Looking at Nothing, Bigly: The Right-Wing Politics of Texture Mapping Earth

Abstract

Are render engines fascist? This article proposes a debate on the relationship between conservative and far-right politics and environmental visualization technologies. The argument works through a close reading of a patented texture mapping process owned by Google Earth and a related artistic project titled Postcards from Google Earth (2010-ongoing) by Clement Valla. These case studies surface the engineering choices that selectively edit and optimize what is seen by users, thus creating a very particular, and manipulable, framing of “environment.” On this basis the article makes two claims: one, that computer graphics play a part in the conservative, right, and far-right mobilizations of nature-as-metaphor that nourish fascist and populist imaginaries, and two, that computer graphics more broadly reshapes human visual culture in ways that amplify the central contradictions of liberalism that have historically been exploited by fascism, such as an anti-allegiance to fact and rationality. The article concludes that combining digital technologies with representations of environments can resurrect latent conservative politics of the environment, and furthermore, that these politics can be directly and critically assessed through canonical interrogations of landscape art.