Project 1 - Homes I Saw
Homes I Saw is a piece that I created in response to Josh Begley’s Prison Map. As noted in a previous post, I took issue with the ways that Begley presented satellite images as “actual” representations of prison landscapes, as well as how the images served many of the same purposes that other forms of data would have.
Can satellite imagery show us what pieces of our world actually look like?
I think it’s interesting to question what sort of authority satellite imagery does and should have in how we see our world. There’s this feeling of exploring the world via Google Maps, the excitement of finding junkyards or weird houses or whatever else might show up, but what kind of reality is that painting? There seems to be an innacurate sense of familiarity that comes along with seeing a place via satellite; sure, you know the layout of the buildings (which can be worth quite a bit, like when adding a sense of closeness to physically distanced relationships), but how actual is that familiarity?
Satellite imagery and Google Street View
Homes I Saw is a long, scrolling grid of photographs procured through various Google Cloud API’s. Using the coordinates of spots I found on Google Maps, I got the aerial and street views (if available) of around fifty homes in Arkansas (my home state).
Satellite images are distanced. But what happens when we include street views in our virtual depictions of a place? Google’s street view images are captured literally by a car driving by the place in question. When I’m driving through Arkansas, there are plenty of place that I only know through a car’s window. I argue that seeing these places through our car windows is just as distant as seeing them through a computerized street view. Through Homes I Saw, I am trying to question the ways that we associate physical presence with understanding and familiarity.
(here’s a link to the slide presentation I gave in class. It includes images, which is a big plus)