Dutch Landscapes
2011Satellite views of Dutch military and political sites, obscured for security, appear instead as bold, accidental works of abstraction.
When Google Earth launched in 2005, governments were quick to censor sites deemed vital to national security. In the Netherlands, this censorship took the form of bold geometric polygons laid over military and political sites. Seen from above, the country became a strange new landscape, where secrecy itself turned into an act of abstraction.
“Google’s free satellite imagery promised unprecedented transparency, but governments soon demanded the obscuring of sensitive sites. Whereas most countries relied on blurring, pixelation, or cloning to hide military bases, palaces, and fuel depots, the Dutch authorities imposed bold, multicoloured polygons — a unique aesthetic intervention in the landscape. Hundreds of sites were covered in this way, from royal palaces to NATO facilities, transforming familiar fields and towns into collages of colour.
This collision of analogue and digital forms echoes the Netherlands’ long history of engineering its terrain. Just as dykes, polders, and drainage networks reshaped the land to hold back the sea, these censor blocks reshaped the land to guard against a perceived human threat. From orbit, the result is a surreal paradox: a country made more visible precisely by the act of concealment. ”
— Mishka Henner
This collision of analogue and digital forms echoes the Netherlands’ long history of engineering its terrain. Just as dykes, polders, and drainage networks reshaped the land to hold back the sea, these censor blocks reshaped the land to guard against a perceived human threat. From orbit, the result is a surreal paradox: a country made more visible precisely by the act of concealment. ”
— Mishka Henner
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