Infrastructure as Art

Wired:

A normal person might use Google’s satellite imagery to look at the house they grew up in as a kid. Jenny Odell spent the last year using it to find refineries, steel mills, shipyards and landfills.
These are the sorts of places we see in Infrastructure, a new series of collages currently on view at the Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In the works, Odell takes satellite-borne views of the unglamorous sites, structures, and systems that drive the modern world and digitally strips them of their surroundings, leaving them floating in white space like items from a miniature train catalog. Each collage is based broadly around an industry–transportation, waste, power, or manufacturing–with related structures arranged in freeform clusters. Among the pieces that make them up are a German train station, a Mexican waste pond, and a sprawling nuclear plant in the heart of Arizona.
Odell, who’s currently teaching a course on smartphone photography at Stanford, has long used Google Maps as an artistic resource. Before these industrial landscapes, she took satellite scraps and transformed them into neatly arranged works with names like 100 Container Ships, 97 Nuclear Cooling Towers, and 10 Waterslide Configurations.

I'm definitely not a normal person.  I've spent a lot of time checking out steel mills, refineries, megafarms and other industrial sites on Google Maps.  I'm not really an art connoisseur (understatement of the new century), but this is art I can appreciate.