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Summer-Winter Mash-Up Glitches on Google Earth


May 24, 2013 | Julia Dawidowicz


At some point during his Google Maps-scouring endeavors, German artist Daniel Schwarz noticed a strange phenomenon: the apparent coexistence of two contrasting seasons in the same place. Juxtapose is a collection of these glitched-out images, mostly of remote locations, taken directly from Google Maps.

Although the satellite images give users a godlike power in jumping from one continent to the next in the blink of an eye, they are also highly abstracted from time, nature and their interrelationships. The glitched images force viewers to interrogate how technology changes our understanding of time, space and place.

Of course, this bizarre collocation of different moments in time is not the result of some metaphysical wormhole, but of the faulty algorithms Google Maps uses to stitch together data. Looks cool though.