Rebuilding Earth as an Art Media

Spatial Consciousness and Information Globalization in Google Earth

Moyi Zhang

Art History

Professor Gerar Edizel and Elizabeth Dobie

May 10, 2009

“Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out

and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the

clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the

seashore.”1

This is the vision from a science-fiction novel called “Snow Crash” by Neal

Stephenson published in 1992. Today, however, a free software Google Earth makes

it totally possible to everyone. Google acquired the company called Keyhole, in 2004

that developed the mapping program called Earth Viewer when it was first released.

It was renamed Google Earth later. It makes a person feel omnipotent in the world

and able to navigate the world at will. It is a program displays superimposed images

provided by satellite, allowing users to visually see the earth resting in space and

looking closely to the cities, houses at different angles. Through this access, users

are able to gather mapping and geographic information of the address typed into the

program. The first attempts at this revolutionary concept utilizing 3D triangulation

photography and CAD created a computer-simulated environment which is a mirror

world, a hybrid space in between, – a representation of the earth we are living in.

“Flying around the world” is my recent piece working with Google Earth. It

almost makes one of my biggest dreams to become true through the process of this

traveling. I put myself, my body, my vision into this virtual globe, seeing the “earth”

consistently from a certain height. The 10h 20mins video starts in Beijing all the

way to the west. It is actually a journey without a beginning or an end. It could goes

1 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, (Random House, Inc., 1992), 267.

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on forever by doing this circle traveling. It also has no stops and destinations along

the way. I meet whatever comes to me. Where I am and what I present is not

important anymore. The person who is actually seeing it becomes the one who is

flying there. The spacious dimension of the vision extends the consciousness from

here to elsewhere. Seeing the earth as us, the body is finally abandoned. It allows us

to be infinitely large and infinitely small. It mixes fear and a sense of wonder. The

geographical environment during the journey is gradually transforming through

time. Also, we could see the division between really detailed imagery of the earth

and the imagery roughly represented by 3D graphic based on the population of the

region. Both of them are photographed in different time and composed together.

They are relatively real or not real in comparison with the actual earth. There is no

border or territory. The viewer experiences time by traveling through spaces, like

the ocean, the desert or even a small town. The emptiness of the space is full of

possibilities for every creature. But, at the same time, we have to be aware that we

are not seeing the actual earth but a digital representation of the globe. It is an

interface of software. The viewer is connected to them by the action of watching and

flying. The imagery we perceive is already there. It is already what it is. The user

could unlimited access to this space, a space opened up in time.

When I compare Google Earth with a map, they are both geographical

information system that make me think maps as a part of the history of Google

Earth. They are both geographic visualization of an actual space or an environment.

A map is a static two-dimensional representation of a space. “It is a selection of

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concepts from a constantly changing database of geographic information.”2 “A map

is much more than a mere reduction, however. If well made, it is a carefully

designed instrument for recording, calculating, displaying, analyzing and, in general,

understanding the interrelation of things in their spatial relationship. Nevertheless,

its most fundamental function is to bring things into view.”3 Mapmaking has been

integrated in the story of human history up to 8,000 years.

As far as we know, the oldest maps are found on a clay tablets in Babylonian

from about 2300 B.C. when the art and science of making maps was considered

most advanced in ancient Greece. Spherical Earth has been accepted widely by

Greek philosophers and geographers by the time of Aristotle. During Medieval Time,

Relegations has dominated the views and concept of maps which called T-O map in

Europe. It is a map format put Jerusalem at the center and east on the top of the

map. During that time, maps were made and illuminated all by hand. By the time of

Renaissance, maps were much more widely used in the virtue of the invention of

printing which started at 15th century. At first, carved wooden blocks were being

used in printing maps. In 1540, the map made by Sebastian Münster living in Basel

(Switzerland) became a new standard for global maps. In the 16th century, maps

were printed with engraved copper plates appeared as the standard maps until the

time when photographic techniques were invented. In order to meet the

requirements of navigation, maps started to include coastlines, islands, rivers,

harbors and mark some of the interest locations for sailing. They also depicted the

2 Shiba Prasad Chatterjee, Prithvish Nag, National Atlas & Thematic Mapping Organisation (India), Prof., Geography and applied cartography, (Govt. of India, Dept. of Science & Technology, National Atlas & Thematic Mapping Organisation, 2003), 23.3 Third Edition, Elements of Cartography, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1969), 2.

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compass lines and navigation aids. Later on, the new way of map projections were

developed. The globes were also constructed and being used. The whole-world

voyages at first by Columbus began to happen followed by the worldwide map’s

appearance in the early 16th century. The first true world map utilized an expanded

Ptoemaic projection which credited to Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 first use

“America” to name this new land for the world. The leading cartographer of the mid

16th century called Gerardus Mercator of Flanders (Belgium) published a world map

developed cylindrical projection that was pervaded after it. From 17th to 19th

centuries, the development of science and geography and the applications of

measurement devices dramatically influence the concept of map and make the map

being increasingly precise and factual.4

Looking back to the history of maps and cartography. Maps no matter on paper

or globe, have stimulated, assisted and recorded man’s endeavors to explore the

world. Besides the prime geographical purpose for maps, it is also an essential

document for identifying the locations of places in relation to each other. The

development of modern map making is a compendium of men’s abilities and

experiences, providing vivid records of that period of history. We can see that maps

are never the realistic representation of the actual world. Even though maps are

easily understood and appreciated by most of the people. The blankness of

knowledge could be filled according to men’s imagination and certain assumptions

about the world so that they are able to make a whole map. Photogrammetry which

used in Google Earth is a remote sensing technique that gather and process data

4 James S. Aber, “Brief History of Maps and Cartography”, 2008, http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm

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about physical environment without physical contact. Visible information are

identified, evaluated, measured and interpreted on the imagery. Even the land cover

is produced directly from photographic. The aerial photographs and satellite images

still can’t avoid being inaccurate. They can’t portray every portions of the light

spectrum, as the light spectrum has to be observed through aerial mapping camera.

Also Google Earth is comprised cartography models that consisted estimated values

at some locations where measurement and data are not available so that the

computer has to extract some main characteristics and process them into a

continuous spatial information. From hand making, printed media to globe model

and virtual globe, the errors of the media themselves are various. “Maps are

abstractions which are also extremely realistic; they picture the world without

mirroring it. Maps are an instantly recognizable form of communication…”5

In Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation, he says: “Today abstraction is no

longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer

that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models

of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the

map, nor survives it…it is the map that precedes the territory…”6

In another words, I could say that simulation of the map extinguishes “the

reality”, the simulation; the representational imaginary of the Earth is not

substituted for the “reality” but becomes the reality by itself. The conclusion has

been made seems odd to many people because it reflects people’s confusion upon

5 Roberta Smith, 4 artists and the map, image/process/data/place, (Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, 1981), 5.6 Jean Baudrillard, Simulation, (The MIT press, 1983), 1.

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the definition of “reality”. Does reality has to be perceived by our direct, personal

experience? Is our visual experience telling us what is the “true reality”?

Grand illusion theory believes that the visual world is all a grand illusion, if we

think we have a rich and detailed stream of pictures passing through our

consciousness one after the other, we must be wrong.

Scientists had made the conclusion that the gaps within the scenes

represented internally can be filled by the human brain. As vision scientist Stephen

Palmer writes, “We fail to experience any sensory gap at the blind spot.”

Canadian psychogist Ronald Rensink argues that the visual system never

builds complete and detailed representation of the world at all, not even during

fixations. Instead, it builds up representations of single objects, one at a time, as our

attention shifts around. Whenever we attend to something, its representation is

created and maintained for some time, but when we stop attending it loses its

coherence and falls back into a soup of separate features. He explains that the

reason we get the impression of a rich visual world is because a new representation

can always be made just in time by looking again.7

Psychologist Kevin O’Regan and philosopher Alva Noë goes even further in

demolishing our ordinary ideas about visual awareness. They take a fundamentally

new approach in which vision is not about building internal representations at all,

but is a way of acting in the world. Vision is about mastering the sensory-motor

contingencies – that is, knowing how your own actions affect the information you

7 Susan Blackmore, Consciousness, very short introduction, (Oxford University Press Inc, 2005), 63.

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get back from the world, and interacting with the visual input to exploit the way it

changes with eye movements, body movements, blinks, and other actions. In other

words, seeing is action. On this view, vision is not about building representations of

the world; instead seeing, attending, and acting all become the same thing. On this

view, what you see is those aspects of the scene that you are currently ‘visually

manipulating’. If you don’t manipulate the world you see nothing. When you stop

manipulating some aspect of the world it drops back into nothingness.8

If we believe our perception of “reality” and our whole relation to it are fully

real, and virtual extinguishes reality, which is not real, but displays the full qualities

of the real, like a reflection in a mirror. Then we have to question that by the theory

of grand illusion.

Henri Bergson (1896) left us a conception of virtuality more profound than the

standard notions we have today. Individual Perception, he stated, is virtual action.

Bergson describes “virtual” as the realm of pure memory, a discontinuous

collection of images. Our sense of reality is not combined by external perception and

instantaneous visions of the real, but, in fact, there is nothing for us that are

instantaneous. There is always some work of our memory goes by in our

consciousness and prolongs into our perception. It is including endless number of

moments and endless time.9

There is not a fundamental division between mediated consciousness by

memory or technology. They are equally “real” since reality is nothing but the

8 Susan Blackmore, Consciousness, very short introduction, (Oxford University Press Inc, 2005), 64.

9 referenced by Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, (Courier Dover Publications, 2004), 76.

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mediation of images. Our relationship to an image is simultaneously virtual and

actual. Gilles Deleuze believes that this dual image is the “nucleus” of reality.

When he talks about cinema, he states that: “the actual image and its virtual

image which carries everything, and serves as internal limit. We have seen how, on

the broader trajectories, perception and recollection, the real and the imaginary, the

physical and the mental, or rather their images, continually followed each other,

running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of

indiscernibility. ”10

He also discussed movement-image in a way that shows links to the theory of

Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë. The movement-image has two sides. The positions are

in space, but the “whole” that changes is in time. “In the movement-image, time is

subordinate to movement, as the rhythm of an ordered sequence of shots that

follow physical movement.”11 Bergson argues that: “the interval of movement was

no longer that in relation to which the movement-image was specified as

perception-image, at one end of the interval, as action-image at the other end, and as

affection-image between the two, so as to constitute a sensory-motor whole. On the

contrary the sensory-motor link was broken, and the interval of movement

produced the appearance as such of an image other than the movment-image.”12

“In the time-image, movement is subordinate to time, as the interval created

by non-sequential, discontinuous camera movement, cutting, and splicing becomes

the direct presentation of time.”13 Take montage as an example. It “is thus essentially

10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The time-image, (U of Minnesota Press, 1989), 69.11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The time-image, (U of Minnesota Press, 1989), 34.12 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The time-image, (U of Minnesota Press, 1989), 34.13 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The time-image, (U of Minnesota Press, 1989), 127.

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segmented shots relating to each other under the broad exigencies of narrativity

and the order imposed upon narrative by the ideology of the film.“14 Montage

practice sought not merely to represent the real but, also, to extend the idea of the

real to something not yet seen, Montage offers a kaleidoscopic expanded vision

which, by collapsing many views into montage replaces the image of a continuous

life glimpsed through a window fame-the heritage of the fine arts since the

Renaissance-with an image, or set of re-assembled images, that reflect a fast-acted,

multifaceted reality seamlessly suited to a synthesis of twentieth century

documentary, desire and utopian idealism.”15 “It is montage itself which constitutes

the whole, and thus gives us the image of time. It is therefore the principal act of

cinema. Time is necessarily before and what is after…Perhaps it is necessary to

make what is before and after the film pass inside it in order to get out of the chain

of presents.” 16

By this sense, in fact, prior to the presence of media technology, the virtual

images had always mediated by human consciousness. Following the new media

theory about cinema in understanding digital representation as a remediation or

reframing of old media via the computer interface, Google Earth would be an

evolution of cinema.

Cinema is a media which condense space and movement into time. Space and

duration are being shown by a rate of 24 frames per second. It is a sequence of

multiplicity of temporality. Immersed in cinematic images as a viewer, subjectivity

14 Ron Burnett, Cultures of vision: images, media, and the imaginary, (Indiana University Press, 1995), 123.15 Matthew Teitelbaum, Montage and Modern Life 1919-1942, (The MIT Press, 1992), 8.16 David Norman Rodowick , Gilles Deleuze's time machine, (Duke University Press, 1997), 11.

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is something that does not belong to us, but it is time that creates the work of

consciousness, the sense of subjectivity. Deleuze thinks that the time-image is

simulacrum. Time is the spirit of virtuality.

For Google Earth, it is a world of geographically referenced information, a

visual presentation of already-mediated information, aerial photo, graphic computer

diagram and territories and boundaries of the map. It also contains multiple user-

generated multimedia simultaneously as a database.

Time is not shown in a fixed sequence of movement in space. The perspective

of the visual camera moves according to the decision and action of the user, which

allows us to visually see the space as we want. The camera moves, the uploaded

information comes and the data being renewed. In cinema, a director or a filmmaker

controls the movement, but in Google Earth, movement is controlled by the

tendency in a direction of the user and their reaction within the parameters

determined by computer interface. Google Earth becomes a cinematic apparatus

functioning as a camera without any limitations to access to this kind of panoramic

space.

In the book called “Virtual reality in geography” by David John Unwin and

Peter Fisher, they describe this kind of software like Google Earth as PanoraMap.

“PanoraMap adds visualization functionality to the virtual environment by

providing an interface through which geometric and attribute data can be loaded,

shading area or point symbols according to data values and allowing successive

variables to be selected and suitable interactive graphics produced.”17 The term

17 David John Unwin, Peter Fisher, Virtual Reality in Geography, (CRC Press, 2002), 82.

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panorama derived from the Greek, it literally means “see all”. A panorama is

continuous circular representation, a wide-angle of a physical space. It has been

widely used in painting, photography, film and 3D model. It is a pictorial space

totalization about all-seeing and all-knowing. One of the most famous Chinese

paintings: “Along the River During Ching Ming Festival” (1085-1145) is a good

example of Panorama painting. Actually the story would starts at cave art which a

static imagery that relied upon the viewing person to animate the spirit or soul in

them. The panorama was commonly used in the nineteenth century refers to a

circular painting exhibited inside of a rotunda wall, covered by a cupola or cone-

shape roof. They usually have to be true life that they could be confused with

“reality”. “Having walked along a corridor and up a staircase darkened to make them

forget the landmarks of their city, visitors reached a platform surrounded by a ramp

to stop them from going too near the canvas, so that it might, ‘from all pats it could

be viewed, have its proper effect’ the lighting was natural, emanating from the top,

but its source was concealed by a roof or veil that made it impossible to see beyond

the upper edge of the canvas, while a fence or other natural objects masked the

lower edge. Everything was arranged so that nothing extraneous could encroach

upon the display and disturb the spectator’s field of vision. Such was the paradoxical

status of the panorama: an enclosed area open to a representation free of all worldly

restricitons.”18 They can also be classified as immersive experiences. It’s also

nothing beyond virtual reality. Further, the motion-picture term was originally

come from “panorama”.

18 Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1999), 7.

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There are usually three themes in panorama. one is express the perceptual and

representational fantasies. It reflects men’s desire of having control of sprawling

collective space. The second one is emerged into a view of history story such as a

war, focused on heroes in the military and momentous events. In this case,

panorama has been used as a propaganda machine which simulate the movement

and narrate a sense of time. The last theme is emerged into a landscape as a trip to

historic cities or distant lands which also a theme in travel cinema. The appearance

of panorama greatly challenged the tradition idea of landscape painting within a

signal frame. After Van Gogh having seen Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s panorama of the

beach at Scheveningen which also often painted by himself, he said that: “…the only

fault of this canvas is that it doesn’t have one.” No one knows if this is a compliment

or a reproach. An article published in the Journal in 1830 criticized: “What we do

not want to see in artistic productions is a complete imitation of nature.” However,

in fact, panorama is definitely not an imitation of nature. The composition has to be

a rediscovering a perfection of balance, rhythm and selection thought to be absent

from real nature and organized into a given function or structure in order to present

a story, a event or a perfect landscape. Also, as a viewer in panorama, he or she has

to complete the work of artist by participation. “It is we who complete his work; it is

our imagination that will add movement, that will bring the spark of life to

masterpiece of art.”19 Later, another two kinds of panorama were created, one is

diorama developed by Daguerre. It combines the lightings through transparent

layers and complementary colors to create a sense of movement. It is such a great

19 Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1999), 97.

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attempt to create movement in still imageries. The time and space totally depend on

the motion of the viewers. The other one is moving panorama first made in London

in 1800. The spectators can watch an unrolled long canvas go through a small

window so that the boundaries will disappear. It’s like a cinema with a sustained

liner timeline carries a liner movement in a fixed landscape. Time and space exist

coherently. Actually, there is another kind of panoramic viewpoint could be seen at

one glance, it is the Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s “Circular View of Mountains Seen

from the Top of the Buet Glacier” from his Voyages dans les Alpes in 1776. It is a

circular representation like sphere planet on the flat paper that could be drawn as

an orientation plan and later being called a horizontal panorama. “…must imagine

that they are at the centre of the drawing, and with their imagination enlarge on

what see from this centre and, turning the drawing, inspect all these parts. In this

way, they will see how, one after another, all the objects are linked together and

exactly how they appear to the observer who stands at the top of the mountain.”20

Later soon, painted panorama has been displaced by panoramic photography as a

very common media to create wide view presentation. In the later 20C, the old

image stitching process has been greatly simplified by digital photography. Stitched

images even being used in crude virtual reality movies, such as QuickTime VR

(QRVR).

I think I could find a lot of connections between QTVR Panorama and Google

Earth. They are both interactive mapping system, stitching photographs into a 360-

degree virtual space. Also they are both omni-directional panoramas of the world.

20 Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1999), 82.

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The difference is, a QTVR Panorama allows the viewer to look outside, people are

inside of the object or the image and surrounded by them. In Google Earth, we are

able to keep a distance to the earth and look into something around the object

unless we get closer to the top of the surface and immersive into the environment.

The way of the observation conversed. Man's continuing attempts to make more and

more realistic records of the world is not only happening in nowadays. So if we

believe virtual reality is totally a new term belongs to modern society, we must be

wrong.

Cinema is also trying to create a wider space beyond the border of the screen.

It starts at the moving camera shots in the early panoramic travel cinema. First, they

allowed a broader view of the landscape. Second, the actual movement seems to

carry the viewer into the image, as Charles Musser has called the “spectator as

passenger convention”. A moving camera creates a sort of stereoscopic illusion as

the movement of objects within the visual field provides another depth cue. They

created a new way of perception mediated by technology and motion. Wolfgang

Schivelbusch is a German scholar of cultural studies calls this new mode of

perception “panoramic”. “Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional

perception, no longer belongs to the same space as the perceived objects: the

traveler sees the landscape, objects, etc. through the apparatus which moves him

through the world.” 21

“Finally, movement is also redefined as that which subordinates the

description of space to the functions of thought.”22 Alfred Hitchcock’s premonition

21 Suren Lalvani , Photography, vision, and the production of modern bodies, (SUNY Press, 1996), 80.22 David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s time machine, (Duke University Press, 1997), 83.

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will come true: “a camera consciousness … would no longer be defined by the

movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to

enter into. And it becomes questioning, responding, objecting, provoking,

theorematizing, hypothesizing, experimenting, in accordance with the open list of

logical conjunctions (’or,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘if,’ ‘because,’ ‘actually,’ ‘although…’) or in

accordance with the functions of thought in a cinema-vérité [cinema of truth] which

as Rouch says, means rather truth of cinema.” 23

In the digital environment framed by a computer interface, a purely synthetic

time-space mapping cyberspace is subordinate to attention and the commands of

the user. The camera seems to grow a brain in the form of seeing from various

points of views, and this is what the user manipulates and perceives. It’s not

extensions of people’s senses, but of their mind in relation to the senses; it changes

our relationship to information in a fundamental way. This is a technology that

permits the active use of the body in the search for knowledge within the

environment. In the computer-simulated environment, the study of mechanisms of

body representation in the environment considers body representation not only as

a body in the brain but progressively more and more as a body in space, or even a

body in action space.24 As Vivian Sobchack (an American cinema and media theorist

and cultural critic) has written, “electronic space constructs objective and

superficial equivalents to depth, texture and invested bodily movement”. 25 The

digital representation of the environment has opened a new relationship between

23 Edward Branigan, Projecting a camera, (CRC Press, 2006), 206.24 Günther Knoblich, Marc Grosjean, Maggie Shiffrar, Human body perception from the inside out, (Oxford University Press US, 2006), 4.25 John Thornton Caldwell, Electronic media and technoculture, (Rutgers University Press, 2000), 151.

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the body and space. One has to imagine how the body can look if viewed from a

given perspective. “The history of art exemplifies a complex set of negotiations

between body and space - negotiations between the actual domain of the real body

of the viewer and the real space he inhabits and the virtual domain of the

represented body and represented spaces. The contemporary body in space is no

longer the classical model. Ours is a vertiginous location - suspended upside down

(Baselitz), launched into space (Klein), declared as obsolete (Stelarc) and now

seemingly superhumanly re-embodied in Cyberspace and superhumanly re-united

in Netspace. (The Dis-Embodied Re-Embodied Body)”26 A commonly belief that the

technology of virtual reality draws the consciousness out of the body and into an

electronic space, yet for me the experience of “virtual body” is just an experience of

extending the physical body, not losing or substituting it. Sobchack also writes that

the deflated space “presents this new electronic subjectivity and terminal space as

nearly ‘absolute’. For most of the film almost everything and everyone have mutated

into a simulation, and the category of the ‘real’ (that narrative ‘real world’

mainframing the computer program world is short-circuited and loses power.

Simulation seems the only mode and space of being.”27 She further notes that the

film exemplifies Baudrillard’s proclamation the medium no longer exists in its

strictest sense, because everywhere there is only immixture.

The “actual image” and “virtual image” of some of the locations in Google

Earth are always porous. They are being digitally marked, documented and ignored

26 Jeffrey Shaw, Manuela Abel, Anne-Marie Duguet, Heinrich Klotz, Peter Weibel, Jeffrey Shaw: a user's manual, from expanded cinema to virtual reality, (Edition ZKM, 1997), 155.27 Scott Bukatman, Terminal identity: the virtual subject in postmodern science fiction, (Duke University Press, 1993), 223.

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based on multiple purposes of the users. A simulation of the original give us

information and data of the “original” contain no inherent spatial properties

mapped into a defined spatial framework so that providing striking and powerful

images that give people a unique sense of the space and give people a new

understanding of the Earth. This is what we mean when we repeat Deleuze’s theory

of virtual and actual as “distinct but indiscernible.” Cyberpunk is concerned with

“models of social order and disorder, narrative structures based on perception and

spatial exploration: and…a mapping of compacted, decentered, highly complex

urban spaces.”28

The reason why I am interested in Google Earth is because it is not only

simulating the effects of the reality we normally perceive but a further study of

reality. It approaches the simulation rather than the abstract referential marking of

real space as maps. It is a new form of visual experience and information

visualization. This kind of computer vision has changed both the world and human

perception of the world. The distance between direct experience and the view

framed by the digital interface disappeared. The notion of reality and visuality have

been deeply inspired by the technology of the computing device.

From my research, there are even more possibilities supported by Google

Earth are being explored very recently.

First, Ancient Rome has been reconstructed on Google Earth. The model

includes more than 6,700 buildings and more than 250 key sites in different

languages. "The project is a continuation of five centuries of research by scholars,

28 Scott Bukatman, Terminal identity: the virtual subject in postmodern science fiction, (Duke University Press, 1993), 142.

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architects and artists since the Renaissance, who have attempted to restore the

ruins of the ancient city with words, maps and images," said Bernard Frischer of the

University of Virginia, which worked with Google on the Roman reconstruction. Joel

Myers, chief executive of Google Earth said: "Cultural heritage, although based in the

past, lives in the present, as it forms our identity.

Also, Google finally moves beyond the land to simulate the ocean so that

people can drive into the sea and explore its vast surface and depths. Users can

swim like a dolphin or follow a path of a whale shark. "Now anyone in just a few

minutes can understand what it has taken me 50 years to understand, that the ocean

really matters, that in fact the world is blue." Said Earle, who has struggled for

decades to find a way to connect the public to the ocean. It seeks to inspire the

global consciousness of the wholeness of the Earth and develop a systems thinking

associate with mind, learning, memory…we have to aware that we are not in

individual organisms but also in social systems and ecosystems. "Without

geography, you are nowhere." A geographer said. Then I would say, without system

thinking or global consciousness, you might not understand who you are.

Another feature being released in the new version of Google Earth is

historical imagery that allows you to go back in time through decades of satellite

images and observe changes to our planet. It creates a new insight and a new depth

on this represented world. It is not a single snapshot of the earth surface any more

but a rich imagery within the historical context of the place. It is a possible way of

time traveling through electronic memory.

What is particularly interesting is adding user-generated data into Google

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Earth. Especially it allows users to use Google SketchUp to build, modify, share 3D

models of buildings. Like human artifacts found in Fossil Beds, human artifacts are

also found in this digital represented world. They reveal things about human

activities around this digital space and become the evidence of our present on this

virtual globe. They will be preserved, accumulated, revised and deleted based on the

updating changes of the world we are living in. It is a parallel world in the

cyberspace. So it is clear that Google Earth is not just a data visualization platform

but also a dynamic environment involving interactions and exchanging of

information. It is entering into the same territory as Second Life. What if Google

Earth takes the next step toward Second Life? Build an alternative 3D universe

where you can interact with other people through the Internet by building avatars

who represent yourself in that represented world; to recreate of another terrains

but not only a mirror world we could live in.

Further more, we can watch Google Earth models in our hands now.

ARSights, a project by Inglobe Technologies, an Italian company specialized in the

development of Virtual and Augmented Reality applications create a way of

integrating digital content in physical world. ARSights aims at visualizing Google

Earth 3D models using augmented reality technology. It deals with the combination

of “real-world” and computer-generated data. The most important characteristic is

the way that transforms face-to-screen interaction to the whole environment.

Augmented reality is about augmentation of human perception. One important

application of augmented reality is for exploring the spatial information systems of

urban environments or planetary environments in space.

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The goal of this research around the issue of human body perception in

terms of the technology of virtual reality and the spatial consciousness in

conjunction with sense of time within a mapping cyberspace is not only exploring

the possibilities of new technology but also having a deeper insight of what is reality

and our relationship to it. Further, use the planetary dimension of the earth as an

artistic medium and understand the telecommunications revolution to the

information globalization of all spheres of human activity would be very helpful for

my future works too.

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