SATELLITE SCREENSHOTS

June 2020, mid-covid:  "With my Gap Year travel plans cancelled along with everyone else’s, I bought a bike to travel within my city and its surrounding mountains. While waiting for its delivery, I checked its location: Yeso, NM. I went there via Maps and found a tiny, grey/brown cul-de-sac of about 5 buildings in the middle of the barren desert. The slim road and and a dump, camouflaged in dust, lead me into another world, far, far away from Los Angeles. I took a screenshot. And then followed the road. And then went to the arctic, to Chile, Brazil, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Kenya, Nepal, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Egypt.

The clarity of the satellite images is astounding. You can see individual trees and their shadows, small boats in harbor towns, striations of salt flats. These stills of the world are beautiful, because nature is, but there is an added depth in its pairing with the technology that allowed me to travel around the world via my laptop. In the pixelation, the changes in light or image quality, and distortion, nature turns kind of dystopian. It seems as surreal as these last few months have been. In the weird geometry created in an unclean stitch between images, and the maintenance of the search bar, compass and menues, I am reminded of the technology that is currently so integral in pasting all of our stories together, feeding and informing protests and crises."

Having now spent two years studying Environmental Sciences and Landscape Architecture, I scoff at the fact that I viewed these landscapes as "natural".  In many of these images, you can see the scars and bites of industry, as well as details that extracitivism has perversely exposed.