Just came across these today and thought you might like them as much as I do: Satellite Collections by Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell - Every Baseball Diamond in Manhattan

“In all of my prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View– parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.” – from Odell’s artist statement

Max Grueter - Me Having A Break

Class 16 was mostly studio time, with a demo of Google SketchUp for those who were interested.

Google SketchUp is a 3D drawing program, and you can download it for free from sketchup.google.com (there is also a Pro version with advanced features). SketchUp’s innovative and intuitive tools make it easy to draw in 3D, and the software can be used to design anything from a desk to a house to a virtual city in three dimensions. A great way to get started is to check out SketchUp’s YouTube channel, which has a series of tutorials that introduce basic drawing concepts. One thing that makes SketchUp quite powerful is that you can download models from Google’s 3D Warehouse, which contains thousands of 3D objects contributed by the SketchUp community.

Another powerful feature of SketchUp is its integration with Google Earth. You can use it to draw models of real-world buildings and then submit those for inclusion in Google’s Earth’s 3D buildings layer, so anyone using Google Earth can see your work. Google has simplified this process for certain cities with Google Building Maker, which lets you model buildings right from your web browser. Corner Brook unfortunately isn’t one of the cities available in Building Maker, but someone has already been making models of local buildings that show up in Google Earth.

A couple of artists using Google SketchUp and Google Maps in their work are Max Grueter, who has created a series of SketchUp self-portraits called The Downloadable Artist, and Jon Rafman, who exhibits photographs found in Google Street View imagery in his project 9-Eyes.com.