Satellite Writers is an ongoing collection of digital satellite images sourced from Google Earth. You can take a look at the archive at here: https://www.are.na/pedro-gil-farias/satellite-writers

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City (…) In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,…”
— Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science (1946)

An exploration of the ‘tattered ruins’ of reality that make their way onto these digital replicas of our territories. Specifically, it collects fragments of graffiti writing caught in the seamless mesh of satellite imagery. Traces of reality that were never meant to be seen from above, yet they slip into these almost pristine copies of the world.

In this short story, written just months before the creation of the first satellite images of Earth, the narrator tells the fictional story of a map so rigorous that it mapped the kingdom on a scale of 1:1, covering point by point all of the surface of the territory it aimed to represent. Today, satellite imagery evolved in such a pervasive way that platforms like Google Earth aim to fulfill that vision: “a real-world canvas” that provides a “comprehensive, interactive model of our world” (direct excerpts from Google’s website).

These platforms are the way we see the world. Directing where we travel, where we meet, how we navigate our neighbourhoods, etc. We no longer see the the difference between map and territory and take Google’s representation as reality itself. Following Jean Baudrillard thinking on Borges’s fable: “this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum […] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.” (excerpt from Simulacra and Simulation, 1981).