archives of the Planet” project, an endeavor to create a photographic atlas of the entire world in order to show the unity and diversity of humankind. See Teresa Castro, “From the ‘Atlases’ to the ‘Archives’ of the World,” Transbordeur 1, (2017), and Jeanne Haffner, The View from above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2013), 25.
“How Google Search Works | Our Mission,” Google, https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Early in 1988 The New York Times reported that somewhere on a desolate prairie in North Dakota “the Federal Government was selling pictures of everywhere.” The Earth Resources Observation Systems Data Center (EROS) maintained an archive there of some six million images, “non-military” satellite and aerial photographs of practical use to geographers, city planners, relief and public interest groups. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as history, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989).
Boris Groys, Google: Words Beyond Grammar, 100 Notes-100 Thoughts, Documenta Series #46 (Berlin: Hatje Kantz, 2012).
For the risk of reflecting and recreating the economic and racial divides online present in society see in particular Michael Crutcher and Matthew Zook,“Placemarks and Waterlines: Racialized Cyberscapes in Post-Katrina Google Earth,” Geoforum 40, no. 4, (2009): 523-34.
Patrick Vauday, et al, “From an Ontology to a Pragmatics of Images,” ASAP/Journal, 1/3, (September 2016): 389-408.
For the shift to a “personalized search” after 2009 see Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (London: Penguin Books, 2012).
Wibke Schniedermann and Wolfgang Hallet, “Editorial: On the Cultural Dimensions of Surveillance,” on_culture 6, (2018). https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-6/editorial-surveillance/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Jörn Ahrens, “The Ubiquitous View,” on_culture 6, (2018), https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-6/ahrens-ubiquitous-view/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
David Lyon, “Exploring Surveillance Culture,” on_culture 6, (2018), https://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-6/lyon-surveillance-culture/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Foucault describes this architectural figure as placing the prisoner in a conscious and permanent state of visibility, therefore assuring the automatic functioning of institutional power. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 201-04.
See Joäo Carlos Magalhaes and Jun Yu, “Algorithmic Visibility: Elements of a New Media Visibility Regime,” https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/e40a7961-0fe3-42a5-8727-f9097552f2fe.pdf <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (Londres: Routledge, 2014), 43.
Asa Mittman, “Inverting the Panopticon: Google Earth, Wonder and Earthly Delights,” Literature Compass 9, no. 12, (2012), 938–54.
Denis, Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye a Cartographical Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001).
Paul Kingsbury and John Paul Jones, “Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google Earth,” Geoforum 40, no. 4, (2009), 509. For a critique of this approach see Gwilym Eades, “An Apollonian Appreciation of Google Earth,” Geoforum 41, no. 5, (2010): 671–73.
Here we can borrow from Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage as a way to adapt existing tools to new purposes (see La pensée sauvage, 1962), and from Guy Debord’s idea of détournement as a way to subvert objects or concepts from their original uses and meanings, but also from the Situationists’ theorization of a “psychogeography”—an approach to geography which emphasizes playfulness and “drifting” around urban environments—as a way to create personal and emotional paths.
Domenico Quaranta, et al., Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011), 18.
We can also refer to Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the 20th century. The Barbican Gallery recently did a whole exhibition on this theme, focusing on the personal collections of more than a dozen contemporary artists, who frequently treat collecting as an extension of their artistic work, through the notion of “creative collecting”. See Lydia Lee, Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2015).
Here I refer to Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse,” October 110, (2004): 3-22. See his figure of the “artist-as-archivist.”
As explained by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York UP, 2006).
Started in 1924 and unfinished at Warburg’s death in 1929 it presents different types of historic and social memory through different kinds of photographs (from art, science, or ordinary practices), whose selection is both representative of western culture and subjective of its creator. Using mapping as a visual form of genealogy, we take part in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the very notion of historicity as founded on chronology: heterogeneous elements and themes express contrasts and polarities rather than a unifying vision of styles. See Aby Warburg, L’atlas Mnemosyne (Paris: Ecarquille, 2012).
Started in 1962 as an album of photographs, collages and drawings to see in time and space (on an exhibition wall).
Marcel Broodthaers’s La Conquête de l'espace, Atlas à l’usage des artistes et des militaires (Brussels and Hamburg: Lebeer Hossmann, 1975) is an artist’s book embodying the artist’s sardonic sense of humor with its plays on language and function: the title references the historic use of atlases by militaries for territorial conquests, but printed on a miniature scale, it is unusable for its intended function. Moreover, Broodthaers did not follow established geographical organization, choosing rather to present only a small selection of countries organized in alphabetical order and graphically represented in identical size.
Opened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2010. See in particular Didi-Huberman’s Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’œil de l’histoire, 3 (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 2011) for a focus on an “interval iconology,” a montage culture and a complex and polychronic temporality obtained through dialectic tensions and anachronistic juxtapositions among images.
Even though we must not forget the digital divide concerning the access to a fast Internet connection, which is not free.
Jason Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” New Media & Society 12, no. 6, (2010): 6-7.
This fluidity of the experience was already announced in the video “Powers of ten” by the couple of designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1977 (proposing a journey between the extremely big and the extremely small through zooming), showing a process more similar to a scan than to a mechanical photographic shot, and transforming all still images into moving ones.
The photograph—taken by the astronauts on board of the Apollo 8 spacecraft while it was entering its fourth orbit around the moon—was said to have been a key part of the start of the new environmental awareness movement as emblematized in Earth Day, initiated just over a year after the picture was taken. See Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire,” 2.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 1994).
It inspired utopian thoughts of a world government, perhaps even a single global language, epitomized by its use on the front cover of The Whole Earth Catalog, the classic book of the counterculture. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World. An introduction to Images, from Self-portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 2.
That unified world, visible from one spot, often seems out of reach now, as the planet itself is transforming before our eyes due to climate change.
Mirzoeff, How to See the World, 6-8.
I refer here to Roland Barthes’ opening in Camera Lucida (1980), where happening on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother he realized that he was “looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor,” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 3.
I refer to the title of the 2009 Geoforum issue “The ‘view from nowhere’? Spatial politics and cultural significance of high-resolution satellite imagery,” which was also quoting and questioning Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986).
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies Vol. 14, No. 3, (Fall, 1988): 16.
Ana Peraica, The Age of Total Images. Disappearance of a Subjective Viewpoint in Post-digital Photography (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2019), 17.
See also the difference between “through” and “at” forms of attention in Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Veronica della Dora, “A World of ‘Slippy Maps’: Google Earth, Global Visions, and Topographies of Memory,” Transatlantica 2, (2012), 4-5, https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6156 <accessed on December 3, 2020>
This difference, as captured by Ptolemy almost two millennia ago, is not only one of scale (global vs. local), but also of mode (quantitative vs. qualitative, maths vs. art, space vs. place, specialized training vs. amateur skills) and of thinking (analytic science vs. the art of memory, the grid vs. pictorial vignettes).
Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (New York: Viking, 2012).
Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire,” 5-6. The Gall-Peters projection of 1973 is considered truer to the world proportions, thus presenting ideological corrections, while the 2016 Japanese map “AuthaGraph” finally deforms the real size of continents as little as possible (there are different forms that the original sphere can take).
Veronica della Dora, “A World of ‘Slippy Maps’,” 9.
Enrico Menduni, I media digitali. Tecnologie, linguaggi e usi sociali (Bari: Laterza, 2007), 217-21.
Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, 425-26.
A free online web mapping service born in 1996 from a cartographic services company founded in 1967.
As Henri Lefebvre argues space is better intended as produced or co-produced (as a complex social construction) rather than as a container. See La Production de l’espace (Paris: éditions Anthropos, 1974).
Corresponding to our network society as described by Manuel Castells in his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: The Rise of the Network Society (1996; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), The Power of Identity (1997; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), End of Millennium (1998; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
It presents categories like “Earth” or “Civilization,” but also sections concerning the space around the earth or educational tools.
Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire,” 19-22. Google Earth is able to present the debates spatially rather than in the form of a list, associating the dialogue of a community with the visual representation of the space that is the subject of the discussion.
We still need to understand if these changes in the system are effectively adequate for practical and urgent purposes. For instance, after the violent 2010 earthquake in Haïti the Port-au-Prince city map was developed on the crowdsourced mapping tool OpenStreetMap rather than on Google Maps. See Jason Farman, Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media (London: Polity, 2010), 52-3.
“Recollecting Landscapes”, http://www.recollectinglandscapes.be/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
“Mapping Main Street”, https://docubase.mit.edu/project/mapping-main-street/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
“C’era una volta Ponte San Pietro”, http://www.ceraunavoltapontesanpietro.com/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
“La memoria visibile”, http://lamemoriavisibile.lab80.it/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
“Mémoire Filmique Pyrénées-Méditerranée”, https://memoirefilmiquedusud.eu/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
The satellite tracing of a point position: satellites send to the Earth digital radio signals allowing whoever owns a receiving device to detect his own position through the measure of the time the signal takes to travel that distance. Developed by the US Defense Department in the 1970s and reserved for military usage until 1991, this device is today used by many practical applications like car navigators and mobile phone apps.
Farman, Mobile Interface Theory, 45.
The first known aerial photographs are those of Paris in 1858 by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (“Nadar”). While these pictures were metaphorically considered “elevating” the art of photography (as shown in Honoré Daumier’s lithograph Nadar élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l’Art, published in Le Boulevard, May 25, 1863), the aerial views by James Wallace Black and Samuel A. King of Boston in 1860 were welcomed as the precursor to practical experiments (“…the time has come when what has been used for public amusement can be made to subserve some practical end”). See Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889 (New York: Dover, 1938), 186-87.
From the 1920s in particular, when the regional tradition of “French human geography” was already firmly established. Aiming at understanding the relations between regions and between natural and human, it had been spearheaded by the geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache at the Ecole Normale Supériore in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. See Jenne Haffner, The View from Above, 22.
Haffner, The View from Above, 7-17; 81-107.
Andrew Higgott, and Timothy Wray, eds, Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 150.
Clement Valla, “The Universal Texture,” rhizome.org, July 31, 2012, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/jul/31/universal-texture/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Doug Rickard, A New American Picture (New York: Aperture, 2012).
“A New American Picture”, http://www.dougrickard.com/a-new-american-picture/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Franci Duran and Wibke Schniedermann, “Interview with Franci Duran about Her Video Art Installation 8401,” on_culture 6, (2018), https://www.on-culture.org/journal/perspectives/duran-schniedermann-8401/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
“9 Eyes,” https://9-eyes.com/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Jon Rafman, “You, the World and I,” http://youtheworldandi.com/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Clement Valla, “The Universal Texture,” rhizome.org, July 31, 2012, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/jul/31/universal-texture/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Like Reijo Kela’s Silent People: a scarecrows field in Finland. See “Voici l’endroit le plus effrayant de Google Maps,” Lesinrocks, https://www.lesinrocks.com/2017/10/news/voici-lendroit-le-plus-effrayant-de-google-maps/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Chris Ip, “‘The Agoraphobic Traveller’ Confronts Anxiety with Google Street View,” Engadget.com, https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/02/street-view-photography-exhibition-jacqui-kenny-interview/?guccounter=1 <accessed on December 3, 2020>
For an example of an artificial neural network trying to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn we can consider the project “Creatism,” which mimics the workflow of a professional photographer, roaming landscape panoramas from Google Street View and searching for the best composition and aesthetics. See Hui Fang, “Using Deep Learning to Create Professional-Level Photographs,” Google Research Blog, July 13, 2017, https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/using-deep-learning-to-create.html <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Andrea DenHoed, “An Agoraphobic Photographer’s Virtual Travels, on Google Street View,” Newyorker.com., The New Yorker, 29 Jun. 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/an-agoraphobic-photographers-virtual-travels-on-google-street-view <accessed on December 3, 2020>
As described by David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation. Understanding New Media (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 1999).
Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1, (2015):145.
Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2, (1995): 17. Here the author links the need for archives to memory and psychoanalysis.
Ana Peraica, The Age of Total Images. Disappearance of a Subjective Viewpoint in Post-digital Photography (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2019), 37.
“Land Lines,” https://lines.chromeexperiments.com/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
Chris Milk and Arcade Fire, “The Wilderness Downtown,” http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
If one looks nearly at anywhere in the Western world, especially in a big city, there is more likelihood that the images will be in high definition. On the other hand, an address in the “third world,” especially one in a small village will have lower definition, if it is represented at all. This seems to be creating a new type of political map structured on image resolution and updating data. On resolution see also Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, “Resolution: Digital materialities, thresholds of visibility,” Necsus 7, No. 1, (Spring 2018):87-103, https://necsus-ejms.org/resolution-digital-materialities-thresholds-of-visibility/ <accessed on December 3, 2020>
For some recent research on “surfaces” see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); Rebecca Coleman and Liz Oakley-Brown, “Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision: Introduction,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7-8, (2017): 5-27, and Tim Ingold, “Surface Visions”, Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7-8, (2017): 99-108.
See Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window. From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge [Mass.]: MIT Press, 2006).
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