Google's Eye - Jenny Odell

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Google’s Eye - Jenny Odell

The impulse towards collection and aggregation is near-universal; it’s the driving force behind museums and micro-blogging habits alike. In cataloging the stuff around us, we invent standards of measure and thus exert power over the pandemonium of a wildly un-curated world.

San Fransico-based graphic artist Jenny Odell knows this impulse well. But her images exploit the god’s-eye-view of Google Satellite, a (virtually) all-encompassing worldview the artist claims is nothing if not “inhuman.” “From this view,” she writes, “the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.”

_{(“125 Swimming Pools”)}

Her “Satellite Collection s“ remove various manmade structures—swimming pools, landfills, water towers—from their terrestrial environments and arrange them in the orderly geometrics of a display case. The result: an oddly pleasurable glimpse of an ordered world, what it might look like if The Creator downed a bottle of Ritalin and decided to rearrange the place.

Odell is in the throes of a new project, and the focus of her practice is shifting horizontally, away from the traces of industry in favor of more mortal subjects. In this new series, “all the people on google earth,” the artist captures raw footage of public spaces from google’s archives and pulls the landscape right out from under the people assembled there. It’s the frozen, stripped-down version of that moment your plane leaves the runway, tiny civilians buzzing around like insects — or a game of The Sims: Rapture Edition.

_{(“All the People in Dolores Park.” You should probably click to enlarge)}

The bodies here in The Mission’s Dolores Park become their own geography, their patterns of congregation the only indication of the ground they hold. The line for the bathroom, the clot of sightseers delineating the boundaries of a particularly pleasing view- the nakedness of this ‘data’ invites the analyst, the compulsive indexer within us. From Google’s eye, it becomes clear how much our own movements are mediated by the arithmetic of the built environment.

Of course, Google’s omniscience isn’t (yet) limitless; on her blog, Odell mentions that a certain section of “All the People on Baker Beach” is much blurrier than others—a glitch due, she writes, “to a nearby set of military buildings in the Presidio that are apparently cause to blur the entire area out.”

Eric Fischer’s maps make an inverted companion to Odell’s series: his Locals and Tourists is a collection of maps indexing ground-level photographs on Flikr by tag and location, with sites color-coded according to how long a person has been photographing there.