Letters From Here

thejogging:

meaning, 2013

screenshot of a desperate search

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Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see income inequality from space? It turned out to be easier than I expected.

Below are satellite images from Google Earth that show two neighborhoods from a selection of cities around the world. In case it isn’t obvious, the first image is the less well-off neighborhood, the second the wealthier one.

(via Per Square Mile: Income inequality, as seen from space)

I was Google Earth-ing, when I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked like they were upside down. I could tell there were two competing visual inputs here —the 3D model that formed the surface of the earth, and the mapping of the aerial photography; they didn’t match up. Depth cues in the aerial photographs, like shadows and lighting, were not aligning with the depth cues of the 3D model.

The competing visual inputs I had noticed produced some exceptional imagery, and I began to find more and start a collection.  At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the algorithm, but looking closer, I realized the situation was actually more interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system.

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Google Earth’s textures however, are not shallow or flat. They are photographs that we look through into a space represented beyond—a space our brain interprets as having three dimensions and depth. We see space in the aerial photographs because of light and shadows and because of our prior knowledge of experienced space. When these photographs get distorted and stretched across the 3D topography of the earth, we are both looking at the distorted picture plane, and through the same picture plane at the space depicted in the texture. In other words, we are looking at two spaces simultaneously. Most of the time this doubling of spaces in Google Earth goes unnoticed, but sometimes the two spaces are so different, that things look strange, vertiginous, or plain wrong. But they’re not wrong.

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Our mechanical processes for creating images have habituated us into thinking in terms of snapshots - discrete segments of time and space (no matter how close together those discrete segments get, we still count in frames per second and image aspect ratios). But Google is thinking in continuity. The images produced by Google Earth are quite unlike a photograph that bears an indexical relationship to a given space at a given time. Rather, they are hybrid images, a patchwork of two-dimensional photographic data and three-dimensional topographic data extracted from a slew of sources, data-mined, pre-processed, blended and merged in real-time. Google Earth is essentially a database disguised as a photographic representation.

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it is precisely because humans did not directly create these images that they are so fascinating. They are created by an algorithm that finds nothing wrong in these moments.

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Clement Valla:  Rhizome | The Universal Texture

There are 5,393 carceral facilities in the United States, places where people are held in local jails, state prisons, federal corrections facilities, immigration detention centers – “anywhere where an individual can be sort of confined and locked up,” explains Josh Begley, “and, in some of the bigger instances, warehoused in one place.”

Begley is a master’s student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University. He wanted to graphically represent what all of this means, to communicate not just the sheer quantity of prisons in America (a number that has been booming for decades), but their volume on our landscape. As part of a class project, he created the oddly beautiful website Prison Map, which offers a mashed-up birds-eye view of all of these places, taken from Google Satellite images.

 (via The Stunning Geography of Incarceration - Design - The Atlantic Cities)

A new program aims to plot the location of every single living thing on Earth.

This ambitious project, called the Map of Life, uses a Google Maps platform to map the known distribution of 30,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates. Many more are still being added, with the eventual goal of curating hundreds of thousands of plants, birds, fish, reptiles and everything else under the sun. Meanwhile, there’s still plenty to search. The project just opened to the public.

(via “Map of Life” Shows the Location of All Organisms, Large and Small | Popular Science)

nevver:

Dead Pixel in Google Earth

The Dutch method of [Google satellite image] censorship is notable for its stylistic inventiveness compared to other countries: imposing bold, multi-coloured polygons over sites rather than the subtler and more standard techniques employed elsewhere. The result is a landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.

(via Dutch Landscapes | New Writing | Granta Magazine)

The continuing rollout of 45° “birds eye view” images across the globe1 has now revealed a real-life tragedy. On the railroad track near Sanford Avenue in the city of Richmond, California, we can clearly see a corpse lying on the rails.

via Google Maps publishes aerial images of murder scene — Google Sightseeing