Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


artwork

“The Floating Piers” in Google Earth

“The Floating Piers” was an artwork by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude on Lake Iseo, Italy, from June 18 to July 3, 2016. It is now visible in Google Earth.


The imagery on the left is older and shows the project still under construction.


We can see people crossing the walkway and others queuing.

See the official artists website here. One of the artists Jeanne-Claude, died, aged 74, on November 18, 2009. According to Wikipedia the artists began conceptualising the project in 1970. According to the web site the floating piers consist of:

From June 18 to July 3, 2016, Italy’s Lake Iseo was reimagined. The Floating Piers consisted of 100,000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric, carried by a modular dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes floating on the surface of the water.”

Although the artists have created a number of large scale art works since the 1960’s, the majority of them do not appear in Google Earth as there is not much imagery from that time period. However, we did find one other artwork, “The Gates” in Central Park, New York in 2005:

To find the above locations in Google Earth, download this KML file.

The land art of Dario Gambarin

We recently came across Italian artist Dario Gambarin who has been creating a large amount of land art in fields near the Italian town of Castagnaro. He creates his art in actively cultivated fields, so it typically does not last long. As a result, only a few of his works can be found in Google Earth imagery.


“No Inceneritore” – objecting to an incinerator being built in the region.


“Italia in Campo” (Italy in the field). Portrait of Italian football player Mario Balotelli featuring his mohawk hairstyle as seen from the back.


“In ricordo di Crevalcore” (In memory of Crevalcore). In memory of the 2012 Italian earthquake


“Benedictus XVI” A dove for the pope.

We found what appears to be the artist’s website, but it only shows his early works. A Google image search reveals a lot more artworks, including some that are particularly relevant to current news, including a portrait of Fidel Castro, who recently passed away, and a portrait of Donald Trump with the word ‘Ciao’ (bye) apparently created when it looked like Clinton would win the US election.

We were able to find the locations of most of Dario’s works listed on his website and have put together this KML file showing that he mostly uses the same seven fields again and again. There were a few that we failed to locate, so there may actually be more of his art in Google Earth imagery that we did not find.

PEACE on Earth message using GPS

Back in 2010 Japanese GPS artist Yassan (also known as Yasushi Takahashi) wrote the world’s largest marriage proposal by travelling around Japan while recording his GPS track. He holds the Guinness World Record for ‘Largest GPS drawing by an individual’. We have, however, previously looked at the work of Nick Newcomen, whose GPS writing was even bigger.

Now, with the help of Japan Airlines Yassan has out done himself and Nick Newcomen by using GPS tracks to literally write the word ‘PEACE’ on the Earth.

For more of Yassan’s GPS artwork see his website.

We were not able to find a source of Yassan’s work in KML format, but Nick Newcomen’s can be found here.

Large artwork in Google Earth

Yesterday we talked about large artwork using GPS tracks. Although the artists did travel to the locations involved in their artwork, the record they left, and thus the actual art, was digital rather than physical.

There are, however, some very big works of art that are visible in Google Earth. Here are a few of them.

Desert Breath by D.A.S.T Arteam.

This is the smallest and oldest, but has lasted well and can be seen in both current imagery as well as historical imagery. Read more about it in this post

Desert Breath

Mundi Man or Eldee Man by Ando

Drawn in the Mundi Mundi Plains in Australia using a tractor, this can be seen in Google Earth historical imagery from 2002. Read more about it here.

Mundi Man

Black Rock Desert by Jim Denevan

Drawn in the Black Rock Desert using trucks and GPS near the location of the Burning Man festival in Nevada. This is the largest of the three. It is visible in historical imagery from September 2010. Read more about it here.

Black Rock Desert - Jim Denevan

To view them in Google Earth, download this KML file.

Do our readers know of any other artwork at this scale visible in Google Earth?

The World’s Largest Marriage Proposal

Back in 2006 we looked at a few marriage proposals visible in satellite imagery. Then in 2008 we saw a marriage proposal in Street View.

Tokyo artist, Yassan lays claim to the world’s largest marriage proposal written using GPS tracks shown in Google Earth.

You can see some of his work here and watch a YouTube video about him below:

Yassan is not the only person to think of writing with GPS tracks. Nick Newcomen created some even bigger writing by this method, which we looked at in 2010.