Vittoria Di Palma Zoom.Pdf

122 Chapter 12 2 3 4 5 6 7 Zoom 8 9 Google Earth and Global 10 1 2 Intimacy 3 4 Vittoria Di Palma 522 6 7 8 By the help of our modern knowledge we may imagine the approach 9 to the earth as it would appear to one of us if he were permitted to 20 fly like Raphael through inter-stellar space. It would first become 1 visible as a mere point of light, then as a remote planet appears to 2 us; after that it would shine and dazzle like Venus; then we should 3 begin to see its geography as we do that of the moon; and at last, 4 when we come within three terrestrial diameters, or about twenty 5 thousand miles, we should distinguish the white icy poles, the vast 6 blue oceans, the continents and larger islands glistening like gold in 7 the sunshine, and the silver-bright wandering fields of cloud. Nearer 8 still, we should see the fresh green of Britain and Ireland, the dark 9 greens of Norwegian and Siberian forests, the greyer and browner 302 hues of countries parched by the sun, the shining courses of the 1 great rivers. All this would be intensely, inconceivably interesting; it 2 would be an unparalleled experience in the study of physical 3 geography, but it would not yet be landscape. On a still nearer 4 approach we should see the earth as from a balloon, and the land 5 would seem to hollow itself beneath us like a great round dish, but 6 the hills would be scarcely perceptible. We should still say, ‘It is not 7 landscape yet.’ At length, after touching the solid earth, and looking 8 round us, and seeing trees near us, fields spread out before, and 9 blue hills far away, we should say, ‘This, at last, is landscape. It is 40 not the world as the angels may see it from the midst of space, but 1 as men see it who dwell in it, and cultivate it, and love it. 2 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Landscape (1885)1

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In June 2005, Google launched its ‘3-D interface to the planet’, Google Earth. With Google Earth, users can fly from Ohio to Oman, Belgrade to Beijing, inaugurating an era of virtual tourism that has, in its turn, spawned unaffiliated websites such as Google Sightseeing (motto: ‘why bother seeing the earth for real?’), which steers viewers toward particularly interesting or noteworthy views such as the ‘Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth’.2 The program also enables its users to view the earth at multiple scales: you can survey the planet from outer space, or see the roof of your own house, zooming from global to local with a few clicks of the mouse. Embedded in its layers are additional levels of information: lists of restaurants and cultural centres, local crime statistics, or accounts of eye-witness sightings of extraterrestrials, which attempt to supplement the global tourist’s aerial view with ‘eyes on the ground’. Google Earth was an instant success; today it is used by millions worldwide. This extraordinary popularity is not only a result of Google Earth’s accessibility – it’s easy to use and a basic version can be downloaded for free – but also because of its propensity to tap into deeply rooted and widely held fantasies of unfettered vision. Offering users the ability to pan across and zoom down onto almost any geographical location, Google Earth seems to offer unrestricted visual access to any spot on the globe. More than a digitized globe, and much more than a map, Google Earth has been called a social phenomenon. Google Earth, as a computer program, is a tool that can be used in numerous ways, both professionally, by teachers, geographers, politicians, archaeologists, lawyers or paparazzi, and recreationally, by a wider public. The visual and textual information it contains can be deployed to various ends, both ameliorative and nefarious: to argue for or against political or environmental action, to build a criminal case defending or indicting a suspect, to find the locations of neighbourhood schools and parks where children gather. However, although a great deal of information is available on Google Earth, an even greater amount is not. For example, the degree of visual resolution of major cities varies widely, with the greatest amount of coverage, unsurprisingly, concentrated on cities in North America and Western Europe. Furthermore, Google Earth’s visual configuration brings with it both possibilities and limitations. The program enables users to view cities, regions and landscapes from above, but not, at the present time, from ground level.3 In other words, Google Earth’s rendition of our planet is fundamentally conditioned by parameters inherent in the aerial view. Furthermore, its gravity-defying simulation of accelerated flight not only alters geographical relations of time and distance, but also constructs a viewer whose desire for speed, accessibility and incorporeality seem presupposed, a viewer who seems to be modelled after a disembodied eye in flight. This model has a history, as well

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122 as characteristics that are specific to the medium in which it has been realized. 2 An extended analysis would take into account both the continuities and 3 changes subsumed by this model, excavating a viewer who is defined by 4 particular representational conventions as well as conditioned by historically 5 determined aesthetic interpretations. This chapter attempts to uncover the 6 parameters defining Google Earth’s construction of its viewers, and, 7 consequently, what kind of global understanding is generated by the program’s 8 construction of the planet we inhabit: in other words, what it might mean to 9 be citizens of the imagined community of Google Earth.4 10 1 Google Earth’s digitized globe is pieced together out of a vast number of aerial 2 photographs, obtained from both satellites and lower-flying planes. Its digital 3 simulations are a ‘mosaic’ of millions of photographic ‘tiles’, which are both 4 stitched together horizontally and layered vertically.5 They present the earth as 522 it looks from above, allowing users to zoom in close to ground level and rise 6 to about 39,000 miles above the surface. The satellite photos used by Google 7 Earth come primarily from DigitalGlobe, a private company, whose satellite 8 QuickBird was launched in October 2001. Equipped with a camera and seven 9 years’ worth of fuel, QuickBird will continue to orbit the earth, at a distance of 20 450 kilometres, until its fuel runs out, capturing 75 million square kilometres 1 of the earth’s surface each year. By the time the photographs appear on 2 Google Earth, they are typically anywhere between one and three years old, 3 and are conditioned by the fact that QuickBird is programmed to chase the 4 sun so that its position always coincides with a uniform local time down on 5 the earth below.6 On Google Earth, it is usually 3 o’clock in the afternoon 6 on a sunny day. 7 In order to generate a map out of these millions of individual images, 8 7 9 Google Earth uses the General Perspective Projection. This projection enables 302 cartographers to transfer geographical information from a three-dimensional 1 object, such as a globe, to a two-dimensional surface such as a sheet of 2 paper or a screen; to do so, it utilizes a point of perspective located at a fixed 8 3 but distant position. Although the General Perspective Projection can be 4 traced back to Ptolemy’s Geographia of the second century CE, it was not until 5 recently, when the use of satellite imagery by mapmakers became widespread, 6 that the projection began to attract considered attention.9 Photographs of the 7 earth from above, whether captured by spacecraft, satellite, or airplane, have 8 a General Perspective Projection, which can be either vertical or tilted, depend- 9 ing on the position of the camera. Google Earth’s virtual map, made up of both 40 satellite and aerial views, thus incorporates both vertical and tilted General 1 Perspective Projections. 2

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The assumption of a located but distant observer is fundamental to both the General Perspective Projection and the aerial view. An aerial view has always been available to anyone willing to climb a hill or a tower, but it is Petrarch who has traditionally been identified as the first author to have recorded scaling a mountain simply because he wished ‘to see what so great an elevation had to offer’: his ascent of Mount Ventoux marks a turning point because of its predominantly visual motivation.10 Representations of such vistas – bird’s-eye views that have an elevated and oblique perspective and an extended scope – include both landscapes that have actually been seen and those (such as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s famous bird’s-eye view of Venice of 1500) that are principally artistic constructs. However, the experience of flight – attainable, for the first time, with the invention of the hot air balloon in 1783 by the Mongolfier brothers – offered a perspective distinctly different from an elevated though earthbound one.11 This novel airborne point of view was first successfully photographed in 1858 by Nadar, whose balloon excursions over Paris resulted in a visual chronicle of the city’s transformation under Haussmann: aerial photography and urban representation were joined from the very start.12 In the early years of photography, cameras were attached to all sorts of flying objects – kites, balloons – and sent up into the air to record and bring back images, but the invention of the airplane provided aerial photography with an ideal vehicle. Planes were much more easily manoeuvrable than balloons and could be flown at constant speeds; cameras could be attached and set to take sequential exposures at a rapid rate, thus documenting large areas of ground. Photographs from airplanes shot in this way could then be stitched together to form a mosaic, from which detailed maps could be generated. The strategic uses of this kind of aerial photography were first recognized by the military, and planes were flown in the First World War for reconnaissance purposes, taking photographs over enemy lines as they went. The subsequent development of aerial photography has been a continuation of this trajectory, with more powerful aircraft such as satellites and spaceships substituting for balloons and planes, and cameras with more rapid shutter speeds and colour film replacing Nadar’s messy early experiments mixing pots of chemicals in a swaying airborne basket. With advances in technology, the point of view also continued to rise. In the 1930s planes began to ascend high enough to take photographs showing the earth’s curvature, and in 1959 the first photograph of the earth from space was captured by the satellite Explorer VI. In 1966, the satellite Lunar Orbiter I succeeded in taking the first picture of the entire globe. And on 7 December 1972, the photograph known by NASA as 22727 – or, more colloquially, as ‘The Blue Marble’ – was taken by the crew of the last lunar landing mission, Apollo 17 (see Figure 12.1), providing a view of the earth whose clarity, colour and beauty have made it an icon of global representation.13

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122 12.1 ‘The Blue Marble’, 2 AS17-148-22727. 3 Image courtesy 4 of the Image Science & Analysis 5 Laboratory, NASA 6 Johnson Space 7 Center, http://eol.jsc. 8 nasa.gov. 9 10 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 The aerial view 9 Nineteenth-century accounts of ballooning expeditions, such as those by 302 1 Monck Mason, Camille Flammarion, and James Glaisher, demonstrate that 2 seeing the world from above made aeronauts reflect upon the way in which 14 3 they habitually saw the world. Many stressed that an airborne perspective 4 enabled them to see more. But it is not so much a question of seeing more, 5 as of seeing differently. From the air, context and broad relationships are more 6 apparent than the particulars of any single object: details are sacrificed in favour 7 of a more extensive panorama. Aerial views, particularly those with a vertical 8 perspective, flatten three-dimensional objects and topographic features to 9 superficial patterns of colour, line and texture.15 From above, objects reveal an 40 entirely different aspect, and well-known landmarks and landscapes become 1 defamiliarized.16 Thus, as the British aviator Sir Alan J. Cobham remarked in 2 his essay of 1929, ‘Seeing the world from the air’, ‘[w]hen looking down

243 Vittoria Di Palma vertically from an airplane, the shadows of objects are often the most important clue to their nature’.17 Many of these changes in appearance are due to the role of the intervening atmosphere. Renaissance artists – Leonardo in particular – studied the effects of atmospheric perspective and noted that objects tended to appear increasingly two-dimensional, indistinct and blue with increasing distance. However, when we become airborne, the thinning of the atmosphere as we rise affects the appearance of objects differently.18 Blue is still dominant (recall ‘The Blue Marble’) but the saturation of colours is increased because sunlight is brighter at higher altitudes. And while a blurriness of outline accompanies a terrestrial atmospheric perspective, the airborne point of view seems to endow objects with an almost uncanny clarity. In his Aeronautica of 1838, Monck Mason commented that as

the balloon continues to ascend, another scenic peculiarity begins to display itself in the vividness of contour, the remarkable sharpness of outline by which the different features in the terrestrial prospect are qualiﬁed, and which, strengthening with the increasing distance, never forsakes them so long as the objects themselves continue to be distinguishable. The roads, rivers, canals, streets, buildings, inclosures, hedges, furrows, watercourses, and all the various characteristics of rural and artiﬁcial scenery, instead of appearing obscured and rendered more indistinct by their remotion from the point of sight, seem on the contrary to augment in clearness and decision, and absolutely gain in intensity what they lose in the magnitude of their proportions.19

Even more striking is the effect of the aerial view on form: with distance, three-dimensionality becomes increasingly difﬁcult to perceive, and from a vertical perspective it disappears completely.20 Mason observed that at very high altitudes,

the whole face of nature . . . appears to have undergone a process of general equalization; the houses and the trees, the mountains and the very clouds by which they are capped, have long since been consigned to one level; all the natural irregularities of its surface completely obliterated, and the character of the model entirely superseded by that of the plan.21

This ﬂattening of form, and equalization of levels, means that the views obtainable from the air already possess the two-dimensionality of an

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122 image – an image, however, that does not conform to the principles of linear 2 perspective. Many early aeronauts, including Mason, were powerfully struck 3 by the way in which 4 5 all the objects of which [such scenes] are composed are presented 6 to the eye in the simplest manner possible as to their relative 7 position. None of the usual interference of parts, by means of 8 which alone their different stations upon the same horizontal sur- 9 face become assignable, is here to be perceived; nor any of those 10 apparent variations in their dimensions which mainly serve to 1 indicate their progressive removal from the point of sight, when 2 situated in or about the same line of visual observation. All the 3 ordinary qualifications of such scenes become, in fact, annihilated, 4 and the eye for the first time beholds a picture of nature on the 522 vastest scale, both as to size and magnificence, in the construction 6 of which none of the complicated laws of linear perspective are 7 involved.22 8 9 Mason responds to the aerial view as though it were a picture, but not a 20 perspectivally constructed one: rather, he likens the scene below to the ‘mimic 1 representations of some vast camera-obscura, in which, with all the fidelity of 2 nature itself, the most rigorous observance of proportion between the size 3 and motion of the various bodies, is combined with the most perfect delineation 4 of their minutest forms throughout every scale of decreasing magnitude, 5 until they no longer continue to be discernible’.23 Thus, what distinguished 6 the airborne view, in addition to the way in which scale was perceived, was 7 the apparent ‘motion of the various bodies’ of the scene below. Unlike the 8 famous perspectival grid illustrated by Dürer, which stilled the teeming world 9 into a framed array of objects, the camera obscura was a device that captured 302 1 and reproduced both motion and change. It was precisely this revolutionary 2 negation of perspective that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti celebrated when he 3 launched that new and most modern form of painting he christened aero- 4 pittura, proclaiming, in characteristically strident tones, ‘[w]e Futurists declare 5 that the changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality, 6 one that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by 7 earthbound perspectives’.24 Aeropittura was to be the pictorial embodiment of 8 a new, mechanical age, giving visual form to flight and motion with every 9 brushstroke. For Marinetti and his aeropittura comrades-in-arms, the airborne 40 modern age was resolutely anti-perspectival precisely because ‘the elements 1 of this new reality have no fixed point and are constructed out of perennial 2 motion itself’.25

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12.2 ‘Path of the Balloon over London (at Night), 2nd October, 1865’, James Glaisher et al., Travels in the Air (London: 1871). Courtesy of Butler Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

For Le Corbusier, as for Marinetti, the invention of the airplane inaugurated an entirely new chapter in the history of vision. In Aircraft, published in 1935, Le Corbusier credited the airplane with bringing the aerial view out from the realm of mere conjecture into that of actual sensation, endowing humans with something akin to an additional sense. The aerial view transformed the act of looking by displacing the traditional place of the viewer: from the air, Le Corbusier wrote, ‘I no longer possess an instrument which gives dimension, which makes form finite, complete, entire: my feet on the earth and my eye five feet or so above the ground’.26 This corporeal displacement that went hand-in-hand with the ‘airplane eye’ resulted in a reconfiguration of the interior life of the airborne viewer, who ‘becomes meditative: he can take

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122 refuge only in himself and in his own works’.27 With this self-absorption came 2 a striking emotional distance: ‘I understand and ponder’, Le Corbusier writes, 3 ‘I do not love’.28 4 5 6 Vision in motion 7 8 9 Flight offered airborne spectators not only a new perspective on their everyday 10 surroundings, but also an experience of vision in motion. In 1857 John Steiner 1 likened the airborne view to a panorama, where 2 3 [t]he earth itself appears literally to consist of a long series of 4 scenes, which are being constantly drawn along . . . and conveying 522 the notion that the world is an endless landscape stretched upon 6 rollers, which some invisible spirits are revolving, for his especial 7 enjoyment, while the aerial adventurer himself is unconscious of any 8 motion.29 9 20 Monck Mason was particularly struck by the visual effect of the 1 2 moment of lift-off, when the ‘aerial adventurer’ 3 4 becomes at once assailed with a mass of observations and 5 reﬂections, among which, astonishment at the unusual tranquillity 6 that accompanies alterations so rapid and so remarkable, is one of 7 the most prominent. Without an effort on the part of the individual, 8 or apparently on that of the machine in which he is seated, the whole 9 face of nature seems to be undergoing some violent and inexplicable 302 transformation. Insensible of motion from any direct impression on 1 himself, and beholding the fast retreating forms, the rapidly 2 diminishing size of all those objects which so lately were by his side, 3 an idea, almost amounting to a conviction involuntarily seizes upon 4 his mind, that the earth with all its inhabitants had, by some un- 5 accountable effort of nature, been suddenly precipitated from its 6 hold, and was in the act of slipping away from beneath his feet into 7 the murky recesses of some unfathomable abyss below. Every thing 8 in fact but himself, seems to have been suddenly endowed with 9 motion, and in the confusion of the moment, the novelty of his 40 situation and the rapidity of his ascent, he almost feels as if, the 1 usual community of sentiment between his mind and body having 2

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been dissolved, the former alone retained the consciousness of motion, whereof the latter had by some extraordinary interference been suddenly and unaccountably deprived.30

Although the airborne view presupposes a viewer who is in motion, the sensation experienced by that viewer is in fact one of motionlessness. The aeronaut, pilot, or jumbo jet passenger, rather than sensing that he or she is gliding, hurtling, circling, diving, and soaring, instead has the distinct impression that it is the landscape that is speeding by, rotating, rising, and falling as it unfurls below. Marinetti, who lauded the airplane for providing the ‘ideal hypersensitive viewpoint suspended everywhere in the infinite’, made the counter-intuitive pronouncement that ‘[t]ime and space are pulverized by the lightning recognition that the earth is dashing at great speed under the motionless airplane’.31 The apparent motion of the landscape below can be horizontal or vertical: one can either have the sensation that the landscape below is speeding past, or that it is rising and falling. Whereas horizontal movement generates an extended, mobile panorama, ascent and descent allow different aspects of the landscape to become appreciable at different scales. Mason observed that with increasing vertical distance, the scene below took on first the aspect of a model, then that of a plan, until finally, at very high elevations, it seemed to have been transformed into a ‘scene of universal disfiguration’.32 As the vertical distance between the viewer and the landscape decreased, a view that was formerly unintelligible began to attain clarity and focus, and, by degrees, what had been a ‘confused mass of illumination’ would, instead,

appear to increase in intensity, extending itself over a larger portion of the earth, and assuming a distincter form and a more imposing appearance, until at length, . . . it would gradually resolve itself into parts, and shooting out into streets, or spreading into squares, present us with the most perfect model of a town, diminished only in size.33

Mason describes this experience of the increasing visibility of detail as that of a landscape gradually coming alive, as the ‘various objects, which, seen from on high, appeared like mimic representations of an ideal world, now gradually developed themselves and assumed the character and aspect of reality’.34 It was not until the balloon was virtually brushing the tree tops, when it was only a few feet from the earth’s surface, that the landscape re-acquired ‘life and expression’. The high-altitude aerial view offered an aesthetic impression of ‘general effect’, but only at lower altitudes did the details, and the ‘charms of particular interest’ become appreciable.

248 122 12.3 ‘Path of the 2 Balloon in its 3 ascent from the 4 Crystal Palace to Epping Forest, 5 21st July, 1863’, 6 James Glaisher 7 et al., Travels in the Air (London: 8 1871). 9 Courtesy of Butler 10 Library, Columbia University in the 1 City of New York. 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 302 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2 Vittoria Di Palma

Scale 12.4 ‘Circular Effect of the Clouds’, The sequence of scales produced by changes in altitude was often accompanied James Glaisher by difficulty in making sense of what one saw, by a vision so indecipherable et al., Travels in the Air (London: that it could seem almost like blindness. The artist Margret Dreikausen has 1871). characterized the visual experience of an airborne perspective as being similar Courtesy of Butler to that of seeing forms gradually emerge from the mass of coloured brush- Library, Columbia University in the 35 strokes of an Impressionist painting as one moves away from its surface. City of New York. Mason, instead, noted that with decreasing distance what had been mere ‘mysterious appearances’ or ‘faint hallucinations’ would ‘insensibly extend themselves in space, strengthening their outlines, and becoming more definite in their forms’.36 These changes in altitude gave airborne viewers a visual experience similar to that of moving between different focal lengths, or different degrees of magnification. For Mason, the effect was akin ‘to that produced while, looking through a telescope during the process of its adjustment, the confused and shadowy features of some distant prospect are made to pass slowly through every gradation of distinctness ere the proper focus be at length obtained’.37 Comparisons such as Mason’s, which liken aerial vision to a vision assisted with artificial lenses, are to be found throughout the literature on aerial perception. Like the balloon, the airplane and the camera, telescopes and microscopes are instruments that bring the invisible into visibility. Although

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122 telescopes and microscopes differ in terms of what they do – microscopes 2 enlarge small objects while telescopes bring distant objects closer – both 3 introduce the possibility that there is much to see outside of the scope of 4 quotidian earthbound human vision, and, by doing so, position technology as 5 central to this expansion of the visual realm. More importantly, the revelation 6 of these new, formerly invisible worlds by the telescope and the microscope 7 also provoked an unavoidable awareness of the relativity of human perception 8 and scale. The expanded vision produced by these instruments made it clear 9 that the universe was not made to the measure of man, introduced the 10 possibility of a plurality of worlds, and resulted in a radical reformulation of the 1 sense of the human place in the cosmos. 2 The shattering implications of an artificially assisted vision were clear 3 even to the earliest commentators. In 1661, Joseph Glanvill saw the limitations 4 and deficiencies of human vision as proof of our fallen state, imagining, instead, 522 a prelapsarian condition in which ‘Adam needed no Spectacles’.38 For Glanvill, 6 Adam’s perfect faculties were able to furnish him instantaneously with true 7 knowledge: 8 What the experiences of many ages will scarce afford us at this 9 distance from perfection, his quicker senses could reach in a 20 moment. And whereas we patch up a piece of Philosophy from a 1 few industriously gather’d, and yet scarce well observ’d or digested 2 experiments, his knowledge was completely built, upon the certain, 3 extemporary notice of his comprehensive, unerring faculties.39 4 5 Adam’s perfect vision encompassed the far reaches of both a telescopic and 6 microscopic scale, as 7 8 [t]he acuteness of his natural Opticks . . . shew’d him much of the 9 Cœlestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilæo’s tube: And 302 ’tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of 1 the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art . . . His sight 2 could inform him whether the Loadstone doth attract by Atomical 3 Effluviums; which may gain the more credit by the consideration of 4 what some affirm; that by the help of Microscopes they have beheld 5 the subtile streams issuing from the beloved Minerall . . . Causes 6 are hid in night and obscurity from us, which were all Sun to him.40 7 8 Four years after Glanvill wrote these words, the publication of Robert Hooke’s 9 spectacular Micrographia provided the visual evidence of just how far from this 40 prelapsarian perfection he and his contemporaries had fallen. Micrographia was 1 one of the Royal Society’s first official publications, presenting the observations 2 Hooke had made with a compound microscope. The book’s exquisitely

251 Vittoria Di Palma engraved plates illustrate the wonder, variety and complexity of objects beyond the reach of human vision and secured a place for this microscopic ‘invisible world’ in the national imagination.41 Micrographia uses the question of scale as a framing device: its ﬁrst plate (Figure 12.5) investigates the concept of a point by illustrating a printed

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122 12.6 Robert Hooke, 2 Micrographia: 3 Or Some 4 Physiological Descriptions of 5 Minute Bodies 6 Made by 7 Magnifying Glasses. 8 (London: 1665), 9 plate XXXVIII. 10 © British Library Board. All Rights 1 Reserved. 435. 2 e.19. 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 302 1 2 3 4 full stop (.) (marked A) and contrasts its form as seen by the naked eye with 5 its irregular, pitted and furred magnified aspect. The book’s final plate (Figure 6 12.6) reverses this comparison, juxtaposing a view of the moon’s surface 7 through a telescope with a scale of the relative magnitude of stars, with the 8 faintest (of magnitude 14) denoted, once again, by a printed full stop. This 9 correlation between point and point, beginning and end, establishes a textual 40 circularity: we finish back where we began. Yet this journey does not leave us 1 with the neatness of a closed circle, and the correspondence between the 2 minuscule (a point) and the gigantic (a heavenly body) does not posit scale as

253 Vittoria Di Palma objective, or universal but, rather, as entirely relative. The scale from point to universe has been exploded in both directions: we have been shown that the minuscule point is, in fact, a world to be further divided and unfurled – in its magnified state it resembles nothing so much as some sort of new, dark planet – while the gigantic moon or star is equally a world in its own right, and part of a larger constellation of equally complex heavenly bodies. The point and the moon represent the limits of human vision, the utmost capacity of the naked eye. With the aid of lenses, our vision is expanded, but at a cost: Hooke’s images also make us vividly aware of the limitations of the human body and of our attempts to know.42 The implications of an artificially assisted vision thus combined a humility generated by a realization of the fallibility of human knowledge with a hubris founded on a belief in the compensatory power of technology. This combination of hubris and humility so characteristic of the Enlightenment project focused attention on the relativity of the human sense of scale.43 Seen through the microscope, formerly minute creatures such as a flea, mite or gnat, loomed as large as horses, elephants or lions. Objects as small as the smallest entity imaginable – a point – embodied by the tip of a needle, a hair, or the thorns and filaments of plants, provided new fields of vision, almost new landscapes, when viewed through the microscope: Hooke imagines that ‘we might find hills, and dales, and pores, and a sufficient breadth, or expansion, to give all those parts elbow-room, even in the blunt top of the very Point of any of these so very sharp bodies’.44 It was not only that formerly familiar objects became unfamiliar when viewed through the lens, but also that by being enlarged, some began to resemble other, known objects seen in daily life: Hooke writes that the seeds of thyme recalled dried lemons or oranges, while poppy seeds looked like tripe.45 Hooke’s descriptions suggest that the experience of looking through the microscope made him feel as though he had entered the world under the lens, with its hills and dales, elephants and lemons; that he had shrunk to a smaller scale, and was perambulating a landscape which was somehow familiar, but unsettlingly so. The imaginative possibilities opened up by the view through the microscope were seized upon by Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels of 1726. Gulliver’s first two voyages, to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, present two different conditions of viewing. In Lilliput, Gulliver is enlarged and the world contracted. The Lilliputians ‘see with great exactness, but at no great distance’ and perceive Gulliver as though they are looking at him through a microscope: Gulliver relates that when they look at his face they see ‘great Holes in my skin, that the Stumps of my Beard were ten times stronger than the Bristles of a Boar, and my Complexion made up of several Colours altogether disagreeable’.46 In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is shrunk, and sees the world much as the Lilliputians formerly saw him – too close, and in too much detail.47 The

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122 consequence of this microscopic vision is that Gulliver is unable to make sense 2 of his surroundings; Brobdingnag seems to be altogether lacking in order and 3 design: its palace ‘is no regular Edifice, but an heap of Buildings about seven 4 miles round’, and its landscape is a sublime combination of barren and rocky 5 expanses, towering grasses, rough oceans and volcanic mountains.48 In Lilliput, 6 on the other hand, Gulliver’s perspective generates an impression of order: its 7 capital city – which looks ‘like the painted Scene of a City in a Theatre’ – and 8 palace seem to be laid out with perfect symmetry and rectangularity, and its 9 smooth and level countryside appears like a lawn covered with a downy grass, 10 with fields resembling flowerbeds.49 Whereas in Brobdingnag Gulliver is 1 immersed in details and confounded by a magnified vision, in Lilliput he 2 perceives clearly because he has an aerial view. His inhabitation of these two 3 perspectives is similar to that described by O. G. S. Crawford, an archaeology 4 officer of the British Ordnance Survey who pioneered the use of aerial 522 photography in archaeological research, who contended: 6 7 If one looks through a magnifying-glass at a halftone illustration 8 made through a coarse screen, it ceases to be seen as a picture 9 and becomes a meaningless maze of blurred dots. If one holds it at 20 some distance off and looks at it with the naked eye, it becomes a 1 picture again. The observer on the ground is like the user of the 2 magnifying glass; the observer (or camera) in the air resembles him 3 who looks at the picture from a distance.50 4 5 Telescopes and microscopes are instruments that expand the range 6 of human vision, but the act of looking through a tube reduces vision to a 7 monocular event. These excursions into realms invisible to the naked eye are 8 thus also experiments in a restriction of vision – from behind the lens, we see 9 more, but we also see less. By rendering stereoscopic vision monoscopic, 302 lenses impede depth perception, flattening the worlds perceived through 1 them, and both the telescope and the microscope configure vision – whether 2 one is looking at the surface of the moon or the point of a needle – as an aerial 3 view.51 Through the lens, three-dimensional objects take on the appearance of 4 two-dimensional images. And once we are in the realm of images, questions 5 of space – of near and far – become supplanted by issues of scale. 6 Scale is related to measurement, and measurement was traditionally 7 gauged in units that corresponded to the parts of the human body: the foot, 8 the palm, the digit. But the expansion and contraction of vision generated by 9 the microscope and the telescope displaced the human body as a central 40 determinant: the limits of vision became arbitrary, based on the potentials of 1 an ever-improvable technology, rather than on the predetermined capabilities 2 of the human eye. The consequences of this displacement, this shift from an

255 Vittoria Di Palma embodied measurement to a disembodied scale, were addressed by Joseph Addison in 1712 in one of his articles ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ written for The Spectator. In this paean to ‘the authors of the new Philosophy, whether we consider their theories of the earth or heavens, the discoveries they have made by glasses, or any other of their contemplations on nature’, Addison posits the new worlds revealed to human vision by artiﬁcial lenses as a source of that mixture of wonder and stupefaction that characterizes the sublime.52 And this sense of the sublime – of being overwhelmed by the intricacy and inﬁnity of nature – is generated by contemplating an expansion and contraction of scale:

Nothing is more pleasant to the Fancy, than to enlarge itself by degrees, in its contemplation of the various proportions which its several objects bear to each other, when it compares the body of man to the bulk of the whole earth, the earth to the circle it describes round the sun, that circle to the sphere of ﬁxed stars, the sphere of the fixed stars to the circuit of the whole creation, the whole creation itself to the inﬁnite space that is every where diffused about it; or when the Imagination works downward, and considers the bulk of a human body in respect of an animal a hundred times less than a mite, the particular limbs of such an animal, the different springs that actuate the limbs, the spirits which set the springs a going, and the proportionable minuteness of these several parts, before they have arrived at their full growth and perfection . . . after all this we [may] take the least particle of these animal spirits, and consider its capacity of being wrought into a world that shall contain within those narrow dimensions a heaven and earth, stars and planets, and every different species of living creatures, in the same analogy and proportion they bear to each other in our own Universe . . . Nay, we may yet carry it farther, and discover in the smallest particle of this little world a new exhausted fund of matter, capable of being spun out into another Universe.53

Although this progressive exploration of a sequence of scales begins with the human body, that body is no longer at the centre of that sequence, but merely somewhere in the middle. And the rapid explosion of scale in two directions means the parameters and capacities of the body are soon surpassed, resulting in a ﬂight of fancy that the imagination is unable to comprehend: according to Addison, although our reason

can pursue a particle of matter through an inﬁnite variety of divisions the Fancy soon loses sight of it, and feels in itself a kind of chasm,

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122 that wants to be filled with matter of a more sensible bulk. We can 2 neither widen nor contract the faculty to the dimension of either 3 extreme. The object is too big for our capacity, when we would 4 comprehend the circumference of a world, and dwindles into 5 nothing, when we endeavour after the idea of an atom.54 6 7 Not only does this exploration of the consequences of an expansion 8 and contraction of scale shed light on corporeal and intellectual limits: by 9 dislocating scale from the anchoring dimension of the human body, the 10 microscopic and the telescopic are brought into correspondence. Scale is not 1 only relative, but the infinitely large and the infinitely small – the world and the 2 atom, the planet and the point – are made comparable. The minuscule and the 3 gigantic are present in the same instant, as part of the same continuum, a 4 continuum of scales experienced as a zoom.55 522 6 7 Zoom 8 9 Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 20 and the Effect of Adding Another Zero, created by Charles and Ray Eames in 1 1977 for IBM, explores this idea of a continuity of scale, and the consequent 2 comparability of the gigantic and the minuscule, by zooming to the outer limits 3 of telescopic and microscopic visibility, one power of ten at a time.56 Powers 4 of Ten opens with a view of a couple settling down to a picnic (see Figure 12.7). 5 They are in Chicago, near the lakeside, it is a sunny day. The man and woman 6 arrange themselves on a striped cloth; the man lies down, palm on his chest. 7 His motion stilled, the man becomes an object like the apples or grapes of his 8 picnic; his human measure the fulcrum of the ensuing journey across 40 scales. 9 As the zoom begins, we move out from the couple and their picnic, pro- 302 gressively taking in the field on which they are sitting, the Chicago lakeside, 1 the whole of Chicago, and then Chicago and its surrounding region. By 106, 2 we have reached the altitude of the atmosphere, and at 107 we see the entire 3 earth, in a view that clearly is meant to recall image 22727 (‘The Blue Marble’), 4 taken only five years earlier (see Figure 12.8). A few more jumps take us into 5 space and the realm of planetary orbits: the moon, the earth, Venus and Mars. 6 Soon the entire solar system with its nine planetary orbits fills the screen, but 7 by 1014, it has dwindled to just one point, the sun like any other star. By the 8 time we arrive at 1022, the Milky Way is merely one small point of light, one 9 galaxy among many. At 1024 we are given a moment to contemplate the lonely 40 reaches of space, where entire galaxies have shrunk to the size of dust. 1 Hovering in the inky void, having reached the ‘limit of our vision’, we are 2 reminded that most of space is empty and dead: the richness and variety of

257 Vittoria Di Palma

12.7 101, Powers of Ten. © Eames Ofﬁce LLC: www.eames ofﬁce.com.

our earth and its own neighbourhood are the exception. After a suitable pause, the return begins. It is a vertiginous drop: we fly across outer space at twice the speed through the incrementally decreasing scales, rocket through the solar system, penetrate the atmosphere, plummet towards Chicago, and arrive, once again, at the picnic on the lakeside. In this sequence, the narrative is drastically curtailed: we are immersed in the rapid flow of images, in the pleasure of a seamless visual continuum. When the narrator does intervene, he focuses on questions of form rather than content, drawing our attention to the alternation between teeming and blank screens that correspond to zones of activity and inactivity in outer space, and giving us a preview of the upcoming microscopic sequence’s exploration of scale. Eventually, he stops narrating altogether, and simply counts down the powers of ten until we arrive back at our starting point, our fulcrum: the reclining man with his palm on his chest. If the first part of the journey took us to the outer reaches of telescopic vision, we now penetrate the world revealed by the microscope. The man’s hand is the focus, both the starting point and the symbol of scale. At 10–2 the hand’s surface, enlarged so its lines seem like immense furrows, comes into view; at 10–3 we penetrate the skin and enter one of its blood

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122 12.8 108, Powers of 2 Ten. 3 © Eames Office 4 LLC: www.eames office.com. 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 vessels. Moving down even further to the atomic scale, at 10–9 we see a single 6 cell’s hydrogen atoms, their electrons pulsing; at 10–10 we encounter their outer 7 electrons in a view whose black background spangled with white dots 8 resembles nothing so much as the outer reaches of the universe (see Figure 9 12.9). At 10–12 the cell’s carbon nucleus, ‘so massive and so small’, with its six 302 protons and six neutrons, comes into view; at 10–13 we reach it: the universal 1 module, building block of matter and of life. At 10–16 the film ends in a riot of 2 subatomic motion and colour: we have reached what was, in 1977, ‘the edge 3 of present understanding’: microscopy’s final frontier. 4 This journey covers the spectrum of the visible, extending from 5 the telescopic reaches of interstellar space to the microscopic nucleus of the 6 carbon atom. Zooming from one scale to the next, it brings the telescopic 7 and the microscopic into correspondence – the limits of our telescopic vision 8 are separated from those of our microscopic vision by no more than 40 jumps; 9 the time it takes to go from one extreme to another can be expanded or 40 contracted at will. The zoom gives rise to a sensation of speed, but it is a speed 1 that involves no corporeal motion: we remain stationary as the images fly by. 2 This is not merely a result of the fact that we are watching a cinematic

259 Vittoria Di Palma

12.9 10–10, Powers of Ten. © Eames Ofﬁce LLC: www.eames ofﬁce.com.

representation but, rather, because the zoom, in itself, does not necessarily have anything to do with physical displacement. The film’s microscopic sequence, for example, requires a stationary viewer who is presented, one scale at a time, with increasingly greater degrees of resolution. The zoom erases divisions between scales, and its rapid progression from one extreme to another renders space and distance irrelevant. With the zoom, speed is divorced from distance, from the necessity of going anywhere. With the zoom, speed becomes a purely visual phenomenon, relating strictly to images and their resolution. By erasing boundaries between one scale and another, by existing outside of conditions of space and distance, and by operating entirely within a ream of images, the zoom generates a condition of seamlessness. And this seamlessness reconﬁgures the relationship between public and private. Powers of Ten centres on a picnic in Chicago – an activity that is both public and private, urban and domestic. But by situating this picnic within an expanded scale that includes the outer reaches of interstellar space and the inner recesses of the body, the ﬁlm transforms dichotomous relations of public and private into a seamless continuum of the cosmic and the intimate.

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122 Replacing a public and private duality with a condition of cosmic 2 intimacy has political implications too. Powers of Ten and its predecessor, 3 Powers of Ten: A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers 4 of Ten and the Relative Size of the Universe, made in 1968, were partly inspired 5 by a children’s book by Kees Boeke entitled Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 6 Jumps.57 Published in 1957, and illustrated by a combination of photographs 7 and drawings, Cosmic View depicts a journey through 40 scales, centering on 8 a photograph of a girl sitting with a cat on her lap at the Werkplaats Children’s 9 Community school at Bilthoven.58 To a much greater extent than Powers of 10 Ten, Cosmic View makes explicit the global implications of an expanded sense 1 of scale: at stake is the very nature of what it means to be human. ‘It is a matter 2 of life and death for the whole of mankind’, Boeke argues, ‘that we learn to 3 live together . . . No difference of nationality, of race, creed, or conviction, age 4 or sex may weaken our effort as human beings to live and work for the good 522 of all’.59 For Boeke, ‘[l]earning to live together in mutual respect and with the 6 definite aim to further the happiness of all, without privilege for any, is a crucial 7 duty for mankind, and it is imperative that education shall be brought on to this 8 plane’.60 A cosmic view is central to this educational objective and, Boeke adds, 9 ‘to develop such a wide, all-embracing view, the expedition we have made in 20 these “forty jumps through the universe” may help just a little. If so, let us 1 hope that many will make it!’61 Although Boeke noted that life is only present 2 in ten of the forty scales his book comprehended, he added that ‘[i]n other 3 scales there may . . . be forms of life we do not yet know’.62 By making us 4 aware of the relativity of our point of view and of our place in the universe, a 5 cosmic view was a first, critical step toward cosmic harmony. 6 Boeke’s ‘cosmic view’, like the Eames’s focus on the ‘relative size 7 of things in the universe’, both emphasizes and transcends the human sense 8 of scale. With each subsequent iteration of the zoom – from Boeke’s Cosmic 9 302 View of 1957, to the Eames’s Rough Sketch of 1968, to their Powers of Ten 1 of 1977 – the frontiers of the visible have expanded. These explorations of 2 otherworldly scales were inspired by the age of space travel – Cosmic View 3 appeared in the year of Sputnik, Rough Sketch in the heyday of the Apollo lunar 4 space missions, Powers of Ten in the year of the Star Wars premiere. But these 5 heavenly excursions did not only lead to a belief in scientific progress; they 6 were also a corollary of Cold War politics – the space race and the arms race 7 went hand in hand.63 Thus, Boeke’s plea for a cosmic view, like Buckminster 8 Fuller’s assertion in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earththat ‘we are all astro- 9 nauts’, were expressions of a Utopian hope as well as a call to action.64 They 40 combined a humility – generated by a sense of cosmic insignificance – with a 1 fervent desire for a more harmonious global future forged by advances in 2 knowledge and technology.

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Google Earth and global intimacy

Google Earth’s digitized globe is heir to the assumptions and implications embedded in both the aerial view and the zoom. Each of these two modes of visual representation is predicated on a defined perspective: each allows us to view in certain ways, but not in others. The view from above, whether obtained by telescope, microscope, airplane, or spacecraft, displaces us as viewers: it offers an extended panorama, and diminishes the importance of our quotidian concerns by decentering our habitual perspective. But this displacement can also be a spur to action. By bringing large features and patterns into visibility, the aerial view can engender a certain objectivity; it allows the earth itself to be seen as an object that can be operated upon and changed. For Le Corbusier, the airplane eye revealed ‘a spectacle of collapse’, – ‘L’avion accuse’ – but this novel point of view served to inspire a new approach to city and regional planning.65 The aerial view can generate a sense of humility and insignificance, or one of objectivity and omnipotence: this duality is fundamental to its 12.10 association with Utopian visions of a better world achieved through scientific Google Earth opening screen. and technological progress. In Aircraft, Le Corbusier recalled the moment when Courtesy of Google Auguste Perret, with whom he was then working, ‘burst into the atelier, Inc.

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122 brandishing a freshly printed Intransigeant. ‘Blériot has crossed the Channel!’ 2 Perret exclaimed, ‘wars are finished: no more wars are possible! There are no 3 longer any frontiers!’66 The sense of a dissolution of boundaries, of an 4 interconnected planet, of a common global project, is powerfully fostered by 5 the aerial view. The first full colour photograph of the earth from space, 22727, 6 achieved an unprecedented iconic status precisely because of the idea it 7 conveyed of a unified planet. Its containment and miniaturization of a globe 8 that we usually see piecemeal and up-close, as well as the invisibility of any 9 cultural traces – whether national borders, sprawling cities, or industrial blight 10 – upon that planet, made human actions, achievements and conflicts shrink 1 into insignificance. In 22727 the earth is beautiful, and that beauty transforms 2 the messy, overwhelming world as we know it into a small and precious object: 3 our singular blue planet, floating alone in the wasteland of intergalactic space, 4 appears both fragile and worth saving. It is for these reasons that 22727 has 522 been credited with launching the environmental movement: it is the visual 6 embodiment of Al Gore’s Socratic exhortation, in a speech given at MIT in 1998, 7 that ‘Man must rise above the earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, 8 for only thus will he understand the earth in which he lives’.67 9 The zoom, when conjoined with the aerial view, unites different 20 scales into a seamless flow, bringing the atomic and the planetary into 1 correspondence. And although the objectification and flattening that are intrinsic 2 characteristics of the aerial view are already, in themselves, qualities we 3 associate with images, the zoom exists entirely within the realm of images: it 4 is a purely representational mode concerned primarily with questions of 5 sequence and resolution. Furthermore, the zoom’s seamlessness and 6 manipulability shape our perception in a particular way. They undermine our 7 awareness of the zoom’s artificiality, and engender a visual experience that 8 mimics the continuous flow of human vision itself. 9 The power of Google Earth’s virtual experience derives in no small 302 part from the seamlessness of its zoom: users can speed across continents, 1 plummet from the heights of the atmosphere down to a city’s rooftops, and – 2 with the introduction of Google Sky in August 2007 – rocket from those same 3 rooftops out to the far reaches of interstellar space. Some users deliberately 4 take the longest route from one location to another in order to prolong the virtual 5 flight, while others find that the zoom of ascent and descent provokes a sense 6 of both exhilaration and vertigo that is key to the program’s appeal.68 But by 7 making the atom and the planet, or the global and the local, all present and 8 immediately accessible simply by dragging or clicking the mouse, Google 9 Earth’s zoom destroys space and time, reducing questions of place to figures 40 of speed. 1 For Paul Virilio, speed – the defining characteristic of our contem- 2 porary virtual and digital age – has made formerly key notions like public and

263 Vittoria Di Palma private, and the distinctions between them, entirely defunct.69 With speed – and its specifically visual corollary, the zoom – we exist in a virtual realm of images, where variables of transmission time, pixels, and image resolution have replaced questions of space and distance. This conversion of an embodied world into a virtual realm, where our life ‘in private’ and ‘in public’ is conflated by the equalizing tendency of a computer screen, means that our experience comes to be mediated by the logic of images. And, most importantly, when these are images that can be downloaded onto our ‘personal computer’, where they can be further manipulated, touched-up and resized, scale is no longer something that gives us a humbling sense of our relative place in the universe but, rather, is something that each of us can control for ourselves, and tailor to our liking. The realm of the contemporary, seamless zoom becomes the non-site of intimacy. Google Earth creates the fantasy of an intimate globe. The small spinning circle that the program greets us with – an image that inevitably recalls 22727 – is an earth that has been miniaturized, and thus domesticated. No longer ‘out there’, it has been brought into the frame of our computer screen 12.11 so that it can be viewed from the comfort of our home or office. Google Earth New York City on Google Earth. makes the earth both portable and personal: it can now fit on your desk, or in Courtesy of Google your bag; it can sit on your lap, or be cradled in two hands. What almost all Inc.

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122 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 12.12 users do the first time they open Google Earth is to look up their house, or the 5 New York City on house where they grew up.70 That initial impetus, of zooming from Google Google Earth, 6 street view. Earth’s opening view of the globe down to a location on that globe embedded 7 Courtesy of Google with personal significance, configures the relationship between the global and 8 Inc. the local in intimate terms. Google Earth’s content overlays (KML files) and 9 ‘mash-up’ options further this conflation by enabling users to add holiday 302 photographs, sightseeing recommendations, or personal anecdotes not just 1 to their own version of the program, but to post them so that they can be 2 viewed by users worldwide. This intimate globe that Google Earth allows users 3 to generate has troubling implications. The program appears to create the 4 possibility of a democratic, participatory community, but it is a democratic com- 5 munity that assumes a globe perennially available for immediate and 6 uninterrupted consumption. 7 Therefore, while the similarities between Google Earth’s opening 8 image and 22727 might appear to promote associations of global harmony and 9 environmental responsibility (Google’s corporate motto, after all, is the vague 40 and rather platitudinous ‘Don’t Be Evil’), these associations are complicated by 1 characteristics inherent in the aerial view, the zoom, and the fantasy of 2 seamless disembodied flight. Google Earth’s globe is one that can be tailor-

265 Vittoria Di Palma made according to each user’s individual desires, interests and points of view. Thus, Google Earth induces the user to dismiss Kees Boeke’s humbling ‘cosmic view’, and instead to elevate his or her own individual point of view above all others, creating an imagined global community populated by narcissists, consumers and voyeurs. Although it is always sunny on Google Earth, this perpetual spring might be more indicative of a planet in the throes of global warming than of an Eden reincarnate. Whether Google Earth will become – or is even capable of becoming – something more than a technological fantasy, whether it can function as a tool for concrete political action, remains to be seen.

Notes I would like to express my thanks to Hugh Campbell, Giuseppe Di Palma and Diana Periton for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

1 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Landscape (London: Seeley and Co., 1885), pp. 3–4, cited by Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space (New York: Hastings House, 1969), p. 12. 2 Go to www.googlesightseeing.com and type ‘naked people’ in the search box. 3 This is true as of October 2007. It seems inevitable, however, that Google Maps’ ‘Street View’ option will soon be available on Google Earth. 4 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 5 According to Michael Jones, Chief Technologist for Google Earth, Google Earth has

a multi-resolution mosaic with some images at very high resolution (10–15 centimetres per pixel in the images), many at high (50–70 cm per pixel), some at medium (2.5–5 m per pixel), and the remainder at our lowest resolution of 15 m per pixel. The basic idea in constructing a multi-resolution mosaic is to expand pixels of coarse data to match finer data. Example: a 2 ! 2 block of 2 metre per pixel images could become a 4 ! 4 block of ‘1 metre per pixel’ data. While such expanded data does not have any finer details, it would allow mosaicing with neighbouring blocks of true 1 metre per pixel data. The data processing tools used to build the Google Earth and Google Maps imagery do just this kind of resolution matching across many tens of thousands of source images to assure that coarser images abutting finer data are always expanded appropriately to allow smooth blending between appropriately resolution-matched data so that our users can enjoy a continuous, whole-earth mosaic at any zoom level from outer space to ground level. This information was obtained through email correspondence.

6 Alex Turnbull and James Turnbull, Off the Map: The Most Amazing Sights on Earth as Seen by Satellite (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2006), p. 7. For more on satellites, see Jeffrey Richelson, America’s Secret Eyes in Space (New York: Harper and Row: 1990). 7 The program used by Google Earth was originally called Earth Viewer, created by the Keyhole company. Google acquired the rights to the program in 2004, and launched Google Earth in 2005. 8 The General Perspective Projection differs in this from the Orthographic Projection, which assumes a point of perspective at an inﬁnite distance. 9 For more on map projections, see John Parr Snyder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Jerry Brotton,

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122 ‘Terrestrial Globalism: Mapping the Globe in Early Modern Europe’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.) 2 Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 71–89; Denis Cosgrove, ‘Liminal Geometry and Elemental Landscape: Construction and Representation’, in James Corner (ed.)Recovering 3 Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (New York: Princeton 4 Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 103–19; and David Woodward, ‘Maps and the Rationalization 5 of Geographic Space’, in Jay A. Levenson (ed.) Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration 6 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 83–7. 7 10 Francesco Petrarca, ‘The Ascent of Mount Ventoux. To Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro’, 8 Familiar Letters, in Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, ed. and trans. James 9 Harvey Robinson (New York: G. B. Putnam, 1898), pp. 307–20. 10 11 For a good overview of the development of aerial photography, see Beaumont Newhall, 1 Airborne Camera. Some other relevant sources include Paul Chombart de Lauwe, La Découverte aérienne du monde (Paris: Horizons de France, 1948); Le Corbusier, Aircraft 2 (London: The Studio, 1935); James Corner and Alex MacLean, Taking Measures Across the 3 American Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Denis Cosgrove and Adrian 4 Hemming, ‘Airport/Landscape’, and Charles Waldheim, ‘Aerial Representation and the 522 Recovery of Landscape’, both in James Corner (ed.) Recovering Landscape, 221–32, 120–39; 6 Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); and Joel Snyder, ‘Territorial Photography’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) 7 Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 175–201. 8 12 For more on the relationship between aerial photography and city planning see Le Corbusier, 9 Aircraft; José Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 20 1944); and Anthony Vidler, ‘Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds) A Companion to the City (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1 2000), pp. 35–45. 2 13 For an illuminating analysis of this photograph and other views of the earth from space, see 3 Denis Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions: One World, Whole Earth and the Apollo Space 4 Photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2 (1994), 270–94. 5 14 Monck Mason, Aeronautica; or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of Aerostation (London: 1838); James Glaisher, Camille Flammarion, W. de Fonvielle and Gaston Tissandier, 6 Travels in the Air, edited by James Glaisher (London: R. Bentley, 1871). 7 15 See Margret Dreikausen, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft 8 and its Inﬂuence on Contemporary Art (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1985) for a good 9 discussion of the formal qualities of the aerial view. 302 16 For example, apparently it was only after the advent of Google Earth that the US Navy realized that its building in San Diego, California, when seen from above, looks like a swastika. 1 17 Alan J. Cobham, ‘Seeing the World from the Air’, The National Geographic Magazine 53 (March 2 1929), 366. 3 18 Aerial perspective (also known as atmospheric or colour perspective) refers to distortions 4 related to a viewing condition in which a horizontal distance extends between the viewer and the object. It is not the same thing as an aerial view, which assumes a vertical distance 5 between viewer and object. 6 19 Mason, Aeronautica, 144–5. 7 20 Dreikausen, Aerial Perception, 54. 8 21 Mason, Aeronautica, 198 (italics in original). 9 22 Ibid., 144. 23 Ibid., 220–1. 40 24 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Aeropainting’ (Turin, 22 September 1929), translated 1 and published in Renato Miracco, Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting (Milan: Mazzotta, 2004), 2 p. 69. Marinetti’s promotion of aeropittura was part of a larger movement that included aerial

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sculpture, aerial literature and poetry, aerial theatre, aerial architecture, aerial ceramics, aerial music, aerial dance, aerial photography and aerial cuisine. See M. Scudiero, ‘Aeroplastica’, Il Dizionario del futurismo, ed. Ezio Godoli (Florence: Vallecchi Spa/Trento: MART, 2001), I: 7. For more on the relationship between the airplane and art in the early twentieth century, see Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago, IL: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959). 25 Marinetti in Miracco, Futurist Skies, 69. 26 Le Corbusier, Aircraft, 123. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 John Steiner, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 4:66 (1857), cited in Newhall, Airborne Camera, 11. 30 Mason, Aeronautica, 116–17. 31 Marinetti in Miracco, Futurist Skies, 69. 32 Mason, Aeronautica, 197. 33 Ibid,, 51. 34 Ibid., 38–9. 35 Dreikausen, Aerial Perception, 21. 36 Mason, Aeronautica, 62. 37 Ibid., 62–3. 38 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: or Confidence in Opinions. Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Uncertainty of our Knowledge, and its Causes; With Some Reflections on Peripateticism; and An Apology for Philosophy (London: 1661), p. 5. 39 Ibid., 5. 40 Ibid., 5–7. 41 Robert Hooke, ‘The Preface’, Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: 1665), n. p. Hooke was neither the first scientist to use the microscope, nor was his Micrographia the first book of microscopal observations to be published. However, his book, which published a selection of his findings consisting of 38 plates of engravings and an accompanying text, was the work that most definitively brought the formerly unknown aspects of minute objects, animals and structures to the English reading public. Samuel Pepys called it ‘the most ingenious book’ he had ever read, and was so captivated that he stayed up reading it until 2 o’clock in the morning on the day after he had purchased it. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 9 vols (London: 1970–76): VI: p. 18. For an account of early uses of and reactions to the microscope, see Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and John T. Harwood, ‘Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia’, in Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (eds) Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989): 119–47. For the relationship between the microscope and visual representation, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 42 Hooke’s Micrographia grapples with these implications in its very first pages: ‘the limits, to which our thoughts are confind, are small in respect of the vast extent of Nature it self; some parts of it are too large to be comprehended, and some too little to be perceived. And from thence it must follow, that not having a full sensation of the Object, we must be very lame and imperfect in our conceptions about it’ (Hooke, Micrographia, n. p.) 43 Many of Micrographia’s plates illustrate this preoccupation with scale by including images of different views or parts of a single object seen at different degrees of magnification. Of these, the plate of a scale of a sole is perhaps the most self-conscious, with the delight in punning manifested by Hooke’s discussion of a printed point present here in visual form with views of the fish’s scales at three different scales.

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122 44 Hooke, Micrographia, 2. 2 45 Ibid., 153, 155. 46 Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel 3 Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (London: 1726): I: p. 93; II: p. 4 23. 5 47 During the course of his stay Gulliver encounters numerous objects from Hooke’s 6 Micrographia: he battles with flies, wasps and lice, he uses strands of the king’s hair to thatch a chair, and he finds the finest handkerchiefs to be ‘larger and coarser than the Main Sail of 7 a man of War’ (Swift, II: 25). 8 48 Ibid., 71. 9 49 Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, I: 56, 7, 25–6. 10 50 Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Wessex from the Air (Oxford: 1928), cited in Newhall, Airborne 1 Camera, 68. 51 W. Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope (London: The Studio, 1935), p. 11. This book 2 was the second volume of the series entitled ‘The New Vision’. Le Corbusier’s Aircraft was 3 the first – a fact that highlights the correspondence between aerial and microscopic views. It 4 should also be noted that our view of the moon (or any other heavenly body) from the earth 522 is, in fact, an aerial one. 6 52 Addison writes: 7 When we survey the whole earth at once, and the several planets that lie within its 8 neighbourhood, we are filled with a pleasing astonishment, to see so many worlds hanging one above another, and sliding round their axles in such an amazing pomp and solemnity. 9 If, after this, we contemplate those wild fields of Æther, that reach in height as far from 20 SATURN to the fixed stars, and run abroad almost to an infinitude, our Imagination finds 1 its capacity filled with so immense a prospect, and puts itself upon the stretch to 2 comprehend it. But if we yet rise higher, and consider the fixed stars as so many oceans 3 of flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets, and still discover new firmaments and new lights that are sunk farther in those unfathomable depths of 4 Æther so as not to be seen by the strongest of our telescopes, we are lost in such a 5 labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the immensity and magnificence of 6 nature. 7 Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination, paper X’, The Spectator, no. 420 (Wednesday, 2 July 1712) (London: 1799): VI: 186. 8 9 53 Ibid., 187. It is important to note that Addison does not yet use the term ‘sublime’, but rather 302 ‘greatness’. 54 Ibid., 188. 1 55 For a suggestive discussion of the miniature and the gigantic, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: 2 Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke 3 University Press, 1993). 4 56 An initial short demo was made in 1963, and in 1968 the Eames made Powers of Ten: A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of the 5 Universe. See Eames Demetrios, An Eames Primer (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001), 6 p. 246. In contrast to Powers of Ten, Rough Sketch locates its picnic on a Miami golf course, 7 uses black-and-white film, has a female rather than a male narrator, includes a panel of dials 8 on the left-hand side of the screen, and covers 36 rather than 40 powers of ten. 9 57 John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart and Ray Eames, Eames Design (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), p. 337. 40 58 Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (New York: The John Day Company, 1 1957). Boeke is acknowledged in the credits of both Rough Sketch and Powers of Ten. 2 59 Ibid., 48.

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60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 47. 63 For more on this topic, see Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 64 R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 46. 65 Le Corbusier, Aircraft, 5. 66 Ibid., 7. 67 Katharine Q. Seelye, ‘Gore Proposes Video Channel to Show Earth, All the Time’, The New York Times, 14 March 1998, cited in Karsten Harries, Inﬁnity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 328. 68 My thanks to Albert Narath and Maarten Delbeke for these testimonials. 69 Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991) [originally L’espace critique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1984)]. 70 Google’s homepage openly acknowledges this. In its list of the program’s most popular uses, the ﬁrst item reads: ‘Fly to your house. Just type in an address, press Search, and you’ll zoom right in’. See http://earth.google.com/.

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