Altered Reality

What happens when parallel realities collide? Apparently, roads look like fettuccine noodles, as bridges and overpasses droop down in a scene that looks like what you'd get if there was a Hot Wheels version of The Sims.

 This comes to us courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-programmer Clement Valla, who studied "the intersection between art and computer programming" at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"My work focuses on socio-technical systems that raise a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. I explore digital technologies that are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things but that also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiples," he says on his website.


The warped images are the product of Valla's vast collection of Google Maps images, which he scraped from the search giant's mapping tool, as it attempts to transition from standard views to Google Earth's 3-D perspectives. Google Earth is good—even amazing at times—but, as Vallas collection shows us, it's not perfect.

The surreal images made HuffPo headlines earlier this week, and two of my favorites are here. Still, I highly recommend you click through the entire collection here.