19.1
JOURNAL OF
VISUAL CULTURE
Whole world within reach: Google Earth
VR
Brooke Belisle
Abstract. Google Earth VR (GEVR), released in 2017, claims to put the whole
world within reach using virtual reality (VR). Relying on sensors that track
a user’s position and gestures in actual space, GEVR suggests that users
can experience its virtual Earth in the same way that they experience the
real one: as a world they actively embody rather than a representation
they examine from the outside. While GEVR conjures a dematerialized
world, it also interrogates how what counts as a material world may always
be suspended between embodied, technical, and aesthetic mediations. If
‘the whole world’ – which exceeds individual perception – can only be
conceived through aesthetic logics, what do the particular aesthetics
of GEVR tell us about the way our world is imaged and imagined today?
What are the implications of the way it stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional,
dimensional coordination? What does the disorienting experience it
offers suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and
representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global
everywhere-at-once?
Keywords. algorithmic aesthetics • Blue Marble • globe • Google Earth •
immersion • machine vision • stereoscopic • virtual reality (VR) • whole
earth • world picture
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
(Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems, 1937)
Within reach
My neck adjusts to the weight of the virtual reality (VR) headset as someone
tightens its straps around my head. Plastic controllers are placed in my
hands and a voice behind me asks ‘do you see it?’ In the stereoscopic display
pressed to my face, a rocky landscape appears to extend away from me,
toward a dusky horizon where ‘Google Earth’ floats in large, white letters.
journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu]
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne)
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Vol 19(1): 112–136https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920909990
DOI 10.1177/1470412920909990
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
Representations of the controllers hover at arm’s length, registering every
fidget of my hands, but my body itself is invisible. As I shift my head, my
changing perspective discloses different aspects of the virtual space around
me. The line of the horizon circumscribes my view in every direction, giving
my look something to trace. When I click a controller, the vantage point pulls
back until the planet as a whole comes into view. The message ‘Welcome to
Earth’ is stretched across its center like a garland. While I still feel my feet
on the floor, in a room in New York City, my virtual body has floated far
enough away from this other Earth to see it compressed into a blue–green
ball. If I could really fly this far out into space, the planet would appear as
flat as a picture; human eyes are spaced too close to perceive depth at such
a distance. The Earth I see now is impossibly spherical, seeming almost
near enough to touch.
Introduced for the HTC Vive in 2016 and for Oculus in 2017, Google Earth VR
(GEVR) transforms the familiar, screen-based globe of Google Earth into an
immersive, interactive VR experience. Using GEVR, users can virtually ‘stroll
the streets of Tokyo, soar over Yosemite, or teleport across the globe’.1 As
this list suggests, navigation across different scales suggests different forms
of virtual embodiment and different interaction metaphors. Users begin as
if somewhere in orbit outside the Earth; using a handheld controller to click
and drag, they can jump to different locations around the planet as if spinning
the globe beneath them. At the distance of a low airplane, they can hover and
‘fly’, as if they were the Google Maps peg man, for aerial views of cities and
landscapes. At ground level, they can ‘walk’ at roughly normal human scale,
for an experience based on Google Street View.
To create a scalable, navigable, multi-perspectival, and photorealistic model
of the planet’s surface, GEVR draws visual information from a massive dataset
that is publicly available through the platform Google Earth Engine.2 This
platform incorporates information from NASA satellites, crowd-sourced
contributions, and photographic sets used for Google Maps and Street
View that have been captured on the ground in cars and from the air in
planes. Machine vision is used to algorithmically analyze and process image
information, minimizing the need for human operators to view, interpret, and
sort individual images. Image data is parsed and combined not only at the
level of the frame, shot, or take, but also at the level of individual pixels. With
machine learning, algorithms find and adapt to patterns found in and across
images, finding unprogrammed solutions to problems such as removing
visual obstructions. Computational forms of photogrammetry are used to
map images to geographic space, allowing three-dimensional models to be
extrapolated from two-dimensional data.
By coordinating visual information as a space to be viscerally navigated in
VR, GEVR constitutes the most extreme elaboration of the ‘search’ paradigm
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that Google has helped make culturally dominant. What began as a project to
index and inter-reference websites, structuring the internet as ‘searchable’,
expanded to the offline world of places and ideas through projects like Google
Maps and Google Books. Google has become, in practice, a general interface
to or index of almost anything – a phenomenon that a popular book called
‘the Googlization of everything’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2011).3 With the aspiration to
index everything worth searching for, Google has helped create conditions in
which the logic of its data structures often determines how everything indexed
seems to stand together as if inherently interrelated, by the very conditions of
being indexible. Early developers of Google Earth envisioned that the spatial
expanse of the planet could act as a data structure and interface for organizing
and accessing all the visible world.
An implicit elision between actual space and the spatialization of digital,
‘searchable’ structures of information has helped naturalize a sense that
informational ‘links’ between things (such as the associations relating multiple
results for the same search term) could be understood as spatially arrayed
and navigable, and, likewise, that material relationships between things (such
as the spatial proximity of two houses on the same street) could be expressed
in terms of inter-referenced data structures.4 GEVR takes this conceit further
by attempting to translate the fusion of geographical terrain and information
architecture in terms of a space that could be embodied and viscerally
navigated. The relative success of this attempt hinges on how GEVR produces
a sense of dimensionality and scalability that can correlate between the
apparent seamlessness of its model, the presumed coherence of the ‘whole
earth’, and the felt coordination of individual, embodied perception.
Other strategies for representing the Earth as a whole have also correlated the
material coherence of the model with the purportedly objective coherence of
the planet itself. Globes and hand-wrought representations have attempted
to render the whole Earth visible since at least about 200 BCE.5 In the 19th
century, as global space was mapped into standard measures, the panoramic
enclosures of spherical georamas aimed to offer an immersive view of the
world ‘at a glance’ (Belisle, 2015; Bigg, 2007). From the mid-19th century,
collections of photographs promised to gather local sights from around
the globe into ‘world tours’ and ‘global’ forms of knowledge (Belisle, 2013a;
Parmeggiani, 2016; Stakelon, 2010). The ‘cosmic zoom’ of cinema – from
Powers of Ten (dir. Charles and Ray Eames, 1977) to films like Gravity (dir.
Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) – has offered a way to integrate a planetary overview
with a close-up on the ground.6 GEVR incorporates strategies from all these
formats, positing a fully mobile point of view that not only integrates the
details visible from all perspectives, but also the dimensional relationships
that reorganize across every scale.
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
GEVR’s most radical proposition is its particular construction of scalar,
embodied visibility. When users navigate within GEVR, they are not simply
‘zooming’ in or out on a static, high-resolution image; or triggering autorendered imagery in the way that, for example, a game engine might draw
trees from a template to populate a forest as the user walked through it.
Instead, different stored image pairs are rendered to the stereo headset,
with visual information unique to a specific scale and vantage point. Sensors
track the users’ position and movements in actual space to call up imagery
that will feel continuous to them because it reflects the implicit change in
their embedded point of view.7 When users actually turn their heads to look
left or walk forward, or use handheld controllers to ‘fly’ in any direction, the
imagery ‘around them’ shifts to disclose a different view that seems to have
already been there, waiting to be seen. This suggests that this virtual Earth
not only reiterates every possible perspective of the planet but also integrates
all possible perspectives across all scales.
The fact that GEVR models the Earth – where its users are actually embodied –
puts an unusual twist on its particular conceit of immersion. With the tagline,
‘your world awaits’, it reminds users that this virtual world represents their
own – the Earth they already occupy.8 The anticipation of ‘awaits’, however,
implies that the world is not theirs quite yet. Claiming that it ‘puts the whole
world within your reach’, GEVR suggests that the visceral interpellation of VR
will enable users to grasp the world in a way that is usually beyond them. In
everyday experience, the ‘whole world’ is already always virtual – something
presumed, despite the fact that it is never fully explicit or present within the
limits of embodied perception. Rather than promising to transport users into
another, virtual world, GEVR seems to promise the actual Earth, and with it
the whole human world, in its otherwise-unknowable entirety.
For the most part, the Earth coincides with the whole world for human beings.
With the exception of very few astronauts, all of human experience has been
held within its atmosphere. An overview of this ‘whole world’ from somewhere
outside it has long been imagined. Phenomenological philosophers have
contended, however, that a ‘world’, in the sense it usually carries, is not an
object like a planet that could be studied from the outside.9 Rather, it names
the dynamic, interconnected complex in which anything exists as such. A
world gathers together and relates everything in or of that world; to be is to
be already enworlded. In this sense, the ‘whole world’ could not be a static,
bounded thing, to be comprehensively grasped by any means. Instead, it
would consist of an ongoing, shifting interrelatedness of everything making it
up, elements constantly multiplying and disappearing.
The whole Earth – the planet as a solid sphere whose surface completes
itself – offers a seemingly objective, and concrete figure for the whole
world’s otherwise imperceptible interconnection. To imagine a view of the
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whole Earth is also to imagine the subject position that could embody this
impossible view. Many scholars interested in globalization, ecology, and
remote-sensing have recently thought back to the launch of Sputnik and
the first representations of the Earth from space to trace how the concept
of a global view has been materially and ideologically constructed through
changing technologies (Bratton, 2019; Gabrys, 2016; King, 2015; Lazier, 2011;
Mirzoeff, 2016; Sloterdijk, 2014; Yusoff, 2017). Computational technologies, in
particular, have offered new capacities for documenting and representing the
Earth: they stage its sensibility ‘as a whole’ less as a singular object seen from
a distance, than as a concatenation of or coordination between the details of
many discrete data points and datasets.
On one hand, algorithmic logics break from the conceit of an embodied view
that has structured how an ‘overview’ has been imagined. On the other hand,
however, as Katherine Yusoff (2017: np) has argued, data modeling is not ‘a
change in kind’ as much as an escalation of the ‘drive towards the totality
of global-world-image, imagined as an accumulative strategy of denser
and more representative data architectures of the world’. The aspiration to
visualize and comprehend the world as a whole is always, as Yusoff insists,
the ‘persuasion of a globalizing force’ that is, nonetheless, ‘located in specific
geopolitical modes of production and technologies of reproduction’. As Yusoff
acknowledges in her own emphasis on affect, embodied experience stands
at the crux of this paradox: specific, visceral forms of sensing and knowing
negotiate how broader ‘persuasions’ emerge through the material conditions
of particular technologies, aesthetics, and structures of mediation.
The way the world is seen, imaged, and imagined is always coproduced through
technical mediation and embodied perception. As aesthetic strategies change,
altering how the Earth’s surface is comprehensively imaged and also how the
whole world is imagined, this changes how the Earth’s objective ‘wholeness’
and the world’s abstract interconnectedness are conceived as pre-existing
any form of representation. From globes, through photographs, to today’s
algorithmic aesthetics, changing techniques of picturing and technologies of
visualization alter what appear as visceral analogies between the way the world
is perceived, represented, and thought to actually hold together. What are the
implications of how GEVR models the world as a provisional collaboration
between algorithmic and embodied processes? What does the experience
of GEVR suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and
representation, subject and world, the individual here-and-now and a global
everywhere-at-once?
Globes
In offering to put the whole world within reach, GEVR uses the contemporary
technology of VR to rearticulate a promise that model globes have offered
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
for at least 2,000 years. Every globe is an interface that solicits visceral
interaction. Every globe models an overarching coordination that cannot
be seen all at once from one perspective. It was for this reason that globes
were once categorized as philosophical instruments and tools of natural
philosophy – models for materially and viscerally demonstrating concepts
that might otherwise seem too abstract to grasp. When users spin a globe,
their experience of the model acts as proxy for an experience of the planet
they could not possibly have: it allows users to feel, at a miniature scale, the
way in which everywhere on Earth holds together as the Earth. The globe
offers a sense of the ‘whole’ and how it could be grasped that rests on the
three-dimensional solidity of a spherical object: its entire surface may not
be visible at once, but it can be traced in a single, continuous gesture of the
user’s hand.10
The virtual globe of GEVR follows traditional globes in proposing a visceral
analogy between the way the Earth objectively coheres and how this coherence
might be grasped through the sensory experience of a representation. GEVR
departs from a traditional globe, however, in the way it constructs this analogy.
GEVR promises that, through VR, users could experience a model of the Earth
in the very way that they experience the reality that it models: as a world they
actively embody rather than a representation they examine from the outside.
Versions of Google Earth made for touchscreens or desktops allow users to
encounter and manipulate on-screen images that can be virtually spun like
globes, as if the user’s point of view remains fixed while the globe rotates.
Within GEVR, users can spin a small image of the planet as an interfacewithin-the-interface; but more often the user occupies a mobile point of view
that traverses planetary space. By tracking the users’ actual spatial position
and gestures, GEVR correlates their embodied perspective with the way the
model is dynamically, dimensionally rendered.
When a globe sits unseen, unspun, its circumference still describes the same
spatial arrangement of continents and oceans. When it is seen and spun,
the user can look at different elements in ways that produce different visual
relationships; but everything around the globe remains fixed. GEVR suggests
a similar persistence, by suggesting that the user can navigate around a stable
Earth-interface. In truth, however, the imagery of GEVR relies on how a user
actively triggers sequences of image data that would not add up to or cohere
as virtual globe. When GEVR sits unused, it awaits a user as a vast amount of
visual information, an interface, and a computational architecture through
which the interface and data can be interrelated. The world is put together
differently each time, dynamically called and stitched in different relationships
in response to – and anticipating – the user.
GEVR becomes a virtual model of the Earth when users prompt particular
imagery to be rendered to their display, and coordinates that imagery in
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terms of their own, ongoing sense of embodied space. To experience the VR
representation, users must incorporate the spatial relationships between the
paired and sequential images of the stereoscopic headset in terms of their
own sense of embodied space, time, and motion. In other words, embodied
processes that are always already underway, and largely involuntary, become
the framework through which the model’s virtual dimensions are constructed
as sensible. Users conjure up the implicit dimensionality that seems to take
place as a technological projection ‘around’ them. When this coordination
fails, the imagery fails to produce a ‘virtual world’ or to be immersive. Instead
it appears discorrelated in ways that are not only incoherent at the level of
visual representation, but also physically disorienting for the user to the point
of inducing vertigo and nausea.11 In other words, a world that cannot be made
to cohere as such unravels the implicit coherence of the embodied user.
In order to achieve the ‘global’ view that GEVR promises, the user has to
incorporate algorithmic forms of visual and spatial coordination in terms of
very individual processes of vision and spatialization. The conceit of GEVR, in
which the user inhabits a virtual model of the actual Earth, suggests that the
disorientation and nausea that can result from trying to experience the planet
within the limits of embodied perception in VR resonate with the ways these
limits also frustrate any attempt to achieve this as an actual experience. When
users find themselves viscerally, and involuntarily, rejecting the simulation,
this brings to the surface a contingency and precarity in how body and world
are mutually conceived that obtains beyond the terms of the simulation. This
is not new to VR; technological and aesthetic transformations have repeatedly
produced accounts of visceral disorientation and vertigo.12 Media aesthetics
are a primary site where the incommensurability between individual,
embodied perception and broader, technically mediated structures of sensing
and knowing are continually renegotiated. Changing technologies of visual
representation alter how the mutual coherence of both the ‘whole world’ and
the embodied ‘subject’ are constructed as always-already in place.
Blue Marble
To anchor what could be a very disorienting experience of flying around and
piecing together the planet, GEVR initially presents the user with the image
of a globe. Developers at Google intentionally modeled this globe the way
that most people already tend to visualize the Earth: a blue–green planet
hovering in darkness, swirled with wisps of atmosphere. Picturing the planet
like this directly invokes the first photographs taken of the earth from space
– especially the 1972 image that came to be called Blue Marble. Blue Marble
was captured by an astronaut on the Apollo 17 mission, about 28,000 miles
away from the Earth. It was immediately iconic, and remains one of the most
widely seen and reproduced images in the history of photography (Poole,
2008). The conditions required to see the Earth illuminated as a sphere in
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
space are so rare that only a few people have ever witnessed it; almost 50
years later, Blue Marble remains the only image like this captured by a human
being rather than through satellites.
The visual homage to Blue Marble in the opening of GEVR works to orient
the user by way of a familiar view – the vantage point constructed by that
photograph. GEVR suggests that, through VR, viewers could occupy the
perspective from which a photograph like Blue Marble could be captured;
that they could encounter a three-dimensional planet hovering within a
space and time continuous with their own embodied presence. Restaging
this photograph in VR, however, acts as a sleight of hand, suggesting that the
reality effects of VR remain anchored in photographic logics that they both
incorporate and displace.
One reason Blue Marble had such an enormous impact was because it seemed
to deliver a view that was belated on arrival, already expected and imagined long
before it was technologically possible. In Plato’s Phaedo (2009[360 BCE]), for
example, Socrates claims that ‘the true earth, if one views it from above, is said
to look like those twelve-piece leather balls’: ‘variegated, a patchwork of colors’
coordinating as ‘one continuous multi-colored surface’ (pp. 110b–d). Although
this vantage point was not accessible in 360 BCE, it is invoked as a present
possibility (‘if one views’). That possibility, however, is described indirectly:
it is recounted from someone else’s account, and conjured by way of simile
(‘said to look like’). As in the rhetoric of GEVR – where ‘your word awaits’ – the
possibility of perceiving the planet as a whole is both presumed and deferred.
A view that could not be embodied in the here-and-now is displaced through
forms of representation and rearticulation. The ‘view’ is always a construct
that posits the objective coherence of the ‘whole world’, and a particular way
of subjectively grasping this wholeness, as mutually assured.
Plato relied on metaphor, and the concrete example of a ball. In the 1960s,
however, when it was possible in principle to capture an image of the planet
from a satellite or space shuttle, a view of the whole Earth seemed immanent
as a photograph. As is often recalled, Stewart Brand (1977) rallied public
sentiment leading up to NASA’s initial release of what are now called ‘whole
earth’ images, distributing buttons reading ‘Why haven’t we seen a picture of
the whole earth yet?’13 He believed that NASA had captured views of the planet
it was refusing to share. This sense that the ‘picture of the whole’ was waiting
to be seen speaks to more than simply leftist suspicion. Even for astronauts
who actually saw the Earth from space, the ‘direct’ view was conceived as a
picture. In the moments before the second best-known photograph of the
Earth, Earthrise, was taken in 1968, as astronaut Frank Borman saw Earth
through the window of Apollo 8, he described it as already mediated: ‘Oh my
God! Look at that picture over there!’ He asked someone to hand him the
camera and if there was color film to capture it.14
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The fact that even an embodied view was grasped in terms of a photograph
– and with the crossed temporality of being somehow already and not-yet
a photograph – demonstrates how a view of the whole world can only be
conceived through logics of picturing and proxy. It is not possible for embodied
perceivers to fully grasp a world of which they are a part. The very distance that
allowed NASA astronauts to witness the Earth as a sphere actually flattened
its appearance, for them, into the depthless plane of a two-dimensional
image. The effect of parallax comes undone when the gap between two eyes
is not wide enough to discern different aspects of something far away. In the
moment when the astronauts saw the planet, it was no longer their embodied
world – it was an elsewhere, like the moon is for anyone standing on Earth.
The astronauts’ view was also photographic in a sense that the stability of the
photographic image ultimately effaces: given the speed of light across the
solar system, the image of the Earth arrived to them as light from a distant
place and earlier time.
Blue Marble exemplifies how the terms of an embodied view and of visual
representation convolute at their mutual limits. Descriptions of Blue Marble
often slip into imagining the view is direct, or as if to look at the photograph
is to embody and re-enact an astronaut’s act of seeing. This is partially due to
the reality effects of photography. Of course, no photograph is a direct view
of whatever it may picture.15 In the case of Blue Marble, however, there were
additional levels of mediation or manipulation separating the familiar image
from the embodied view of an Apollo astronaut. It was shot as one cell from
a roll of 70mm celluloid film, and its orientation on the roll shows that it was
captured with the South Pole pointing toward the top edge of the picture
rather than the bottom. After the negative was cut from the roll and printed,
it was rotated to reorient the planet to look ‘right side up’. The image was also
cropped to center the Earth, and ‘corrected’ for color and lighting, to create
a more perfect portrait of the planet. These changes were guided by very
earth-bound perspectives and habits of seeing. There is no right side up in
the universe.
If NASA astronauts might have, for a few moments, been far enough outside
their ordinary world to see it differently, Blue Marble worked against the
disorientation of such an untethered visibility. It helped construct a ‘view
from elsewhere’ anchored by the conventions of embodied vision and
representation right ‘here’. It helped naturalize assumptions about how
the whole world is visible that were inflected by the logics of photography,
authorizing a sense that the Earth is visible as a photographable ‘thing’ that
can be framed from a single point of view and translated into an image. More
broadly, it exemplifies how any representation of the ‘whole world’ articulates
a self-authorizing proposition.
Given that it is not possible to directly, viscerally, experience the whole
world as a present, proximate object of perception, it is only ever conjured
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
through logics of aesthetic representation. These aesthetic logics articulate
a particular kind of coherence, and make this contingent on a particular
vantage point and particular way of seeing. When users take up and enact
the mode of visibility that a representation offers, they lend themselves to its
structural proposition. They invest the kind of coherence and visibility that
the representation offers as if it rearticulates the coherence and visibility of
whatever it represents. To the extent that a user can make sense of a model of
the whole world, and that it seems to make sense as such, its particular way
of modeling the world is felt to rearticulate the way the world itself exists to
be seen and modeled. This constructs the only available sense of a whole that
would be otherwise insensible.
Just as globes were philosophical toys, material tools for abstract thought,
GEVR might be seen to update the way the world is modeled to keep pace
with the aesthetic and technical conditions that have restructured how our
planet’s material reality is visualized and understood as visible. It analogizes
ways in which the Earth is now pervasively mediated by computational terms
of representation: not only in how it is represented, but also in how it is even
conceived of as visible. It is important to remember that the Earth’s visibility
has always been mediated by aesthetic technologies – from Plato through
NASA photographs – but different logics of mediation, and their particular
aesthetics, produce different analogies that are viscerally incorporated and
naturalized as the appearance of objective reality itself.
Contemporary visual technologies and constructions of visibility disrupt how
long-held logics of an ‘overview’ have structured the contingent coordination
between an embodied subject and an all-encompassing world. Adrian
Mackenzie and Anna Muenster (2019) have recently theorized this as nothing
less than a wholesale reconstruction of visuality. They propose
it is the image ensemble – images, not simply quantified, but labelled,
formatted and made ‘platform-ready’ – that enables the emergence of a
new mode of perception, and indeed a reformulation of visuality itself.
We call this platform seeing. These contemporary image ensembles are
not simply quantitatively beyond our imagining but qualitatively not
of the order of representation. Their operativity cannot be seen by an
observing ‘subject’ but rather is enacted via observation events distributed
throughout and across devices, hardware, human agents and artificial
networked architectures such as deep learning networks. (p. 5)
This conception of visuality challenges how any ordinary notion of ‘seeing’
would mutually coordinate the subject who sees and what is seen in terms of a
view or a picture that reiterates that view. It asks that we rethink what counts
as an image and as an ‘event’ of observation.
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Platform seeing is one way to think about how contemporary techniques of
Earth-sensing have radically redistributed what was once conceived as the
Apollonian view. As soon as Apollo astronauts seemed to deliver that view,
their photographs were nostalgic. Satellites have captured many more images
of the Earth from space since, documenting countless aspects of its surface
from multiple distances and perspectives. These technologies are not cameras
operated by someone looking through a lens to capture a view. Likewise,
the image data they capture is most often computationally combined from
multiple sources and ‘takes’ to produce ‘views’ surfacing specific information.
These processes inherit both the presumption of direct visibility that Blue
Marble encouraged and the effaced layers of manipulation that structured its
legibility in conventional ways.
Today it may no longer be possible to even imagine a single-scale point of view,
or photograph, that could encompass ‘the whole world’. The conception of an
overarching, all-encompassing, and objective perspective may no longer be
projected as a ‘view from above’. Instead, this vantage point may be conceived,
as it is in GEVR, as embedded and emergent, but without the ordinary
limitations of an individually situated perspective. The challenge becomes,
then, how to correlate the algorithmic terms through which information is
coordinated to produce an apparently coherent model of the world, with the
visceral terms through which sensory experience coordinates and produces
what counts as and feels like the world as such.
Mesh
Rather than delivering a stable object from a singular perspective, GEVR
offers a dimensional, scalable model that seems to afford every perspective.
This is possible because the information architecture for GEVR is not based
on a two-dimensional map or the singular surface of a globe, but instead,
is structured as a multi-dimensional ‘mesh’.16 The nodes and links of the
mesh are organized as radially branching, which allows visual and spatial
information to be interrelated across multiple scales and perspectives. In
other words, this helps organize the same geolocation and surface area –
the same ‘place’ is pictured in many, related images that show it at different
times, from different perspectives, and at different scales and resolutions.
In VR, these differences construct differently embodied views; they conjure
immersion at different scales and suggest different ways that a shared virtual
space seems to encompass both the viewer and what they see.
VR immersion aims to coordinate how users feel themselves to be positioned
in and taking-up actual space – having, for example, a front and back side
– with the way the representation articulates their perspective as materially
situated within the virtual space of the model. By coordinating users’ actual
gestures and movements with the way the virtual world is rendered and
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
continually re-rendered, GEVR relies on a dynamic feedback loop between
the way users proprioceptively sense their body in actual space and the way
a virtual space appears to cohere as navigable. When users navigate GEVR,
their actual position and movements trigger which imagery is rendered to
their stereo headset. Users produce the perceived spatiality of the virtual
world as they coordinate the stereoscopic relationship of each image pair
and the implicit spatiotemporal relationship between subsequent images.
This works to gear users’ embodied apperception – the way they integrate
a bodily sense of space, of even being a body in space – with the way the
representation appears to cohere as a continuous world. In the parlance of
VR, this sense of ‘immersion’ is also described as ‘presence’: it is less about the
optical verisimilitude of the representation than its ability to support a largely
involuntary coordination of virtual and actual embodiment.
GEVR’s conceit of immersion is tested by the hyperbolic dimensions of a
planet-sized space. It is not possible for the same embodied perspective to
scale from a street level view to a cosmic perspective. It would be sadistic
to prompt users to incorporate spatiotemporal sensations of actually
rocketing from far away in space down to the Earth’s surface in a matter of
seconds. Rapidly changing perspectives on a flat and bounded screen can be
disorienting; but the immersive, scalar shifts of GEVR produce more bizarre
perceptual effects. Navigating between spatial scales, the user’s vantage point
radically expands and contracts; this can feel like an Alice in Wonderland
experience of physically growing gigantic or shrinking very small.17
The changing interaction metaphors and forms of virtual embodiment at
each scale of GEVR presented the most complex technical challenges for
its developers. They devised several original interaction models to make its
dimensional navigation work.18 These operate as something like a form of
continuity editing for this platform, like the crop and rotation did for the
Blue Marble image. A technique of ‘scaled, step teleport’ helps compensate
for shifts in scale. It parses large, virtual movements into modular stages, and
allows the implicit perspective of the users to scale up or down relative to
the space they are trying to frame within their view. This helps to keep users
from feeling suddenly huge or small even though their perspective is being
reorganized to encompass very different proportions.
The developers of GEVR also developed ‘cone drag’, for triangulating the
vector of virtual movement. This helps accommodate for the perceived height
of the user’s body within the representation. When users click a location
to move toward it, that movement is directed by their gaze; but anchoring
movement at eye level can result in users feeling they are virtually crashing
their faces into things rather than ‘landing on their feet’, so to speak. Cone
drag ensures that the implicit distance between a user’s head and feet adjusts
relative virtual shifts in scale, so that users feel their virtual movements result
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in the point of view they had expected. Lastly, developers added a feature
they call ‘tunnel vision’, which limits the field of view and imposes a geometric
grid as virtual floor. This helps produce the illusion of a stable orientation
when users ‘fly’ across the globe in ways that cannot be easily tethered to the
dimensions of embodied experience. Without activating this feature, many
users find it nauseating, and frightening, to virtually experience movement at
such an impossible scale and speed.
Attempting to prevent users from getting nauseated, the developers of GEVR
worked to naturalize the warpings of its algorithmically spatialized world.
Their efforts foreground how VR immersion aggressively disembodies users’
perspective while also entraining their embodied production of spatiality to
coordinate the virtual space. This is not altogether unlike a traditional model
globe: globe users must conceive of themselves as dematerialized observers
of a planet they hold as an object in their hands; and yet it is the way the
space and time of their own embodied encounter can encompass all sides of
that globe that ratifies it, too, as solidly self-same. What may be new about
GEVR are the specific algorithmic aesthetics and techniques of coordination
in which it interpellates the users and involves them in co-producing.
GEVR relies on techniques of artificial intelligence and photodigital imaging
that thoroughly mediate how the world is actually seen and engaged today.
This is true of how, for example, a weather scientist studies atmosphere but
equally true in the most quotidian experiences, such as trying to coordinate
your position in actual space with your GPS-tracked position on a mapping
app. These visualizations are not easily reducible to the idea of a singular
picture capturing an individual view. Contemporary representations of the
Earth’s surface may involve data recorded by cameras and satellites that
is computationally processed before being rendered as an image. Data
from multiple moments and points of capture may be correlated, analysed,
compiled, and rendered into a form that appears singularly coherent. Due
to this, computationally produced images often depict perspectives that are
strictly virtual – which have not and could not be embodied or often even
take place in the world. When human perceivers take up and engage these
images, however, they make sense of them in terms that transform what could
constitute a ‘view’.19
GEVR prompts users to viscerally ‘make sense’ of a spatiality that is at
once virtual and actual, algorithmic and embodied. It interpellates the user
within an effort to adequate algorithmic and perceptual logics. It could be
understood as a kind of philosophical toy that offers a visceral way to grapple
with how the ‘whole world’ is pictured, experienced, and conceived of through
an uneasy mesh of algorithmic, aesthetic, and embodied logics that produce
what counts as visibility.20 If this both leverages and displaces the terms of
embodied, human experience, this may analogize ways this already takes place.
For example, consider how you might turn in place, watching which way the
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
directional cone is cast out from the blue dot representing your position on a
mapping app, trying to match up your position in the model with the sense of
where you are actually facing and the way you will be heading. This very local
example of how embodied, aesthetic, and technical forms of spatialization are
interleaved scales out to also implicate how individual bodies are interpellated
into the broader concatenations of actual and virtual that ‘global’ names.
The way GEVR makes it impossible for users to anchor themselves anywhere
‘outside’ the representation offers a way to think about the overwhelming
struggle to grasp, at any level of actual sensation or sense, the planetary scales
of climate change, late capitalism, terrorism, a pandemic like COVID-19, and
human migration, to name a few. The ways we are individually, viscerally
interpellated into these concatenations can prove nauseatingly, even violently,
incoherent. And yet, the problems they name cannot be addressed without
finding some way to make sense of and engage them as something other than
abstractions.
GEVR attempts to instantiate a perspective that would be capacious enough
to grasp the entire planet as a coherent whole, and yet still remain coordinated
at the scale of individual, human perception. This asserts a radical scalability
to the relationship we might ordinarily call perspective, or understand in
terms of aesthetic coordination: a relationship between how an embodied
perceiver grasps something as coherent and sensible, and the way that thing
appears and seems to cohere as something graspable. It suggests a potential
for comprehending and engaging global scale relationships through embodied
terms of feeling, knowing, and making-sense. As with previous attempts
to tether the expanse of the ‘whole world’ to the dimensions of embodied
experience, this tests how both body and world are already presumed to
cohere and relate; it viscerally stages how this relationship is actively reckoned
and continually recalibrated.
Worldlessness
In a 1966 interview (published a decade later), Martin Heidegger (1992[1976])
claimed he was ‘frightened’ when he saw some of the first images of the Earth
from space. For him, they showed that ‘we don’t need any atom bomb. The
uprooting of man has already taken place. The only thing we have left is purely
technological relationships. This is no longer the earth on which man lives.’ 21
In other words, we would not need to wait until the Earth was destroyed to
lose our world; it had been lost as technical relationships replaced the lived
forms of relationality that would constitute a world as such. In light of his
earlier writing about ‘world picture’, the most disturbing thing about images
of the Earth from space would not be the fact of achieving them as much
as how they could seem to ratify and operationalize a presumption that the
world is something that could be grasped and conveyed in terms of an image.
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For Heidegger, ‘world picture’ names a way that the modern subject and
modern world are co-conceived as if the world were completely, objectively
present, arrayed before the subject; and as if the subject could grasp the world
entirely enframed within their view, from a vantage point somehow outside it.
Heidegger explains that what he means by ‘picture’ is not an actual image, but
a character of ‘standing-together, system’; the terms of picturing produce ‘the
unity of structure in that which is represented as such, a unity that develops
out of the projection of the objectivity of whatever is’ (Heidegger, 1977[1954]:
129). While the subject seems to stand outside this system, their vantage point
is implicit in the way it appears to objectively stand-together, how it seems
self-coordinated as visible. Heidegger saw this double bind as alienating and
reifying in ways that enable violence: subjects seem to survey a world of things
at their disposal, and forget that they would be counted among those things.
Heidegger, along with other phenomenological philosophers such as his
teacher Edmund Husserl and student Hannah Arendt, associated this double
bind with the way Galileo and Descartes had cast doubt on the truths disclosed
through direct experience, and projected greater certainty to a vantage point
beyond those limits. Heidegger saw this rooted in a Cartesian geometry that
presumes space extends in objective and static dimensions: things sit in the
world like pegs in a coordinate grid. The Cartesian cogito, the I-think of
human subjectivity, transcends this spatiality, however, by being ‘unextended’
in material space – somehow divorced from the terms of its embodiment.
Both Heidegger and Arendt described this as a way subjectivity was dislocated
to the Archimedian point – that fabled place on the other end of a lever long
enough to move the Earth.
Arendt (1958) marked the 1957 launch of Sputnik as evidence that what had
been constituted as the ‘view from the Archimedian point’ had become
untethered from the Earth and embodied visibility entirely. She argued that
if it seemed possible to actually look back from the distant edge of Galileo’s
gaze, then the most all-encompassing and authoritative perspective would
have to be conceived of as if outside this circuit. She theorized that the locus
of ultimate objectivity had receded to a ‘universal’ vantage whose truths
could not be verified in terms of tangible or perceptible phenomena, but only
inter-referenced. Her argument suggests how the conceit of ‘world picture’
might no longer obtain, or at least how ‘picture’ would be understood very
differently. The consequences she associated with this are similar to those
Heidegger described as being uprooted, but describes almost the inverse:
a ‘worldlessness’ in which the ‘common world’ floats away from the people
thought to share it.
Arendt uses the metaphor of sitting around a table to illustrate what it means
‘to live together in the world’ and ‘have it in common’ (pp. 52–53). She explains
that ‘the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
time’, similar to the way the table both relates and separates ‘those who sit
around it’. What she calls wordlessness happens when
the world between [people] has lost its power to gather them together, to
relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a
spiritualistic séance where the number of people gathered around a table
might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their
midst, so that two persons sitting opposite one another were no longer
separated but would also be entirely unrelated to each other by anything
tangible. (pp. 52–53)
This sense of multiplicity without relation describes a way of sharing the planet
without sharing a world, a way that every place and position on the surface
of the Earth could be conceived as co-present, visible, and representable
without being held in common or integrating, even in terms of anything as
coherent as a ‘picture’.
The ways that computation has altered the structure of picturing could
escalate the stakes of Heidegger and Arendt’s critiques. Arendt historicized
the loss of a common world in relationship to postwar developments of
math and science that were bound up with the shift into computational and
algorithmic logics that undergird how visibility is conceived and constructed
today. Virtual Reality, in particular, relies on and extends Cartesian geometries
that virtualize subjectivity, and was developed in tandem with the ‘space race’
technologies and aspirations that concerned phenomenologists invested
in ‘enworlded’ life. In one sense, it stands as a hyperbolic expression of the
paradox of world picture and the alienation of worldlessness. People using
GEVR are offered the subject position Heidegger described as lord of the
earth, promised the planet set out before them, self-organized as visible
in terms they can take up and embody. As a contemporary update to Blue
Marble, GEVR could be alarming in the same way that early images from space
frightened Heidegger.
On the other hand, Heidegger’s concept of world picture presumes a particular
structure of seeing and picturing that is no longer adequate to describe
contemporary terms through which the world is conceived and grasped. Just
as Blue Marble seemed to offer a view of the whole Earth, the conceit of this
view was shifting away from the photographic. Today, a concept of world
picture would find a different figure in algorithmic coordinations that produce
a different relationship between embodiment and representation, constructing
different structures of both ‘world’ and ‘view’. The visual data in Earth Engine, for
example, is not necessarily visible in itself, and does not add up to any coherent
view. To glean what could be grasped from its petabytes of data requires active
correlation and coordination. This takes place as a collaboration between
algorithmic techniques and human operators – computational processes for
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consolidating ‘aspects’ of information, and aesthetic strategies for making these
sensible for human perceivers.
Worlding
Algorithmic logics condition contemporary practices of observation,
documentation, and representation to the degree that it does not even seem
useful to aspire toward a single, embodied view from which everything that
is could be apprehended. This aspiration of an overview has largely given
way to the fantasy of an internally articulated ‘everyview’: a visibility that
could coordinate every distinct perspective, across radical contractions
and dilations of scale.22 The ‘whole’ seems posited in terms of a multidimensional coordination of all possible aspects. Contemporary VR figures
this aspiration, imagining what it could be like to embody this way of seeing,
which is subtended by algorithmic terms of visualization. To the extent that
this is staged as ‘virtual’, displaced from any actual world, it does not bring
a world within reach as much as figure and exemplify the condition Arendt
described as worldlessness, and what Heidegger described as being left with
nothing but ‘technological relationships’.
GEVR could analogize and ratify how the stakes of world picture have escalated
in and as 21st-century conditions of computation. On the other hand, the
computational strategies that drive GEVR also recondition assumptions
about vision, representation, and how things ‘stand together’ as a picture,
that subtend Heidegger’s thinking about world picture. Observing the rise of
imaging platforms that could dynamically stitch facets into multi-perspectival
spaces, William Uricchio (2011) argued that an ‘algorithmic turn’ unsettles, or
at least ‘fissures’ the logic of world picture that has seemed to organize the
mutual coordination of vision, representation, and subject–object relations
in what is usually defined as modernity. Thomas Elsaesser (2013) has made
a similar argument, identifying the 21st-century resurgence of threedimensional media as ‘part of and symptom for a broader change in our
perceptual and sensory default values’ (p. 228) that is ‘retooling the semantics
of embodied perception’ (p. 239) and ‘redefining what we mean by seeing, by
images, and how to differentiate the latter from pictures’ (p. 235). He claims
that this change disrupts ‘the fixed or grounded observer of the single point of
view as predicated by the last five hundred years of monocular perspective’ to
describe our ‘embodied relation to data-rich simulated environments’ (p. 240).
It activates ‘postpictorial spatial vision’ and dimensional forms of ‘in-depth
sensation’ as ‘the new default value of digital vision, presuming a layered,
material, yet also mobile and pliable space’ that involves a ‘different awareness
of bodily orientation and physical location’ (p. 239). His description invokes
precisely the kind of vision and dynamic, embedded, spatialization that GEVR
asks its users to embody and invest. Modeling the entire planet, GEVR also
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
suggests how the virtual spatiality of a digital simulation may not be entirely
distinguishable from what Elsaesser (2013: 239) calls ‘the everywhere and
no-where, the spatialized ubiquity we now inhabit in the day-to-day’.
GEVR is not new in positing the whole world could be ‘directly’ grasped by
way of aesthetic mediation, or in suggesting that a new visual technology will
make this more possible than ever before. What is new about GEVR is the way
in which it overtly prompts the user to engage in an adequation of embodied
and computational aesthetics, and the way this particular production of
immersion posits that the world holds together, and enacts its coordination.
While VR conjures a dematerialized world, it also emphasizes that what counts
as a material world may always be suspended between embodied, technical,
and aesthetic mediations. It suggests an active analogy between the way its
representation of the Earth dimensionally coordinates multiple aspects, the
way embodied perception actively coordinates spatial experience, and the
way the world itself takes place as a coordination of places and perspectives.
It could be possible to read GEVR through alternatives that Heidegger (2010)
himself leveraged against the construct of world picture. He offered the term
‘Dasein’ to disrupt the binary of subject and world, and convey a more complex
convolution of how human being takes place as being-in-the-world. He also
suggested that the ‘world’ might be reimagined as a process of ‘worlding’, a
way time and space open through and as entanglements that come before and
help constitute what counts as subject and object.23 If GEVR may analogize a
contemporary structure of world picture, it might also analogize something
like a dynamic production of being-in-a-world and worlding.
Recent scholarship engaging how the ‘whole earth’ is conceived today points
out divergent potentials of new media that revisit those once associated with
images like Blue Marble. On the one hand, as Katherine Yussoff (2017) states,
techniques for representing the planet have almost always been in the service
of limiting ‘indeterminacy’ and stabilizing what is actually dynamic, rendering
what exceeds control as ‘an artifactual sphere of operations’, and even what
Jennifer Gabrys (2016) has described as a set of ‘programmable’ relationships.
On the other hand, however, Yusoff (2017: np) points out that ‘Every image,
every affective architecture that pertains to a global vision and a spatial
imaginary, comes from somewhere’, constituted ‘within a heterogeneous
space of different “worldings”’ that inflect a ‘material ordering of the world’.
Gabrys (2016) argues something similar, contrasting the ‘satellite view’ with
the conditions of ‘distributed monitoring’ today, which point to ‘ways in
which the earth might be rendered not as one world, but as many. Here are
multiple earths . . . unfolding through distinct environmental conditions, sites
of study, and responsive inhabitations.’ She explains that ‘what “counts” as an
environment – and Earth – then concresces in different ways in relation to the
sensors sensing within distinct conditions’ (p. 14). The kinds of worlding these
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authors describe is particular, and situated, even as it speaks to the ‘global’.
It takes place through multiple, material, technical mediations, rather than
referring to a static and singular objective world that pre-exists and awaits
sensors and perceivers.
There is no escape from the double bind of what Heidegger describes as
world picture if escape requires conceiving of the world without recourse to
terms of representation. If, however, the world is constantly being produced
as such – as whatever seems to stand together as interrelated – processes of
worlding necessarily involve technical and aesthetic mediations, and these
are not necessarily objectifying and alienating. Media aesthetics are a site
where the terms of worlding are persistently renegotiated.
Media scholars Sara Kember and Johanna Zylinksa (2012: xv) have proposed
mediation itself as ‘a key trope for understanding and articulating our being
in, and becoming with, the technological world, our emergence and ways of
interacting with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporality stabilizing
the world into media, agents, relations, and networks.’ Many media artists
such as Zylinska, along with media scholars such as Lisa Parks (2013), see this
as a potential to actively engage in mediation in ways that disrupt or recreate
whatever analogies may seem to ossify into objectivity – to make visible and
interact in different ways.
It seems perhaps too hopeful, however, to wager on avant garde aesthetic
strategies – such as laying bare the device, or galvanizing new ways of seeing –
that have long been championed as modernism’s answer to the Cartesian logics
of modernity. Techniques like ‘cone drag’ and ‘scaled, step teleport’ – which
are created for ‘usability’ and to be self-effacing – may prove to be the most
interesting and transformative kinds of aesthetic experiments in our moment.
If photography naturalized a lens-based form of optical realism, and cinema’s
moving images seemed able to rearticulate the perceptual flow of time and
space, the affordances of algorithmic media now negotiate a related conceit
of dimensional coordination: this posits how the coordination articulated by
every individual aspect, and every spatiotemporally coherent ‘take’, might all
concatenate within logics that integrate and ‘make sense’ across all mutually
exclusive details.
One reason it is only possible to conceive of ‘the whole world’ through
aesthetic logics and technics of mediation is because these are material
modes through which the world is actualized and made sensible. Recalling
the rhetoric of GEVR with which this article opened – your world awaits!
wholly within reach! – VR offers an interesting limit case in this process,
because it claims to aesthetically and technically rearticulate the very terms
through which embodied perceivers grasp and produce what appears as the
actual coordination of the world they inhabit. This affords a view that can
only be embedded and processural, and a kind of coherence that can only
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
be provisionally rendered. This is more than reflexive, enacting a radical
contingency between body and world: if users cannot invest the representation
in terms of their own embodiment, it will not coordinate as a ‘world’ but,
likewise, if the multiple aspects that appear cannot be coordinated in terms
of a world, this challenges the users’ own sense of embodied coherence.
In this light, to feel immersed in a model of the Earth may suggest ways to
conceive a world-in-common that is not objectively integrated and waiting
to be seen. It might suggest how what counts as the world for a perceiver is
constantly produced through processes of ‘worlding’ that not only imbricate
bodies and technologies, but do this in terms that might best be understood
as aesthetic. The forms of contingent interconnection that structure GEVR,
and which it enables, analogize at a visceral level how an ongoing challenge
– of reconciling individual experience and whatever whole both includes
and exceeds it – is structured by the particularities of our contemporary,
computational visual culture. When users put on the headset, take up the
handheld controllers, and step into the model of GEVR, they lend themselves
to a disorienting effort of patching together a world, at the seam of their own
experience. This is not a substitute for, or the very reality of, conjuring and
sharing a world, but it might point to ways that we need to reconceive the
kinds of relationality that constitute a world as such, and allow it to be shared.
ORCID iD
Brooke Belisle
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7548-831X
Notes
1. See: https://arvr.google.com/earth/
2. See: https://earthengine.google.com/:
A planetary-scale platform for Earth science data & analysis: Google Earth Engine combines
a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale
analysis capabilities and makes it available for scientists, researchers, and developers to
detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface.
3. In an article on screen-based versions of Google Earth, Jason Farman (2010: 8) argues that
‘Google Earth’s charting of the globe onto an interactive, web-based GIS is inherently
connected to the desire to map out a new territory: the digital empire.’ He claims that:
One possibility for beginning to chart this new global and distributed power is to replicate
the visual connectivity that was initiated by the ‘Whole-Earth’ photographs of the Apollo
space missions. By representing the new global village as a virtual globe that can be
navigated and interacted with, Google has taken the steps to chart out visually the territory
that it has sought to command: an interconnected global village. (p. 10)
I will also look back to Apollo images, and share Farman’s interest in how Google is modeling
global interconnection. I find, however, that GEVR does this differently than screen-based
versions, disrupting – even while it may superficially replicate – the kinds of coherence
offered by whole-earth photographs or the televisual-era metaphors of global-village.
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4. This association also precedes digitization. See, for example, the ‘trailblazing’ metaphor in
Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think (1945).
5. Historians of geography and cartography agree that around 200 BCE Greek philosophers
Eratosthanes and Hipparchus explicitly grappled with representing the spherical nature of
the Earth; and, in his Geographica, Strabo (63/64 BCE – 24 CE) refers to a globe owned by
the Stoic philosopher Crates of Mallos, circa 180–150 BCE. See Denis Cosgrove’s work for a
rich history of how the earth as a whole has been pictured. (1994, 2001, 2010)
6. Kristen Whissel’s (2016) essay on Gravity resonates with my own argument about GEVR,
exploring how this film uses 3D
to produce the illusion of disembodied movement through, and optical immersion within,
an awe-inspiring sublime location that is associated with technologically enhanced forms
of seeing-in-depth that aid in the production of information and the formation of new
modes and means of producing knowledge. (p. 4)
7.
By using interactive VR, GEVR produces a different form of visceral immersion that relies on
dynamic user input. Its algorithmic construction of a navigable ‘world’ sutures body space
and image space in ways that develop cinematic conceits, but also move beyond cinema’s
formal grammars. The cosmic-zoom of films offering a view from space is structured from
either a static position or from a point of view that takes a single path. The navigability of
GEVR, however, offers mobility across each axis of three-dimensional space, controlled by
the user.
Leon Gurevitch (2013) has pointed out how screen-based versions of Google Earth already
move toward this, away from cinematic ways of structuring space. He argues, for example,
that in Google Earth
the space does not exist independent of the viewer, with the camera observing in the
viewer’s bodily absence. Instead the space becomes the subject and slave of the viewer: it
only exists, and is only simulated because the viewer’s virtual presence commands it into
being. (p. 347)
In some ways, this could also be said of all 3D media, which require the viewer’s engagement
in order to become a spatialized view. GEVR elaborates a more radical version than the
screen-based Google Earth or either photographic or cinematic 3D however: it combines
the navigable conceit of Google Earth, the dimensional effects of a stereoscopic display, and
sensor-driven interactivity that departs from even the optical anchor of a virtual camera.
8. See: https://arvr.google.com/earth/
9. Many philosophers could be cited here on the concept of ‘world’ but I am partial to Jean-Luc
Nancy’s (2007) elaboration in The Creation of the World, or Globalization, and Pheng Cheah’s
(2016) reading of Derrida in What Is a World?.
10. My emphasis, here, on the implications of a globe’s spherical shape invokes the much more
elaborate investigation of this in Peter Sloterdijk’s three-volume series Macrospherology
(2011–2016), and especially his thinking in the second volume, Globes (2014). His interest in
the way spheres scale, articulating dimensional forms of coordination, is closely related to
my own. While this article focuses on a specific, aesthetic case study, I see the larger stakes
of my argument as aligned with some of the post-phenomenological questions that animate
Sloterdijk’s project as well as those of related thinkers like Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques
Derrida. These are questions about how to think the groundedness of being, the primacy of
being-with, and the ecstatic processes of worlding.
11. Shane Denson’s (forthcoming) work on ‘discorrelated’ images follows a related phenomenon
but focuses on its aesthetic potentials, asking how 21st-century imagery breaks from
traditional perspectival logics to prompt unusual forms of affect.
Belisle. Whole world within reach Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
For example, see 19th-century claims of ‘see-sickness’, described in relation to immersive
spectacles, and to train travel in Wolfgang Schivelbush’s The Railway Journey (2014[1977]);
or, for a more recent example, see Anne Friedberg’s (2006) discussion of Attention Deficit
Disorder in relation to digital media in The Virtual Window.
Brand is best known as the originator of the Whole Earth Catalog (Brand 1977, 2009; Turner
2006), which used a whole-earth photograph for its first cover. For one recent account of
Brand’s campaign, see the Editors’ Introduction to the Canadian Journal of Communication
devoted to Earth Sensing Media (Russil, 2013).
There has been heated disagreement about who took the Earthrise photograph, see for example:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/who-took-legendary-earthrise-photoapollo-8-180967505/. My account relies on the transcript of an audio recording made inside
the shuttle, and I am less concerned with who used the camera in those moments than in
the way the astronauts responded to what they saw. Lazier (2011) also notes this unusual use
of language in an essay that engages many of the same thinkers and examples my own takes
up. Lazier’s work takes a more philosophical approach than that of others on screen-based
versions of Google Earth – such as Jason Farman (2010), Lisa Parks (2009, 2013), Lisa Parks and
James Schwoch (2012), and Leon Gurevitch (2013, 2014) – exploring the ‘globalization of world
picture.’
To look at a photograph is to take up a point of view constructed by a photographic image as
such. The perspective on offer is conditioned, for example, by the geometry of perspective
built into a camera lens and the conditions of representation that govern how a flat image
printed on paper tends to be interpreted as a representing three-dimensional space.
Google regularly shares technical information about its products on company blogs, in white
papers, and through conference presentations. An early UX designer for Google Earth VR,
Adam Glazier (nd), has posted descriptions, diagrams, and clips from presentations on his
personal website; see: https://adamg.io/earthvr
Upon reading a draft of this article, my Co-Editor of this Themed Issue on VR, Paul Roquet,
pointed out that Alice in Wonderland metaphors have been used in relationship to VR at least
since Ivan Sutherland’s ‘The Ultimate Display’ (2002[1965]), in which Sutherland describes a
room that ‘could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked’: ‘a chair displayed in
this room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room could be
confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal.’ Jumping from furniture to
fatality (through immobility) suggests how the limit for what counts as actual is imagined to
lie at that of life itself.
Developers working for Google have presented their work in conference presentations
that have been recorded and are available online; and recent research at the intersection
of computer science and visual design has discussed some of their innovations (Huang and
Chen, 2018; Käser et al., 2016, 2017).
This is not uniquely true for digital mediation. I have written about how railroad lines were
once represented through photographic series (Belisle 2013b); and Lisa Parks (2013) has
shown how they were also represented in diagrams drawn by one person:
In the nineteenth century massive, dispersed systems that stretched across an entire
continent in some cases were drawn by one person’s hand. This fusion of an extensive,
material infrastructure with an individual’s perceptual and creative capacities speaks to
the incredible challenge of infrastructural representation . . . the map or diagram became
the only visual discourse that could represent the vastness of these new national systems
in a single frame. (p. 293)
20. This line of thought could see VR, following Walter Benjamin’s much-rehearsed argument
about cinema, as a kind of training ground for a 21st-century context thoroughly structured
by such algorithmic/embodied hybridities (Benjamin, 2008[1936]). Scholars such as Mark
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Hansen (2012) have made arguments that come close to this, though focusing on forms of AR
and ‘mixed-reality’.
21. Given the timing of his remarks, Heidegger must have seen Lunar Orbiter images, which
were produced in a complex manner involving radio transmission and strips of photographic
prints. In Heidegger’s work, ‘earth’ and ‘world’ take on complex definitions in relationship
to one another, which are relevant to this article but extend far beyond its scope. See, for
example, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (Heidegger 1977[1954]) and The Bremen Lectures
(Heidegger, 2012).
22. This is distinct from the imagined Cartesian vantage point and has been called the God’s
eye view ‘from everywhere’ or by more contemporary thinkers, ‘from nowhere’. While that
view is imagined to be infinite, it is also seamless and unmediated, constituted outside (and
therefore authorizing) the terms of material presence.
23. My gloss of ideas from Being and Time (Heidegger, 2010[1953]) here is informed by other
readers of Heidegger, such as Kaja Silverman (2000) and Pheng Cheah (2016), whose work on
aesthetics has helped clarify the stakes of ‘world picture’ and has suggested alternatives to
its double bind by drawing on other aspects of Heidegger’s thought as well as that of other
philosophers in his tradition.
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Brooke Belisle is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Art at Stony Brook
University, where she also directs the Graduate Certificate in Media, Art, Culture, and Technology.
Her comparative approach to the history and theory of media aesthetics relates 19th century
and contemporary strategies for expressing forms of dimensionality that would seem to exceed
depiction. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Leaned Societies, Getty
Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Address: Department of Art, Staller Center, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, 11794,
USA. [email: brooke.belisle@stonybrook.edu]
Brooke Belisle