David Thomas Smith created these striking digital colleges by taking thousands of images from Google Maps, then stitching them together in Photoshop. And besides making the aerial view of your backyard look just like that totally trippy poster you had in college, the pieces have a more critical intent.
By refracting the landscapes into repeating, kaleidoscopic patterns, Smith hopes to evoke the vast, oft-unseen web of industry that drives capitalism worldwide. There’s probably something being said about global surveillance and our relative complacency regarding it as well–all of these seemingly sinister images are publicly available to anyone with a decent internet, after all. Either that or I’ve just been staring into the digital abyss for just a little too long.
