One day when I was walking around in the hills behind my house, I happened upon this bizarre street. It was as though someone had taken postmodernism and tried to make it into a block of houses. Each one has its own internally complete theme, involving strange colors and sculptural elements attached to the outside walls (gold eggs, wisps of wrought iron). This led me on subsequent walks to name them: the Corbusier House, the Barn, the Preschool Blocks house, the House of Wicca… and so on.
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.
