Visual Geolocations. Repurposing online data to design alternative views

Abstract

Data produced by humans and machines is more and more heterogeneous, visual, and location based. This availability inspired in the last years a number of reactions from researchers, designers, and artists that, using different visual manipulations techniques, have attempted at repurposing this material to add meaning and design new perspectives with specific intentions. Three different approaches are described here: the design of interfaces for exploring satellite footage in novel ways, the analysis of urban esthetics through the visual manipulation of collections of user-generated contents, and the enrichment of geo-based datasets with the selection and rearrangement of web imagery.