Seeing the world after Google Streetview

Trevor Rainbolt is really good at geolocating a place given a single frame from Google Streetview. He used to only stream from his desk, but he’s exploring the physical world now. For the New York Times, Tomas Weber profiles Rainbolt’s expanded point of view.

Rainbolt’s most banal moments are now served with little tinctures of epiphany and recognition. It turns out that touching Thai grass for the first time is infinitely more thrilling if you’ve obsessed over its texture and hue on your computer: It’s the excitement of a face-to-face meeting with a longtime correspondent, a first date with an old crush. Rainbolt has used the internet’s cartography to turn up the world’s intensity, fusing the virtual with the real to make both more pleasurable. “Depression can’t be real if there’s mountains,” he said last July, in a video announcing that he would soon be summiting Mount Kilimanjaro. His route: a trail that a Google Street View camera ascended 10 years earlier.

The data informs the journey.

See also: Address is Approximate, a stop motion adventure.