When Dante Fields and I were looking at a glossy image of the rocky shoreline of Cabos San Lucas one day in 2007, we decided to see if we could spot the location on Google Maps. And we did. The knowledge that the vision of Mapping the Next Millenium was here and now came roaring in like a freight train or - more apropos to later in this piece - like a Hellcat Missile from above.
Google and others pull off their mapping magic using an image technology called JPEG 2000. Unlike its predecessor - JPEG - it allows multiple resolution representation. In layman's terms this translates to "you can store multiple resolutions in the same image file." This cleverness plays out nicely when you're using Gmaps since when you view a specific locale, the browser loads up a bunch of individual images stitched together - and also loads up a higher resolution image so that when you zoom in, you instantly get to see a more detailed view. It's as if the more-detailed image is hidden behind the first.
In my studio sits a photographer, Marc Faasse, who does something exceedingly clever with JPEG 2000/image-stitching. Since Marc's work is all about dangling a camera 7 or 8 meters above a public space then, over time (much time, in fact...sometimes months) gathering these images and stitching them together, then it makes perfect sense that his website should be built in precisely the same fashion. Behold...a website which exists in a single page: you start in from on-high, then zoom in to examine individual works, his bio, contact information and so on. Brilliant:
Gets rid of pesky navigational issues. He worked with a developer, Arnold Obdejin (who used the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis' GMAP Creator and GMAP Image Cutter), to accomplish this.
Roel Wouters takes the aerial view to inventive extremes as a director of zZz's Grip, "a one take, top shot music video with trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video effects:"
And yet another playful treatment in Her Morning Elegance:
The Evil Eye
If I want to show you a bird's-eye view of where I ran today, I can share a link with you to a fabulous website where I can map my run...from where you can click on the "Watch Fly-By Video" and take off on a 10-mile excursion through Amsterdam.
If I ever take up terrorist activities this is not an application I'll be using any longer since it would let the CIA know my running route and they could blast me to smithereens, like these 3 very unlucky people, using a Hellfire missile filed from a Predator drone:
This use of aerial surveillance is...well...terr(or)ifying. Like a suicide bomber it comes from nowhere, without warning. What's worse is that you would have those last few seconds of your life to know that something was rushing toward you at supersonic speeds like God's Right Hand of Wrath before surrounding objects were Jackson Pollock-ed with your corporeal being. Fortunately it would be over with quickly.
On the other hand Saeed Cmagh, a Reuter's photographer, was not so lucky. After surviving an initial attack directed from an American helicopter gunship, he received some open heart surgery on the spot as he was being carried to a van.
Once again we see something akin to mere mortals being oblivious to a Deity's thunderbolts from the sky, then God toying with his prey like a cat playing with a mouse before biting off its head. 12 died. Two children in the van survived with multiple gunshot wounds.
So Star Wars Death Star, isn't it? And so videogame-ish. From on high one is abstracted from emotional empathy and the smallish forms one sees from one's video monitor must be like the targets one shoots at in a video game to rack up points.
The Mapping the Next Millenium book made an apt comparison to the Age of Discovery, noting that the presence of new technologies - e.g. the telescope, the microscope, the astrolabe - allowed 15th Century Europeans to extend their gaze outward to the stars and inward to cells. It also allowed them the means with which to explore and take over the World. In a similar vein, having a flotilla of imaging satellites high above us let's us the see the only planet we will probably ever inhabit - probably a good thing - in incredible detail; it also exposes us to an outrageously invasive scrutiny and control.
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