Gallery: Watch: Hollywood FX Team Turns Google Earth Into Art
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*The Color Project* is a video installation that transforms Google Earth imagery of exotic locales like India, Ecuador, Vietnam, and Cleveland, Ohio into a mosaic of dynamic triangles.
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The exhibit feel like an homage to the Eames' iconic film *The Powers of Ten*, though the MPC Creative Director David Estis says the visual inspiration came from color field painters like Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt.
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The "canvas" for this work of art is a group of 27 HD screens arrayed in a three by nine grid which was subdivided into 324 triangular segments.
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Each triangular segment of the mosaic plays a video of data captured from Google Earth which hops from location to location and various levels of zooming. MPC refers to the process as a form of "[database cinema](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_cinema)."
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The app skips around the map choosing a random coordinate from within a geoJSON boundary, zooms in to the maximum elevation available at that location, takes a sample of pixels and saves it to the database.
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Over the course of a few seconds, viewers see familiar satellite imagery transform into a kaleidoscopic abstraction, but if played end-to-end those mini videos would run for over eight hours.
