Lost Motion Assembly | Blog

Design, development and occasional bloggery

Mappix

Dec

A Google Maps satellite photo of NU Canada

We stumbled upon Mappix whilst perusing the mightily impressive portfolio of designer and developer Philipp Oehrlein. The premise is as simple as “one random google maps image a day. That’s it.” As modest as this sounds, it is a surprisingly engaging affair; removing the familiar controls turns the google maps experience into a kind of geographical roulette.

Without the familiar demarcations of borders, roads or any other labels it distils the images to pure topography, stripping away contextualising clues.
This particular shot eschews any indication of scale – it could as well be a slide of some grains of sand. Such images conjure up Baudrillardian ruminations on the nature of maps vs. territories, whilst reinstating the joy of simply looking at the sheer diversity of the earth on a purely visual scale.

By: Dre

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