In Google Earth and other digital imaging platforms, the map of the world is composited from thousands of satellite images gathered from an army, or several armies, of satellites and licensed by the builders of each platform. Some of these images are in the public domain (notably images captured by government agencies such as NASA or the US Department of Agriculture); others are proprietary. This hybridity of ownership is characteristic of digital ecosystems.
If Google Earth is a lens, it is full of distortions. These can be revealed through a critical use of tools internal to the platform itself — the Historical Imagery function for example, or manipulation of viewing and touring settings. The images here, captured from along the trajectory of the video, have been directly harvested from Google Earth, along the 49th parallel. They have not been manipulated beyond framing and placement on the page.
Images like these, which date from the early 1990s to the present, reveal an obvious asymmetry between the imagery on the American side of the border — highly defined — and the Canadian side. In this case, the area north of the border is often] presented in a much lower-resolution. This distortion comes from the processes that capture and reproduce the image and map it onto the 3-dimensional model of the Earth’s surface. Pixelation and artefacting create a landscape of a new kind, with its own qualities of darkness and light, opacity and texture; it forms a geography and a materiality in its own right.
We expect that such digital imaging platforms fulfil technology’s promise, now over two hundred years old, of a transparent, complete and seamless mapping of the world. But do they?
The border between satellite images rarely equates exactly to the political border. The edge of the southern satellite tile is typically offset some hundred metres north.
At other times it can be identified by a 6m border vista or by disparities in land use.
The border is frequently invisible.
114º 11’ 15” W, 49°N. Akamena-Kishenena Provincial Park, BC
Yet even that simplified border could not be precisely pinned down. Cumulative surveying errors led to the border monuments straying up to hundreds of feet from the theoretical parallel. Subsequent treaties have defined the border as the wavering line demarcated by these monuments, rather than the parallel itself. So the images you see here, in para||e| , record a landscape whose technological mapping was compromised from the beginning.
Displacement, the error built into all reproductions and representations, even highly technological ones, is built into this media landscape.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 3
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