Version ControlSeth Ellis

Recently, in researching a site-specific project, I came across a glitch in Google Street View. I was searching for the Elks Lodge that used to be a farmhouse owned by the Ford family in Dear-born, MI. In fact, the Elks Lodge had been demolished within the past year, and replaced by a Tim Hortons. Google, having passed that way since then, recorded the absence of the Lodge, and thus the fact that it had ever existed passed out of Google’s eye.

However, an accidental artifact remains in Street View. From one particular spot on the road, if we move in one particular direction, the perspective changes to that of an older photo-graph, taken six years earlier: the Tim Hortons disappears, and the Elks Lodge returns. In the next step, we are back in (the photographs of) 2013, and the Lodge is gone again.

This sudden accidental time travel throws into relief the mas-sive act of erasure constantly enacted by Street View, by the

fig 1: In 2013, a Google vehicle drove down this road with a ring of fifteen 5-megapixel sensors, with custom-built lenses.

Media-N, Spring 2015: v.11 n.01

2 - Media-N vol. 11 no. 1

simple effort of remaining up to date. Saving over one’s previ-ous work erases the history of edits one has performed; in this case, the work is the common landscape, and the history of edits is the identity of place embedded in that landscape, now hidden, and perhaps unavailable to view, behind the seamless surface of street-level imagery.

Since Street View launched in 2007, Google has gone to con-siderable lengths to improve the accuracy of the images they capture, which includes not only increasingly comprehensive coverage, but improvements to the image-capturing technolo-gy array—from commercial lenses to custom-designed equip-ment, from an array of 8 sensors on each car to 15. Each sub-sequent pass by Google’s vehicles replaces the “bugs” of the previous version: bad stitches, inaccurate positioning, inade-quate image coverage. The resulting version, the “real” image of the landscape, is (notionally) a seamless surface representation of the physical landscape as it exists.

Among the “bugs” that are smoothed away, however, are the historical quirks and previous versions of the physical land-scape itself. In 2014 Google launched a feature that allows users to browse “historical” imagery in Street View – that is, previous imagery captured by Google itself. But this organizes the past into tidy layers, an impervious surface peeling back to reveal another impervious surface. More revealing is the occasional technical imperfection, a digital scar that replicates the physi-cal scars of the lived-in landscape. Street View depends for its reputation on the closeness of its relationship with objective reality: its constant updates, its apparently seamless stitching, its almost-omnidirectional coverage of the landscape. The re-sult, or at least Google’s aim, is an unquestioned trustworthi-ness, the assumption that Street View is showing what’s really there. What’s really there, however, is not a tidy organization of historical layers, but a series of distinct nodes, each accreting historical narratives as they go, each butting up uncomfortably against the next.

Version Control - 3

fig 2: In 2007, a Google vehicle drove down this road equipped with a ring of eight 11-megapixel sensors, with commercial lenses. The driver wasn’t really sure what he was doing, and drove too fast.

fig 3: In 2013, Angie, who works at the Tim Hortons now, told us about the parties she used to go to at the Elks lodge, back when she worked at the club down the street.

fig 4: In 1952, the women’s hospital, now tired and obsolete, struggled to justify its existence.

4 - Media-N vol. 11 no. 1

In the 1850’s a farm was built on this site, right on what was then the Chicago Road. In the early 20th century, Henry and Clara Ford bought the property; after summering here for sev-eral years, Henry converted the farm into a home for orphaned boys. Here the boys would be trained in the skills they would need to move into Ford’s factories when they were grown.

A few years later, Henry moved his training program into the factory itself, and Clara took over the property, turning it into a home for wayward women – that is, single mothers. These women too were trained in respectable productivity, this time in the form of domestic skills. In later years, the home became a women’s hospital; in the 1950’s, the hospital shut down, and the property was sold to the Elks.

Productivity, usefulness, paternal benevolence; this has always been a scripted site. Indeed it has always been a site of culti-vation: cultivated land, cultivated people, a cultivated image of what it means to be an American town. The Fords’ benevolent social programs always had a strong impulse towards Ameri-canization, teaching new immigrants (of which there were many) to be good Americans, productive citizens.

Today the site is a part of a seamless American exurban land-scape – the Chicago Road is now Michigan Avenue, a divided highway like any other in the nation. This corporatized exurb, carefully uninscripted with anything but itself, is a portal into a reliable narrative space. One Tim Hortons is the same as any Tim Hortons; they are designed to be reassuringly interchange-able. The carefully seamless Street View, with its narrative voice of authenticity, reinforces this sameness of place.

Version Control - 5

fig 5: In 1914, George Brady graduated from the Valley Farm Home for Homeless Boys, and went right to work at Ford’s Highland Park plant.

fig 6: In 1928, Clarissa Deneski learned to sew at the home for wayward mothers. Her child had died, but they let her stay on anyway.

fig 7: In 2030, a bridal boutique opened on the grounds of the old Elks lodge. The Dearborn Historical Society, who had finally raised the money to reconstruct the old Valley Farm build-ing, protested.

6 - Media-N vol. 11 no. 1

If we poke behind the Street View curtain, we become aware not only of what was there, but of what wasn’t there. Of all the things that happened on this site in its first hundred and fif-ty years, the presence of an African-American was not among them; for most of the twentieth century Dearborn was a sun-down town. Similarly, there was long an understanding that the Chicago Road was built on what was originally the Great Sauk Trail, but this is untrue; before white settlers, the Sauk-Fox people moved through this territory, but not here, and the wide avenue we can glimpse under our notional feet in Street View is not a trace of their presence.

How can we keep ourselves aware of the jumbled repository of history, of the things that happened on this site, and the things that were criminal by their absence? One way to move past the curtain of Street View’s implacable accuracy is to smear it into recognizability, to reduce the current moment to the smoothest possible canvas, as I’ve done here. This further act of digital erasure turns the Street View surface into the base of a palimpsest, onto which we can re-inscribe our history. This is necessarily a speculative act, but a powerful one; the past ex-ists only as our speculation, after all. The very technology on which Street View is based works against this truth; its focus on seamlessness forms a rhetorical appeal to authority, in the form of “fidelity” to physical presence on this site. This is in itself an unexamined act of erasure, hiding the mechanism as an act of technical prowess. But it’s in the seams that history accretes. The occasional mistake, the scar of a technical glitch, reminds of this, but we need to go further, to pry open this seam and look inside.

Version Control - 7

fig 8: In 1859, Alfred Gulley built his farm here. The land was low and damp, and in the sum-mer months his son Orrin was often chased home through the woods by clouds of mosquitos.

fig 9: In 1911, Henry Ford gave Jerry Wolfe, a boy who lived here, a dog. But Ford didn’t really like dogs, and later he paid a farmhand $5 to shoot it.