Imagined shades of blue

Since I was young, I have been drawn to maps, especially colonial ones. To their shapes, their colours, the ways territories take form on paper, and the stories that unfold within them. Growing up in Uruguay, I spent time in colonial museums, absorbed by early depictions of the Americas. The continent appeared in shifting forms, changing shape with every map as new information and mapping technologies reached European cartographers. These charts were dense with drawings and annotations, where faith and myth coexisted alongside geography.

Maps do more than describe territories; they tell stories. They delineate hierarchies of power, what is visible and what is beyond reach, what is real and what is fiction. Many historical representations of the world have proven inaccurate. Yet some forms of data visualization still appear neutral, as if untouched by interpretation. Satellite imagery, in particular, continues to carry this sense of trust. Platforms such as Google Earth, developed by large technology companies, mediate how these images are accessed and experienced.

I first encountered Google Earth in 2005. Living in what felt like a remote corner of the world, I found this technology opened a window to a new way of moving through space. Using the service, I began to wander across distant geographies, taking virtual journeys and visiting faraway places I had never been to. I would spend hours tracing routes across oceans, “flying” like a bird over vast, continuous surfaces.

Gradually, my focus shifted from strolling to paying closer attention to the imagery. I began to notice inconsistencies: blurred areas, repeated textures, glitches, and strange visual artefacts. These details revealed something important. Like historical maps, digital mapping platforms are not neutral. They share an underlying impulse: to transform the world into something visible, structured, and navigable. In doing so, they also construct narratives, producing their own myths and shaping how the unknown is imagined and understood.

Over the years, satellite imagery became a sustained line of inquiry and, eventually, a central focus of my artistic practice. Satellite images are often perceived as objective: the distant, god’s-eye perspective, combined with automated image capture, creates the impression of a seamless and accurate representation of the planet. At first glance, everything appears visible, accessible, and fully mapped. But what interests me is not only what these images show but also how they organize visibility itself. Satellite imagery does not simply document the world. It produces a particular way of seeing, one that suggests continuity, coherence, and control. This apparent completeness depends on a series of decisions: what is captured, at what resolution, at what time of day or year, how often it is updated, and how it is rendered. These decisions are not neutral. They reflect economic priorities, political interests, and technological limitations, shaping a world that appears unified even when it is built from fragments. It was through this attention to what is missing, unstable, or artificially constructed that I became interested in the oceans.

The Ocean as image

Oceans cover most of the Earth’s surface, yet they remain among the least visually documented environments in global mapping platforms. It is often noted that only around 5% of the ocean has been directly imaged or mapped in detail. Satellite imagery struggles with water in fundamental ways. Sunlight reflects off the surface, producing glare that obscures detail, or penetrates unevenly into the depths, leaving large areas either overexposed or visually opaque. Unlike land, the ocean lacks stable reference points, making it difficult to align and stitch images into coherent composites. In addition, the surface is in constant motion. As a result, vast areas of the ocean are not directly photographed. Instead, they are rendered through composite textures, generated from indirect data, forming a sleek surface of imagined shades of blue. I became particularly interested in the smooth gradients and subtle variations of these artificial oceans. They are images of a place that resists imaging.

For several years, I have been collecting screenshots from Google Earth ocean imagery, building an archive of marine textures. These fragments have become the raw material for a series of works exploring the relationship between mapping, absence, and representation. One of these works is Imaginary Blues.

Imaginary Blues

In this project, I recreate the sea monsters depicted in medieval and Renaissance maps as a series of printed digital collages, using ocean imagery drawn from Google Earth. Antique maps often placed creatures in unknown waters, at the edges of the known world. They were not only decorative elements but also ways of giving shape to uncertainty. Their forms moved between observation and imagination. Some resembled whales, serpents, or hybrid animals, echoing encounters with unfamiliar marine life. Others appeared entirely fantastical, emerging from oral traditions, religious symbolism, and collective fears. Scales, teeth, exaggerated proportions, and expressive gestures transformed the ocean into a space of both danger and wonder. Rather than marking absence, these images filled it. They made the unknown known, even if through fiction. They offered a way to navigate what could not be measured or verified.

In Imaginary Blues, I return to these figures as tools for thinking about representation, reconstructing them so they can once again inhabit the unknown waters of contemporary mapping systems. The process begins with an image of a historical sea creature, which I use as a structural guide. I then use a custom Processing script to translate this image into a system of colour values. Each colour is assigned a unique identifier and linked to a corresponding image from my archive of ocean screenshots. The software reconstructs the original figure by replacing each pixel with a pixel from one of these ocean images, preserving its relative position. In this way, the monsters appear as ghostly presences within the images sourced from Google Earth.

From a distance, the resulting visual resembles the original illustration. Up close, it dissolves into a dense field of blue pixels. The surface behaves like a woven fabric, where each thread carries a fragment of a different place. I often think of this process as a form of algorithmic weaving, where code, image, and data intersect to produce a composite surface.

This shift in scale is central to the work. What first appears stable begins to fragment, revealing a surface built from discontinuities. The image holds together, but never fully resolves. Rather than resolving the unknown, the work holds it in place, making visible the seams, gaps, and constructed nature of the images we rely on to understand the world. The ocean, in this context, is not only a physical space that resists full representation, but also a conceptual one. It exposes the limits of the systems that attempt to capture it. It is within this space of resistance that my work operates.

Rendering the unknown

For centuries, oceans marked the limits of human understanding: vast, uncharted, and filled with speculation. Maps made these limits visible, often filling them with images, symbols, and narratives that gave form to the unknown. Historical maps were produced within imperial contexts, where mapping was tied to expansion and control. They organized space by establishing centres, borders, and directions, shaping how the world could be read and navigated. The creatures placed in the oceans marked areas that remained outside available knowledge. They introduced danger, uncertainty, and at times excitement, framing these regions as spaces that were distant, risky, and yet open to exploration. Through these images, the unknown was given a form. It became something that could be imagined, approached, and eventually incorporated into expanding systems of knowledge and control.

Contemporary mapping platforms extend this logic through various visual strategies. Where visual data is missing, continuous textures are generated, creating the impression of a complete and coherent representation of the world. Yet the unknown does not disappear. It is absorbed into images that feel stable and reliable. This sense of completeness generates trust and encourages use of the platforms. As these infrastructures become part of everyday navigation and perception, they position themselves as essential systems for accessing and understanding space. Through this process, users become embedded within these systems. What appears as a neutral interface becomes a framework that shapes how the world is seen, navigated, and known, reinforcing new forms of control.

Imaginary Blues does not seek to resolve the unknown or restore a sense of completeness. Instead, it lingers in the gaps that remain, drawing attention to the structures that attempt to conceal them. By bringing together historical imagery and contemporary data, the work exposes how different systems of representation continue to shape what can be seen, understood, and imagined. In this context, the ocean persists as both a material and conceptual space that resists full capture. It remains unstable, shifting, and only partially visible, despite the technologies designed to render it. The images in the series hold this tension, oscillating between coherence and fragmentation, between presence and disappearance. Rather than offering clarity, the work invites a different kind of attention: one that stays with uncertainty and recognizes the limits of the systems through which the world is mapped and known.

Recommended citation: FARBER, Liliana. Imagined shades of blue Mosaic [online], April 2026, no. 207. ISSN: 1696-3296. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7238/m.n207.2603