on the question of mapping

For more than a decade we have been able to access maps and views of many locations. Google Maps started life in 2005. The 3D tool Google Earth was announced in the same year, and satellite maps have become available in increasing quality.
Other companies and organisations have launched satellite mapping tools more recently, some for public use and many for commercial uses of satellite imagery and GIS information.
Mapping the Earth is not an unbiassed operation though. Satellite images often have clouds and other obscuring effects which are often algorithmically removed. Stitching together the multitudinous image sets, often from multiple sources is also code-heavy. Deciding how to put information on the map is also loaded – country disputes over territory and borders, naming etc can be difficult to navigate. Some sensitive sites are even obscured at the request of political or security organisations and governments.
In Street View, interventions on the imagery include the obscuring of faces and the removal of domestic violence shelters and the blurring of car number plates.
In Google Maps and Google Earth interventions include the reconstituting of obscured data. For instance, clouds are often an issue for satellite images and several techniques are used to show clear imagery. Direct substitution of data from a previous, cloudless pass is one possibility but machine learning algorithms are likely to be in use to rebuild obscured areas in a more complex way.

Many of these works are shown and available as cleanNFTs on the Tezos platform Versum and teia.art
The work has been shown in several exhibitions including Ilam Campus Gallery show “Presentation Layer: NFT forms, platforms and transference” and at the conference “Levels of Life: Photography, Imaging and the Vertical Perspective“.
Online, ‘uncharted territories #14’ was included in the SuperChief Gallery curated NFT show “The Bastards – Post & Experimental Photography“.