Google Earth Glitches Make For Surrealistic Artwork
5 “I explore an author-less world at the intersection of human labor and digitized systems, a blurred boundary between human creativity and machine intelligence,” says artist Clement Valla in the statement on his website. This statement describes one of his projects titled, “Postcards from Google Earth” just perfectly. Valla has a series of different images which were captured on Google Earth that bring to life a technical error that’s made “in an effort to convert 3-D space onto a 2-D computer screen.” It is always fascinating when an artist takes an error of some kind and turns it into something beautiful, and the New York based artist does an exceptional job of this.
Apparently, this project of Valla’s happened, as many brilliant things in art do, accidentally, when he was searching on Google Earth and saw a building that appeared to be upside down. At that moment, something magnificent must have sparked in his mind, and prompted the creation of this beautiful collection of surrealistic Internet snapshots. These warps in the Internet interpretation of reality are being called endangered accidents, due to Google’s constant pursuit to fix things on the global map. One could only hope that it won’t prevent people from creating inspiring things like these.
In case you were wondering if all of the works are just a snapshot alone of the Google interface, there is a little bit of tweaking done to some of them. But no matter how the final outcome is reached, the pieces are absolutely stunning and resemble a sort of modern counterpart to Salvador Dalí’s work, as well as some other artists of the Surrealism movement. The way that the man-made landscapes appear to be melting into space could be related to the way Dalí painted the drooping clocks in works like The Persistence of Memory.
But it would not be true to say that this is all Valla is attempting to do, seeing as he has some very unique and interesting other motives in creating these works, apart from creating the surreal. Valla seems to be very interested in exploring that claimed very thin line between man made things and computers.
He explains, “Human and computer activity is hardly distinguishable. I am interested in the moments where the typical distinction is blurred or even inverted.”
