Art From Above

As those of you who puzzle over the Satellite Challenges will probably agree, using Google Earth to find your house and stump your friends is a lot of fun.  On top of that, everyone from the government to the media puts the same technology to professional, “serious” use.  But can satellite imagery be used as an artistic medium?  The answer — perhaps as much to your surprise as it was to my own — is a resounding “yes.”

God’s Eye View

I first encountered the use of satellite imagery as a medium for artistic expression through Joel, a friend and occasional guest blogger.  A month or two ago, he sent me a link to this post on the Creative Review blog.  When I opened it, I was treated to four stunning images.  Here’s one of them.

What you’re looking at is what God would have seen as Moses led the Hebrew exodus through the valley of air carved into the Red Sea.  Click here to see the other three God’s Eye View images: one of the Garden of Eden and its famous former residents; another of a stranded Noah’s Ark; and finally, the Crucifixion.

The images were created by members of The Glue Society, a “creative collective” that puts together commissioned pieces ranging from unique artwork (such as this) to commercials.  Here’s what one of their representatives had to say about the genesis of this particular project:

“We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real,” say The Glue Society’s James Dive. “As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.”

Dive hits on an interesting idea.  When we see an image of something taken from above, there is a certain level of authoritativeness, even omnipotence, that is implied.  Whoever had the power to observe from such a great height and distance must certainly be smarter than us.  The fact that the image even exists — that someone or something thought the event or object was important enough to capture, catalogue, and share — makes the image seem unquestionably accurate, and unquestionably real.

What also gives a satellite image more authority than, say, a dramatic interpretation of an event in a movie is precisely the exclusion of minute detail.  When you watch Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments (especially today), the film fails to make you feel like what you’re watching is “real” in the sense that, “This is what Moses and his people looked like as they escaped from Egypt.”  Whether it’s dated moviemaking techniques, or an all-too-familiar celebrity in the lead role, or an over-abridgement or glossing of the story: something, even if it’s a tiny thing, just isn’t right.  It doesn’t mean it was a bad movie, it just means that its mission to accurately reflect events as they transpired is not accomplished.

But when you look at the image above, there are no recognizable faces.  There is no cheesy soundtrack or questionable costume design.  All you see is geography and a bunch of dots that are supposed to be people.  The rest is left to your imagination.  The only difference between this and an image from some beach in Google Earth is the parted waters.  The artists give your brain just enough to work with, and then let your imagination run wild.  Combined with the omnipotent perspective, it’s hard to avoid the spooky feeling that The Glue Society tapped into God’s hard drive.

A “Rebel Cartographer”

A second example of satellite art was brought to my attention by Megan, the recent Satellite Challenge champion.  She pointed me to this article in the Washington Post about Nikolas Schiller, a D.C. resident who — besides co-chairing the Statehood Green Party — spends a lot of his time remixing USGS aerial imagery into art.  Using mirror imaging, geometric repetition, and other “kaleidoscopic” techniques, he turns a humdrum picture into something beautiful and captivating.

David Montgomery, the Post reporter who covered Schiller last year, does such a good job of describing (and linking to) the 26-year-old’s work that I’ll just quote a little bit:

“Ball of Destruction” [above] shows the Mall and Capitol Hill in the figure of a woman. For security reasons, the feds have obscured photos of the roofs of the White House complex. On Schiller’s map, the White House appears to be dangling from the woman’s nose like something in need of a tissue. The woman holds a sphere made from satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina. On the ground before her is a fractured map of the Superdome on the second day of flooding.

Some are meditations on themes such as religion, as in “Cathedral Quilt — Signed,” which shows the Washington National Cathedral neighborhood, upon which Schiller has signed his name repeatedly in Arabic. Many exploit the spacey, soothing rhythm of repeated forms, and imply a dialogue between the real and the imagined, with titles like “DC Lenz #2,” “Jefferson Mandala” [below] and “RFK Quilt.”  “The world is severely out of balance,” Schiller says. “These maps I make are an implied reflection of a world more or less at balance.”

The article is extremely interesting, both in how it describes the art and the artist.  Schiller is a bit eccentric, only recently allowing Google to list his website in its search results.  He enjoyed leaking his site discretely, and then using visitor tracking software to see who comes to his site, where they’re accessing it from, and when.  (A standard practice by all website owners, by the way… even us!).  He explains:

“It’s about how information flows from A to B,” Schiller says. “You can float out balloons and see if someone pops them or picks them up.”  By selectively granting access and watching the results, Schiller created a virtual country within the borderless Internet, populated by friends, fans, activists and map freaks.

You can find Schiller’s web site, filled with hundreds of his digitial geographis renderings, here.

Have you seen other uses of aerial imagery — or any other unusual medium —  as art?

Images courtesy of the CR Blog and NikolasSchiller.com.