In 2000 the press announced that the entire surface of the planet had been mapped by satellite photography. These satellite photographs are digital so in effect the announcement indicated that our entire natural landscape had been digitised – There was now a digital representation of our world that stood in parallel to our own: a world reduced to a finite number of pixels. This could be seen as significant development in the history of landscape representation particularly in its relationship to property and ownership.
If you imagine this parallel world blown up to a 1:1 scale like in the Borges short story ‘Of Exactitude in Science’ 1 then the world’s surface would become a series of coloured squares: huge swathes of monochrome colour which differ only in hue and tone. Since 2000 I’ve worked with this imagined landscape as a model to parallel advanced capitalisms trend toward global homoginisation. It is difficult to imagine a model that takes the oft-theorised ‘modernist grid’ to a more literal incarnation.
