Creature of the Shade

google abstract

Sydney

Here are three new Google Abstracts -- images I've selected from Google Earth because they are (a) satisfying as abstract art, and (b) unrecognizable as aerial photos.  More such abstracts here and here.  A fuller explanation of the concept is here.

In each case I've provided the lat-long and eye-altitude coordinates you can use to find the original on Google Maps or Google Earth.  (You can copy these directly into the search bar, then zoom in or out to match the eye altitude.)  It's fun and educational to zoom around in the vicinity, discovering the vertiginous edge where geography surrenders to abstraction.

(Click any pic to enlarge.)

This is an area of the Australian outback with sand dunes trending northwest to southeast in regular parallel rows, redolent of this recent post.  Interior Australia is full of fertile landscapes for Google Abstracts, because there are no human marks and, over large areas, no evident watercourses.  In this case, the parallel channels between the dunes must serve the fleeting purposes of drainage.  (24 45 49.97 S, 135 14 59.16 E, eye altitude 51.32 km.)

Is that a pelican or a swan in the upper right?  These cloudlike forms are masses of barely-submerged sand in the Wadden Sea, which lies between the Dutch mainland and its outer barrier islands.  (53 07 56.77 N, 5 15 03.91 E, eye altitude 13.40 km) 

Finally, this one is almost cheating.  Its interest comes from the inevitable photo-seams that occur all over Google Earth, where pictures taken at different times, with different weather etc, are spliced together.  Here, the splices all seem to be rushing to a point, half-erasing the undersea mountains in the lower part of the image. 

It's the Arctic Ocean, of course, with the North Pole near the top center of the image.  This exact image is 89 35 57.20 N, 125 05 27.07 W, eye altitude 141.36 km)

Find your own!

google abstract

Sydney

 

As art, it looks early 20th century, doesn't it?  (Click to enlarge.)  Some forgotten acolyte of Mondrian, perhaps, who never made it as a modernist because he couldn't let go of earth tones.

This one is in a bottomland southwest of Toowoomba, Queensland.  Bottomlands in general are a feast for the abstract-loving eye, as they are the only landscapes without much trace of a watercourse.    Amid these vigorous patches and stripes, the roads are reduced to gossamer, while the dotting of farmstead buildings, each with its little drive from the nearest road, jostles the eye pleasantly, like an intentional imperfection that reveals the purity of the rest. 

(Previous Google Abstract post, and manifesto, here.)

google abstract

Not long ago, roaming on Google Earth, I stumbled on an image that I could admire as abstract art.  Perhaps it was this one:

Now and then I even found something that, if found in an art museum, wouldn't obviously be an aerial photograph at all, but might just as well have been an abstract or surreal painting, or sometimes a watercolor, were it not for the signature.

It's remarkably hard to predict when I'll find one.  One can't just head for a famously beautiful place and expect to find this kind of abstract interest.  Most famous dramatic landscapes look too obviously like themselves from the air, though this well known object in the center of Australia almost works, perhaps because the geometric arrowhead shape draws the eye away from a too-literal recognition.   

But usually it's hard, which makes it fun.  Shorelines, for example, all have a familiar-looking white foamy line where sea meets land, while craggy shorelines, from the air, look just like craggy shorelines.   To make a shoreline recede into abstraction, I have to find a very long, very flat beach, so that I can zoom way out.  And still I'm not sure it works.