I chose to copy Clement Valla’s Postcards from Google Earth project. In this project, Clement Valla recorded Google Earth through screenshots: bridges that melt into the river below, highways that drape over hillsides like fabric, and terrain that folds in on itself. He argues that these are not glitches in the sense of errors. They are the direct result of how the system works. The images are not manipulated. They are screenshots. What they record is an automated system doing exactly what it was designed to do and producing pictures nobody intended (Valla, n.d.).
When I tried to find the same views in Google Earth in 2026, some of the distorted forms had changed. This made me notice that a screenshot can keep a version of an image that I can no longer capture in the same way.
I used the Conditional Design Manifesto to guide my iteration: for each place, I collected Google Earth screenshots from different years and paired them with Google Maps reviews from those years. Repeating the same rule across different places let me compare the results and notice things I had not planned in advance (Maurer et al., 2013).
At first, I worked at the image level to show a sense of temporal dislocation within the same space by collaging screenshots from different periods of the same place. After visual testing, I made an interesting discovery about the shape of the bridge, squeezed along the shape of the mountain by the system, is very similar to the shadow of the bridge on the mountain after the system update. I tried to take two screenshots of the same bridge from the old and new systems and stitch them together, so that the collapsed bridge from the old system and the shadow of the bridge from the new system were connected, implying that the shadow of the new bridge was a visual extension of the form of the old bridge. However, although this effect produced interesting psychological suggestions, it was weak in terms of studying how screenshot can reflect a history that has taken place.
So I tried to use screenshots as a medium to reflect history on more levels. These attempts included trying more complex visual effects, making more irregular image changes, and finding new information as a visual element before turning the image into a postcard. Because screenshots can record information, I began to ask whether a screenshot could also reveal the history of the image it records.
I noticed the review content on Google Maps while searching for material. Maybe this is simply because Google Earth and Google Maps were originally developed for related purposes. I wanted to explore what kind of historical information Google Maps carried. I entered the addresses connected to the Google Earth images into Google Maps. Afterwards, I browsed the reviews of these addresses. Through reading them, I learned many details about these places—for example, that gold could be mined in one of the parks, that a bridge was very difficult to cross by bicycle, and that a car on the bridge had been hit by stones. These reviews seemed like information about these addresses passed on by strangers. By reading the reviews, I developed a concrete impression of the abstract images of places I knew nothing about. As records stored by the platform, these reviews can reflect certain events that have taken place. I tried to collect reviews posted in different years for one place and pair them with Google Earth historical images labelled with the same years. I repeated this process for different places to see what happened when the images and reviews were read together. The year a review was posted and the year of an image do not necessarily refer to the same moment, so I do not treat a review as proof of what appears in the image. （I tried to collect the annual reviews of one address and superimpose them with Google Earth screenshots from different years at that address, so that the image not only included the history of abstract visual changes, but also specific linguistic descriptions of events.）
When screenshots are used as a medium, how can I make them reflect a history that has taken place? I want the image captured in a screenshot to reflect certain histories while also carrying and transmitting those histories.
Reference List
Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J. and Wouters, R. (2013) Conditional Design Workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Valla, C. (n.d.) Postcards from Google Earth. Available at: https://clementvalla.com/work/postcards-from-google-earth.html (Accessed: 3 November 2026).
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