In 2015, Google Street View completed its first non-street cartographic journey with the Colorado River. The algorithm for blurring out cars was primitive at the time, and completely failed in this instance. Cartographers were completely visible along huge lengths of river. I took thousands of screenshots of this unintentional documentation, and was able to weave together a narrative about cartographers’ social dynamics and experiences. This window into the expedition marked an anomalous moment in cartographic history, in which the mapping and the map merged into one document. In An Earthly Expedition, I compiled the images and created a tri-layered narrative from the fictional perspectives of a Google cartographer, the camera, and my own self-reflexive experience as a viewer.

Since 2015, Google permanently obliterated all of these images from the internet; they no longer exist. Now, alternative Street Views are commonplace, and the algorithm has evolved to successfully blur almost all procedural evidence, including in the case of the Colorado River. The images comprising this video are a unique archive of lost cartographic history.