Whooa. That first photo is my recurring nightmare....a bridge that goes awry and wonky as you're crossing it. I don't like bridges.

Enter voice of dissent:

Is he really considered an "artist" if all he's doing is taking screen captures of ridiculous things on Google Earth? Sure, no one else is doing it, but when I think of "artist" I think of something that takes a skill that other people can't easily do.

And reading the paragraph-of-pretention as to why he's doing it, let's get real. He's basically taking screen captures of things that look funny before Google makes the software better. Are these "artifacts" that REALLY need preserving?

these are very cool/creepy. however i have to agree with erik that it's a bit of a stretch to claim a software defect as one's own creative expression. screen shots do not an artist make. i would be much more impressed if valla had been inspired by the google earth 'glitch', then created these distorted images himself from photographs he had actually taken.

I've seen those on Google Earth before. The husband and I just laughed and moved on. Too bad I didn't think to start marketing them!

@ ErikTheRed & ottowoman: Is a photographer an artist if "all they do" is click a button to capture what is there on the street in front of them?

Honestly, I think there is an analogy. These things don't occur all over the place in Google Earth. He has to search them out and find the perfect angle to get the visual composition he wants. He then does the post-processing. Also, He is documenting a moment in time. Sure, it's a digital moment, but it is still freezing a moment in time, just as a photographer does. What makes a photograph art as opposed to a standard snapshot? In many ways, the difference is the concept behind it. You can't even say that it is the hand of the artist making the final piece, because many artists use others to help create the final work. Christo didn't wrap the Reichstag by himself, and I don't think anyone will deny that he is the artist and they are the installers.

My point is: don't be so quick to define the label artist.

Let's remember that the idea of an artist sitting alone in a studio in a smock and beret with a palette is pretty romanticized. Artists from Michelangelo to Warhol would work out an early draft -- or merely written directions -- and leave a team at their studio to execute the work. They might not have literally had their hand in the execution of a piece, yet it's still their work of art. This is no different.

If he's going through a process of discovery that ends in compelling images, I see no reason to dismiss it as art merely because he's aided by a computer algorithm.

I find that people are very quick to dismiss art if it's made via a method that's unconventional.

I would imagine there would be some kind of copyright infringement involved here, especially if it's for a profit. I know I would be pissed if someone went through the thousands of photos I've taken, cropped and adjusted the color and then called it their own art.

very inception.
i love them.

I've had days that felt just like that!

I guess Marcel Duchamp wasn't an artist either, Erik?

@Gaidig

Totally different. There's so much more to photography than just pointing and clicking. There's understanding light, exposure, composition, developing (if you're old-school).

You then beg the question/comment that this dude isn't even the artist. Google Earth is the artist. Clement Valla is simply the guy who made them easily accessible.

@akay

You definitely make the best argument about the process of discovery. But let's say you made a work of "art". Now let's say I take that work, attribute you, but then sort of pass it off as my own. Who is the artist? Me? I think not. The ability to crop and make minor color adjustments in Photoshop does not make me the artist of your work. My argument, to summarize again, is that Google Earth is the "artist", Clement Valla is simply a guy with a very basic knowledge of Photoshop.

@overture

Duchamp had plenty of original and creative art in his lifetime. Do I think mounting a bicycle wheel on a stool is art? Scratch that, do I think it's stupid? Probably yes. To each his own.

Duchamp challenged the boundaries of art with his "readymades" and they were all, in some sense, altered. Even if the only change was in the location of the object. Once an object is placed in a gallery setting the expectations on the viewer change, at the time this was nothing short of revolutionary.

Clement Valla is really no different.

Art or not, I love it.

I wouldn't have thought to actually crop, print and hang these.

There's never really a point to the art vs. not art conversation, is there? It's like trying to figure out the purpose of life.

The artist, Clement Valla, is infringing on the copyrights of Google and the satellite imagery corporations which supplied the imagery. By cropping out the copyright information he is further violating the law. Its not too difficult to adjust the terrain feature on Google Earth to produce these, but to attempt to sell them is just dumb and any people who buy his postcards need to download Google Earth and make the postcards themselves. Apartment Therapy should not entertain artists who are violating international copyright law. If you like this type of design, check out Nikolas Schiller's Geospatial Art. From what I'm told, he doesn't use copyrighted imagery.

The discussion of the value & ethics of what Clement Valla is doing here is interesting, but as a geographer I just can't resist being pedantic about one point from the original post...

Most of the distortion present in these images is not really a result of the "effort to convert 3D space to a 2D screen."

Instead it results from taking an image, originally captured to a 2D image plane (the image sensor or old-school camera film in a satellite, aircraft, balloon, etc.) from a single aerial perspective point, and transforming (stretching, warping, compressing, etc.) it to match the 3D model of the terrain underlying the image area.

It's a minor point, given that 3D-->2D transformation distortion is indeed a big part of what's involved here, as the poster said, but given that I'm usually just gawking at the photos on AT and thinking "I wish I had those design skills," I thought I'd chime in with some corrective details where I could.

Note that there can also be also oddities that occur along the edges of where aerial images (taken from different perspectives) meet when displayed as in Google Earth/Maps.

Google earth is the artist. This man is the curator of the program's work. And Duchamp raised serious questions about context, object and symbolism that revolutionized EVERYTHING. This man is presenting interesting snapshots generated by a computer program he had nothing to do with creating. Not in the same league at all. That being said, these are some really awesome images.

Interesting. Frightening. And for some reason they remind me of massive sink holes... Which are all too real.

I agree with Gaidig about the photographer analogy. True, Google Earth produced the images, but Valla had to find them, get the framing right, get the viewpoint right, AND recognise the "art" within the malfunction of the software. It's perfectly analogous with the work of a photographer.

I love these pictures. Forget postcards - these images would look awesome blown up on a wall in a modern dining or living room.

I think what makes an artist is the creative spirit, the ability to see something from a unique viewpoint and find beauty or relevance in it. A photographer can do this by choosing to take a picture of a certain thing that no one else has noticed before or viewed from that angle, or by coming up with a full fledged imaginative concept to execute. A painter's claim to being an artist, similarly, does not lie only in their technical skill, but more in their ability to find inspiration in unlikely places or convey emotion through an image. To me, Clement Valla is doing that by choosing to see these glitches as revealing and beautiful. Anyone could have seen this before, but did you think it was beautiful? Did you think of the implications of people trying to map their world so precisely and instead getting these surreal visions?

I don't like bridges either, and these picts make me queasy!!!

i hat to make an AT account to step in and say that everything is art, and everyone is an artist. that's it. the end.

So now, someone who looks for oddities on google is an artist?
And I thought the befores and afters were getting lame here.

What is the difference between this and actually taking photos of something weird? This is infinitely cooler because it exposes the lapse between technological advancements and our expectation for technology. I'm no techie, but I wholly appreciate use and representation of technology that reveals the embodiment of human emotion.

Nobody can argue that Duchamp's "readymade" is not art. This guy is no different. Whoever thinks this is not art clearly doesn't know anything about art.

Why are we wasting time in the debate of "what art is" when we already know what art is! Jack Donaghy sums it up perfectly, "It's paintings of horses!"

** timecode 17:08 in this 30-Rock **
http://megavideofreestream.com/30-rock-season-5-episode-11-mrs-donaghy-20110225/