PART 1
Panoramic Vision, Earth Browsing, and Model Making
Erin & Ian
T
he City of Google Los Angeles is brimming with
images of palm trees and edged by a mirage of
sparkling beaches. The spectrum color palette of
40
ALONG
THE
FRONTIER
OF
RESOLUTIONS
thousands of shipping containers constitutes what
appears to be a bustling port at its south end. At its
Figure 1
Real Esmerelda
housing
development in
Andalucía, on the
northwest frontier
of resolution in
the digital model
of Mexico City,
as rendered in
Google Earth
7.1.2.2041.
1
“Myth of
the Flat Earth.”
Wikipedia. [http://
en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Myth_of_the_
Flat_Earth]
north end is a valley sprawling with single-family
homes, light industrial warehouses, and car dealerships. There’s a basin south of that, and a range
of foothills at the terminus of the Google Santa
Monica Mountains dividing the valley on the north
from the basin on the south. This representation
of the city is jarringly close to reality, not unlike the
Los Angeles that is popularly depicted in television
and film. But there’s something strange tucked
into that range of foothills in Google Los Angeles.
It’s another kind of division that at certain points
resembles an edge: A frontier of resolutions.
Early sea explorations were supposedly plagued
by superstitions of Earth’s looming edge.1 The
exploration of Google Earth, a digital artifact that
sits between image and evidence, similarly presents
an unsettling and enigmatic edge. The boundary
between pixelated flatness and approximated fo rm
Besler
marks the extents of Google’s latest efforts to model
the entire surface of the earth. While conventional
in most Google Cities, the edge of Google
41
Los Angeles is particularly callous. It doesn’t recognize architectural form, is largely indifferent to
the established political boundaries of the material
world and it disregards the constructed edges of
the built environment. In Google Alhambra, east of
Google Los Angeles, for instance, the edge erases
roughly half of the 12-story steel and glass headquarters of the Los Angeles County Department
of Public Works —bisecting the tower along its
diagonal.2
forms and mobile mapping applications, the
ERIN & IAN BESLER
42
comprehensive rendering of the city was a rare
space of encounter. This all-encompassing view
was most commonly provided at a comparatively
low resolution by flat maps, standard fixtures in
Gone are the days when the only way to get a bird’s eye view of your favorite city was
from the window of a penthouse apartment or helicopter. Now you can soar above the
skyline by simply opening Google Earth on your desktop or mobile phone.3
the automobile of any serious Southern California
Eiffel Tower in Paris, the vista visible from the high
motorist, like those published by Rand McNally or
rise executive office suites depicted in Antonioni’s
Thomas Brothers. Other communicative technologies like the passenger airliner and the elevated
interstate overpass provide transient sites from
which the city—its expanses and its boundaries—
can be experienced and examined. The frame of
the airplane or automobile window, a geometry of
steel encased in finishing material and spanned
by glass, dictates rather forcefully the experience
of this view; one’s connection to a landscape is
tenuous when the frame reinforces a sense of separation. Other elevated views would have been more
novel or privileged—the panoramic vista from the
viewing deck of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the
2
“Los Angeles
County Department
of Public Works.”
Wikipedia. [http://
en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Los_
Angeles_County_
Department_
of_Public_
Works#History]
3
Google Earth.
“Google Earth
Showcase: 3D
Imagery.” Google
Earth. N.D. Web. 03
Nov. 2014. <http://
www.google.com/
earth/explore/
Zabriskie Point.
In cases such as the General Motors Futurama
display at the New York World’s Fair, or the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model in Sausalito,
California, or The Great Train Story at the Museum
of Science and Industry in Chicago, are singular
occasions where one might study the built environment as a scale model. These miniaturized objects
occupy a presence that is distinct from images, but
like the elevated view, a frame is inevitably present.
In the case of scale models, one must look in rather
than out.
ERIN & IAN BESLER
Figure 2
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works headquarters building in
Alhambra, CA, which straddles the frontier of resolution, as rendered in Google Earth
7.1.2.2041.
Prior to the ascent of digital earth browsing plat-
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Part 2
Project: The Resolution Frontier
The set of video works “The Resolution Frontier”4
makes explicit use of the filmic tracking shot to
identify the edge of the digital model’s resolution in
Google Earth and to activate it as a threshold. This
is the frontier at which algorithmic geomodeling
ends and the handmade model is allowed a tentative stay of execution until, inevitably, Google’s
Figure 3
http://vimeo.com/ianbesler/los-angeles-resolution-frontier
scanning efforts envelope the entire surface of the
Earth. A video composition generated from Google
ERIN & IAN BESLER
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Earth (a “tour” in the software’s parlance) is not so
much composed by the user as it is scripted. The
interface that Google Earth provides seems to resist the framing of a perspective or the movement
of a recording device through space. Rather, the
This generally intellectual character of the panoramic vision is further attested by the
following phenomenon, which Hugo and Michelet had moreover made into the mainspring of their bird’s-eye views: to perceive Paris from above is infallibly to imagine a
history; from the top of the Tower, the mind finds itself dreaming of the mutation of the
landscape which it has before its eyes; through the astonishment of space, it plunges
into the mystery of time, lets itself be affected by a kind of spontaneous anamnesis: it is
duration itself which is panoramic..5
software provides property windows, “Get Info” dialogue boxes for manipulating “views” of a “path.”
gle Earth secrets.” These videos make use of rapid
Properties relating to the perceived speed of move-
shifts in location, bombastic or evocatively mys-
ment (from “Slow” to “Fast”), the rendering rate of
terious soundtracks, wildly gesticulating cursor
the software and other settings are manipulated in
the Preferences window. It’s clear from the company’s promotional material and tutorials that Google
imagines touring as a wonderful tool in the hands
of well-intentioned land-use advocates and other
motivated generators of content.
4
arrows, and provocatively suggestive captions,
https://vimeocom/88113800
in default Arial typeface, rife with misspellings.
5
They insist that human-made disasters, elaborate
Barthes, Roland.
“The Eiffel Tower
and Other
Mythologies.”
Trans. Richard
Howard. University
of California Press.
1970. Print. 11.
conspiracies, and pre-historic symbology can be
collected, constellations drawn, and rational conclusions reached — a powerful affordance, by any
standards, for a single piece of software. Such is
A search on YouTube for “Google Earth” yields
the cultural influence that media generated with
an abundance of videos exposing “secret places,”
Google Earth possesses, despite being a resolutely
“strange discoveries,” “hidden places,” and “Goo-
consumer-grade tool.
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Amazingly, Google Earth —despite whatever loyalties its name implies— is indifferent to the specific
astronomical object that it happens to be rendering
at any given moment. Google Earth allows users
to view topographical renderings of not only the
Earth, but also the Moon and Mars via the “Explore”
sub-menu. If a user is “Exploring” the Moon in
Google Earth, any pin, data point, or track of points
that exist within its informational database will be
projected and scaled, almost as if by default, onto
either of the other objects in space. According to
Google Earth’s re-projection of the Earth’s land
ERIN & IAN BESLER
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Mare Tranquillitatis would have taken place somewhere in the north of the Democratic Republic of
Congo, roughly 34 miles (on the Moon’s surface)
southeast of the river port of Bumba. Coincidentally, four of the six manned Moon landings would,
according to Google Earth’s projection, have taken
place in Africa. The Apollo 12 and Apollo 14 landing
sites would have been in the Atlantic Ocean.
The inadvertent remapping of American moon
landings across the African continent and the
Atlantic basin suggests an ever-expanding set of
misuses, hacks, and appropriations of software affordances in digital maps and models. These tools
resist Google’s constriction on the agency that was
The Los Angeles Resolution Frontier. Google Earth’s indifference to existing
political and judicial boundaries. The photogrammetric model of Los
Angeles (dashed line) straddles Los Angeles County and Orange County,
and its edge slices through no fewer than 11 Los Angeles neighborhoods
and 27 cities in Southern California.
once so central to Google Earth as a tool for creating
a depiction of the city.
ERIN & IAN BESLER
masses onto the Moon, the Apollo 11 landing in
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FIGURE 4
The continent of Africa projected onto the Moon in Google Earth 7.1.2.2041. The Apollo
11 landing site is visible in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo, roughly image
center.
As digital representations become the predominate imagery shaping our routine experiences
and understanding of the environments around
us, our capacity to influence, edit, reject, or undermine the objectivity and apparent immutability of
the depiction becomes critical. Delineating and
giving name to certain edges, like the frontier of
Google Los Angeles, or appropriating the humorless sobriety of Google Earth’s visual renderings
of Africa on the Moon, opens a discussion around
the embedded assumptions of all simulations and
It isn’t so much that Google Los Angeles is less legitimate or real, as a place, than the County of Los
Angeles or the lunar landing site in Google Sudan.
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As a piece of software, Google Earth confuses the
distinction between any given geopolitical or historical boundary and the impositions of the user.
The resolutions and fidelities that Google Earth
favors and neglects point to the mutability of all
maps, models, territories, borders, and frontiers.
The spaces that dictate the encounter, whether
generated by Google, Apple, Microsoft, governments, militaries, or open-sourced, rely on a set of
concessions on the part of the user: for instance,
that political borders and place names are as real as
coastlines and mountain ranges. But geo-browsers
and mapping applications render these concesFIGURE 5
A depiction of an Apollo 17 astronaut, presumably Commander Eugene Cernan, posing
with a flag in North Sudan on the Moon in Google Earth 7.1.2.2041.
sions optional, or at least, redundant. Who says
that Apollo 11 didn’t land in Google Africa? Can’t
you read a map? •
ERIN & IAN BESLER
representations.
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