Mapbreakers

Hours of countless research (aka procrastination) by the Check-In Architecture think tank have turned up another internet jewel that we think is very interesting. So Google Earth, for those not in the know, is a program you can download from the Google mothership that allows you to navigate geography in a very interesting way, from photos blended into the map to Wikipedia entries so on so forth.

But intrepid programmers, innovators, drifter, and researchers (aka procrastinators) have both scoured Google Earth and manipulated it to create new interactions with time and space. From couples caught in flagrante delicto (always a favorite for the sex crazed 13-year-old lurking inside all of us) to much more complex monkey wrenches being thrown into human consciousness.

On Google Earth Hacks, you can search through a series of add ons, meant to enhance your Google Earth experience. For example, Google Earth is now largely flat, but many are using tools to render the earth in a searchably three-dimensional world. And though mapping satellites, international flights and football clubs are all good and fun, it's when they really fuck with it when things get interesting, like what the Earth would look like if a meteor smashed into in, or Google Planets, searchable maps for Mars, or global warming sped up just a little bit.

Though we've not heard any serious research on the topic, but we think that mapping technologies as they progress are completely shifting/warping/transforming our consciousness about space. Making everything somehow more immediate, easier, bigger, less foreign and somehow more strange. Mapmakers and cartographers are becoming kind of hip for the first time since Columbus, but what do you call someone who messes with map, changes it shape, plays with it to create new experiences, new worlds. Mapbreakers? Deconstructive Cartography?

Why do I feel theirs a sci-fi novel/new program at MIT somewhere in here.