And one from 10 Waterslide Configurations. Photos by Jenny Odell
And one from 10 Waterslide Configurations.
Photos by Jenny Odell A normal person might use Google’s satellite imagery to look at the house they grew up in as a kid. Jenny Odell spent the last year using it to find refineries, steel mills, shipyards and landfills.
These are the sorts of places we see in Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In the works, Odell takes satellite-borne views of the unglamorous sites, structures, and systems that drive the modern world and digitally strips them of their surroundings, leaving them floating in white space like items from a miniature train catalog. Each collage is based broadly around an industry–transportation, waste, power, or manufacturing–with related structures arranged in freeform clusters. Among the pieces that make them up are a German train station, a Mexican waste pond, and a sprawling nuclear plant in the heart of Arizona.
Odell, who’s currently teaching a course on smartphone photography at Stanford, has long used Google Maps as an artistic resource. Before these industrial landscapes, she took satellite scraps and transformed them into neatly arranged works with names like 100 Container Ships, 97 Nuclear Cooling Towers, and 10 Waterslide Configurations. The satellite overlords in Mountain View haven’t objected; Odell’s work can currently be found on the walls at Google’s headquarters.
“I chose these elements to remind viewers that products don’t come from nowhere.”
While those whimsical earlier works were, on some level, about the act of remixing and reusing Google Maps imagery itself, the pieces that comprise Infrastructure have a more pointed message. “I chose these infrastructural elements to bring them back into the picture,” Odell says, “to hopefully remind viewers that products don’t come from nowhere, and that huge amounts of effort and resources underlie our experience of pedestrian, day-to-day first world life.”
But even when you’re showcasing the forbidding machinery of late capitalism, there’s an aesthetic dimension involved. For Odell’s purposes, the bigger and crazier the refinery, the better. “The insanely large Hyperion wastewater treatment plant in Los Angeles is better than, say, a small plant with only a couple of centrifuges,” she explains. “I’ve been compared several times to a natural scientist, and I do see it like that: while looking around, I’m asking, what’s the most interesting specimen I can find of this thing? What varieties are there?”
After she pinpoints her specimens and captures them in a screenshot, Odell meticulously carves her subjects out of their environs in Photoshop, loads the like pieces into a blank canvas, and fiddles with their placement until she arrives at a satisfactorily harmonious scene. “This part is totally subjective and drives me crazy,” she explains. “It is very tedious.”
But while Odell thinks it’s crucial to keep sight of all this hidden infrastructure–to people of the vast, dirty engine that drives our world of “instantaneity, screens, and 1-click shopping”–her outlook isn’t entirely pessimistic.
“I really do think these structures are beautiful and compelling, if poignantly so,” she says. “I’m amazed by what we’ve developed–and that it works–even if the bigger picture is more troubling. Someone recently remarked that he walked out of my show laughing. I think there will always be something fascinating and delightful about seeing ourselves and our structures in miniature.”
