Google Maps turned 10 this week. It wasn’t the first digital mapping service, but it’s the one that has become most familiar — and that in its decade of existence has proved perhaps the most ambitious in reimagining what “a map” can be and should look like in the Internet age.

Thanks to the mobile revolution that’s happened in the meantime, the process of getting from point A to point B is something that millions now resolve by tapping an address into an app and following step-by-step directions. That’s a radical change in how we get around, and it’s one that’s been accompanied by unplanned side effects –– in the art world, specifically.

In the past decade, swarms of artists and other creative types have seized on Google Maps as a new sort of canvas: It’s a medium, it’s a muse, it’s a once-unimaginable tool that can be used as much more than a map.



Here, then, are some favorite Google Maps projects from people who chose not to follow directions.



At Woodcut Maps, youcan offer up a Google Maps location (a neighborhood, a nation) that gets filtered through the site’s software and then laser-cut onto wood.

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Sunnyvale, Calif., on Woodcut Maps

The practice of “GPS drawing” — converting GPS data from a walk or bike ride into a recognizable pattern — predates Google Maps. But certainly the ability to plop that data directly onto Maps has helped make it one of the more familiar map-creativity exercises. Michael Wallace is one of the better-known practitioners of the form, having made a slew of amusing map-pictures by riding his bike around Baltimore.



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By Michael Wallace via DesignBoom



Kim Asendorf, delving into the code that Google makes available to third-party developers, created a site that loads and re-envisions a Google map every time you hit refresh: Each result offers pleasing color schemes and variable degrees of topographic detail. It’s totally impractical, but totally beautiful.

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