I will let you read the explanation from Jenny Odell to decipher her
work, as I think my interpretation will obscure her main intentions.
Please read it - hugely intriguing and conceptual! You will find more of
her work
here.
"...because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be
impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated
articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human
existence.
-Hannah Arendt
In all of
my prints, I collect things that I've cut out
from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds.
The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were
ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of
view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny,
reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view,
the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue
rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people
were here.
At the same time, like any photograph, satellite imagery is also
immediately an image of the past. That is, to look at satellite imagery
is to look not only down upon ourselves but back in time, even if only
by a matter of hours or days. In recording the moment at which things as
bizarre as water parks and racetracks covered the earth, the photograph
also implies that moment's own passing, encoding each tiny structure
with vulnerability and pre-emptive nostagia. My desire to collect these
pieces stems not only from the fascination of any collector but from a
wish to save these low-resolution, sporadically-updated pixels--these
strange pictures of ourselves--from time and the ephemerality of the
internet."
