words// Jessica Barrett Sattell

images// from Google Maps

From 7500 North to 3000 South, I spent three hours clicking through the algorithms of Google Earth while perched on a bar stool at a coffee shop near the corner of Damen and Irving Park. This business does not appear on Google Maps; the latest image for this stretch of the thoroughfare was captured in October 2013 and the shop opened shortly after. According to this massive mapping database disguised as a photographic representation, I do not exist in my present place.

I am some different set of pixels, a spectrum of hex colors scattered in many guises within this once-removed universe.

As I sit on the eastern side of the street, I follow the flow of data blips that are sewn together into an eerily familiar texture. Far from seamless, it breaks down into mismatched shapes and unaligned texts, most obviously seen in warped street signs and the blurred gestures of passersby. Image captures of the long road groove into an infinite scroll. One click is about fifty feet.

My ghost in the system is everywhere on this street.

I keep heading south, past the fire station, past the Polish nightclub. The sunlight of the image on the screen changes as I pass and the parked cars suddenly disappear into a blur of rust. Pedestrians, stiff and surreal but smacking of a kind of removed humanity, remind me of the cut-and-paste patrons designed to populate architectural renderings.

I don’t exist here at my current address, also just a few feet off of Damen; that latest capture was in July of 2011, two years before I moved to Chicago. At that time, I was thousands of miles away in Seattle, somewhere within the folds where the pattern snaps and hidden away from the mechanical eye.

I was probably on my computer utilizing Google’s other suite of products for a different kind of geo-spying.

All of these paths are marked by disappearing acts; people float in and out and cautiously wave at the shadow of the cheery green Google Maps car, delivery trucks dissolve around corners, and buses disintegrate into air. Stretches of the street shift back and forth in time, block by block, from September 2013 to October 2013 to June 2011.

In April 2014, I walked a long leg of this journey, heading south down Damen from Irving Park to Milwaukee at midnight, holding hands with a man that I knew that I was never going to love but was too afraid to see what would happen when I would let go of his grasp. We walked by the glowing yellow plastic sign of the Vienna Beef hot dog factory store just south of Fullerton and a man wearing sunglasses in the deep of the night emerged from a parking lot, like some concrete oracle. 

He looked us over and said, “be good to each other.”

We tried, and we weren’t.