Satellite Collections incorporates a brilliant use of readily available tools and resources to create thought provoking statements on what is important in our physical and digital landscape. Jenny Odell has used Google Satellite view, available to anyone with an internet connection, and turned a tool made for navigation into a design program. Jenny cuts and pastes interesting objects or “hieroglyphs” from her aerial searches and pastes them together into beautiful compositions that help express the fact that we do not see these objects. They are not meant to be seen. And when they are out of context, broken down to basic shapes, and categorized into digital prints we can see their importance. From this moment forward, we take note of what they are and what they represent. Read her statement:
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.
jenny odell • satellite collections.
