This strange splicing of times seems characteristic of contemporary conditions of media.
Anomalies are provoked in particular by the temporal nature of the map. Google Earth is not just a database of current satellite tiles. It is also an archive of historical images of the Earth dating back to the 1990s, and sometimes earlier. Satellite images are not captured simultaneously.They are gathered by a space-based camera moving along a path above the surface of the Earth, and are recorded in sequence before being composed as tiles in a mosaic image of the globe. So the border between two satellite images represents a seam in time, rather than just space. Adjacent satellite images juxtapose separate moments. Different seasons coexist. The contrast between these times, or worlds, is made more apparent by Google’s tendency to marry images from different times at political borders.
Sensitivity to temporality is one of the qualities that makes this amalgam of media and landscape not just an Earth, but a World.
The Dominion Land Survey: a one mile by one mile grid resulting in 640 square acres to which roadways are added
American Homestead Act system: a one mile by one mile grid, resulting in 640 square acres from which roadways are deducted.
The square-mile grid of prairie fields on display here is a result of modern systems of demarcating the world, dividing and owning land, and growing and distributing crops. These were implemented in parallel with the surveying of the border. To the north, that system was Canada’s Dominion Land Survey (1871); south of the border, it was set out by the American Homestead Act (1862). While the two grids are similar, they rarely align.
These nineteenth century systems of land division have a strange resonance with today’s imaging technologies. We might even say that the prairie surface seems ... pixilated. In fact, it is. A pixel is a picture element , a component of a whole image broken down into cells of identical size (generally consistent and organised by a grid within a given image) and with a single defined colour. It makes a complex, rich, and whole image manageable by a digital infrastructure.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 4
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