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Digital maps made from satellite images give birth to the poetics of the power of the seeing — the experience of the control and conquerability of any landscape through vision. It seems that a route can be built to any point — the world on the map seems close and at-hand.
The routes that a digital mapping platform can build are potential and possible. They are potential because they can be a conductor of someone’s intention, and possible because a person can follow them in the landscape on the surface of the Earth.
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From the point of view of the digital geoinformation system, the routes laid out manually in the project are neither possible nor potential for the user. However, the routes created in this project do not matter whether they are possible or not, continuous or discrete — they are built without the intention of being traveled in the conventional sense. This is their special nonpotentiality: it is a sliding along the surface, behind which there is no potential for “depth” or “original” of travel on the surface of the Earth.
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Paving the way across the digital landscape is a self-sufficient practice, satisfying curiosity and a melancholic craving for distant landscapes. In this project, the meaning of satellite images is not in the photographic representation of the surface of the Earth. Visual and mental passage of the route on the surface of the map does not need anything outside the map itself. From this nonpotentiality a new kind of potentiality and possibility is born that is not beyond the edges of the screen. Nonpotential routes are conquered by the eye of the body and the eye of the mind in the landscape of an abstract surface.
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