Glitch City

[Images: Via Wired UK].

Sites of urban infrastructure and other industrial facilities integral to municipal management, from fire stations to fuel depots, appear to be the target of deliberate erasure in Baidu’s street maps.

As photographer Jonathan Browning—who noticed odd moments of incomplete blurring, cloning, and other visual camouflage a few years ago—explains to Wired, “I don't know who does it, if it's an algorithm that gets GPS co-ordinates for each place and then somehow wipes it, or if an actual person goes to each one and cleans it with Photoshop.”

Either way, he adds, “It would be great to meet these people and see what they think about it. If they wanted to do it, why didn’t they do it properly?”


[Images: Via Wired UK].

The effects are, in their own way, actually quite interesting, as if some sort of representational glitch has slipped into the world by way of sites of Chinese infrastructure—a scrambling algorithm crawling out of the depths of digital compression to target all these marginal, back-stage spaces that help a 21st-century city operate.

A wildly applied cloning tool in the top set of images for example, actually creates what appear to be reeds, an emergent landscape of the New Aesthetic breaking through the cracks between pixels.

Read more over at Wired UK.

Spotted via @samanthaculp and @larsonchristina).