Some areas of San Francisco are so steep that the sidewalk literally is a stairway; other times it’s just more interesting to have a stairway between streets… or a slide. I once saw a grown man with a briefcase matter-of-factly go down this slide and continue on his way down the hill. Why not?
Jenny Odell is a Bay Area native/captive who makes art from Google satellite imagery. (Portentiously, Odell was born not 6 miles from where the Google Headquarters would eventually be.) Her work attempts to bring into focus the specificity and fragility of human existence by cataloguing its structures: swimming pools, parking lots, billboards, etc.
Her work has been featured at the Google Headquarters and Les Rencontres D’Arles in France, as well as on the NPR Picture Show, Rhizome, Gizmodo, ESPN Magazine, Die Zeit, NEON Magazine, Elephant Magazine, and most bizarrely, a Belgian TV guide that came in the mail with an assortment of gorilla stickers.
