When browsing the globe through Google Earth, Brooklyn-based artist and programmer, Clement Valla, noticed that every now and then, there are a series of disjointed images, where the landscape seems to buckle and warp, distorting Google Earth’s ordinarily seamless representation.

He began to collect screenshots of these glitches and soon realized that these were not errors, but just a logical result of the system.

Valla explains the disruptions as an edge condition: “an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They reveal a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources constantly updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion; Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation.”

The collected images can be viewed on a dedicated website called www.postcards-from-google-earth.com

- A.Morris