10 Years of Google Maps, 10 Years of Google Maps Hacks
Google Maps turned 10 this week. It wasn’t the first digital mapping service, but it’s the one that has become most familiar — and that in its decade of existence has proved perhaps the most ambitious in reimagining what “a map” can be and should look like in the Internet age.
Thanks to the mobile revolution that’s happened in the meantime, the process of getting from point A to point B is something that millions now resolve by tapping an address into an app and following step-by-step directions. That’s a radical change in how we get around, and it’s one that’s been accompanied by unplanned side effects –– in the art world, specifically.
In the past decade, swarms of artists and other creative types have seized on Google Maps as a new sort of canvas: It’s a medium, it’s a muse, it’s a once-unimaginable tool that can be used as much more than a map.
Here, then, are some favorite Google Maps projects from people who chose not to follow directions.
At Woodcut Maps, youcan offer up a Google Maps location (a neighborhood, a nation) that gets filtered through the site’s software and then laser-cut onto wood.
Sunnyvale, Calif., on Woodcut Maps
The practice of “GPS drawing” — converting GPS data from a walk or bike ride into a recognizable pattern — predates Google Maps. But certainly the ability to plop that data directly onto Maps has helped make it one of the more familiar map-creativity exercises. Michael Wallace is one of the better-known practitioners of the form, having made a slew of amusing map-pictures by riding his bike around Baltimore.
By Michael Wallace via DesignBoom
Kim Asendorf, delving into the code that Google makes available to third-party developers, created a site that loads and re-envisions a Google map every time you hit refresh: Each result offers pleasing color schemes and variable degrees of topographic detail. It’s totally impractical, but totally beautiful.
A stealthy side effect of Google Maps’ ubiquity is our familiarity with the “pin” icon planted on whatever digital location we’ve just searched for. Claude Closky recognized another possibility for this symbol as a graphic element in the interactive digital piece "Backward Rain Forecast.”
Backward Rain Forecast, via OWNI.eu
Arem Bartholl has brought the now-familiar pin marker into the physical world with his “Map” project, installing supersize pins in spots that Google identifies as, for instance, city centers.
A 2013 “Map” installation by Arem Bartholl
Jenny Odell may be one of the best-known Google Map re-envisioners, creating unique collage works (see below) that gather and arrange features collected from Google’s satellite view option — parking lots, swimming pools, sports stadiums. “To me, mapping and miniaturisation have in common the attempt to understand, or render understandable, a system that might otherwise sprawl beyond comprehension,” she told the Economist.
“137 Landmarks” by Jenny Odell
The stitched-together satellite images of Google Earth, a separate standalone program that made its debut under that name in 2005, extended Google’s map-mania in a direction that had less to do with getting around than with virtual exploration.
For a project called Painting for Satellites and various sequels, Molly Dilworth designed and executed murals on rooftops and similar settings that were big enough to be visible to casual Google Earth surfers.
"561 Grand,” from Molly Dilworth’s Paintings for Satellites
Others plumbed Google Earth — and, later, Street View — for glitches and oddities. Well before the more Dalí-esque elements of Apple’s map app inspired a mocking Internet craze, Clement Valla cataloged similarly surreal failures in Google Earth’s attempt to duplicate the world in digital miniature.
From Clement Valla’s “Postcards From Google Earth”
Street View came along in 2006 and proved to be another boon for those who viewed Google mapping tools as something more than just a way to get around. Emilio Vavarella’s project “Report a Problem” memorialized a number of aesthetically appealing Street View screwups.
From Emilio Vavarella’s “Report a Problem”
Meanwhile, several creators recognized Google’s fleet of camera cars collecting Street View imagery as something like the ultimate “street photographer.” By obsessively exploring the feature’s vast collection of mindlessly made automated imagery, Jon Rafman and Doug Rickard, among others, unearthed striking moments that stand as compelling found photography.
From Jon Rafman’s 9-Eyes project (the title refers to the multi-lens cameras mounted on Google’s image-gathering cars), via Mashable
And as a kind of jarring reminder that Google’s map technology does trace back to the real world in unexpected ways, Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts collected Street View imagery and stuck it into the physical landscape it came from: The accidental “portraits” of individuals going about their business as a Google vehicle rolled by were printed and then pasted into the corresponding settings in cities around the world. It’s like Street View when you’re, you know, on the street.
From Street Ghosts, via Peta Pixel
Probably Google never imagined such uses for its geographic technology — but probably most of us never imagined the degree to which our relationship to geography and navigation would go digital.
And that’s exactly why these hacks and innovative reuses of Google’s technology are, while sometimes curious, also useful. For better or worse, the whole concept of cartography has changed in the last decade. Nowadays our maps are so robust we need tour guides and artists to point out what they’re really showing us.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
