Satellite Collections

digital prints

2009-2011



You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there's no strings holding it up, and it's moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.

-Eugene Cernan, an astronaut on the Apollo 17, on seeing the Earth from space



In all of these prints, I collect things that I've cut out from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landfills, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here. The alienation provided by the satellite perspective reveals the things we take for granted to be strange, even absurd. Banal structures and locations can appear fantastical and newly intricate. Directing curiosity toward our own inimitably human landscape, we may find that those things that are most recognizably human (a tangle of carefully engineered water slides, for example) are also the most bizarre, the most unlikely, the most fragile.



681 Observatory Domes, Telescopes, and Other Structures for Long Range Observation





137 Landmarks





206 Circular Farms







Cargo Trains









100 Shipping Containers





Shipping Containers





100 Bulk Carriers





964 Round Parts of Wastewater Treatment Plants





97 Nuclear Cooling Towers







104 Airplanes







10 Waterslide Configurations







120 Stadiums







77 Waste and Salt Ponds





39 Landfills







125 Swimming Pools





Every Outdoor Basketball Court in Manhattan





Every Outdoor Baseball Diamond in Manhattan









1,378 Grain Silos, Water Towers, and Other Cylindrical-Industrial Buildings









144 Empty Parking Lots









195 Yachts, Barges, Cargo Lines, Tankers and Other Ships









81 Miles of the Great Salt Lake



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