Google Warming

Abstract

This article argues that the computer automation of perspective and rendering in Google Earth has far-reaching consequences for the relationships between representations of the earth, its ecology and cultural responses to climate change. Theorists Erwin Panofsky (1991) and William Ivins (1975) to Lev Manovich (1993) and Don Ihde (2009) have argued that the emergence of Renaissance perspective structured a new relationship between the image and the object: contributing to the initiation of industrialisation and science. Whilst Manovich describes the impacts of Renaissance perspective in terms of its effect upon scientific and industrial structures, Jean Louis Comolli has argued that its advent was both a cause and a consequence of a shift to a humanist social regime. This article argues that Google Earth and its corollaries now complicate the visual and discursive constitution of the cultural and ecological environment. The contemporary computer-generated ‘visual nominalism’ of Google Earth results in a photomapped representation of the earth that can elevate environmental awareness through visualised data sets at the same time as it reduces the earth to a product design–engineered object. As Comolli’s Machines of the Visible becomes Machinima of the Visible, this article asks whether public and scientific calls for a turn towards geoengineering can be viewed through a product design–engineered interface that reconstitutes the social machine as an engineer of the earth object itself.