Photography: iOS Maps glitches depict a weirdly dystopian parallel universe

iOS Maps has provided many an office worker with several consecutive hours of procrastination material – “Ooh, there’s my house! And my mum’s house! And my nan’s house!” – and these examples of glitches, curated into one handy Flickr account by Trapcode founder Peder Norrby, are fascinating in their weird digital distortion of landscapes the world over. The glitches aren’t really glitches of course but logical misalignments which occur as a result of texture mapping, when a two-dimensional image is applied to the surface of a three-dimensional model. They’re created by an algorithm, rather than human beings, explaining the oddly dehumanised images they present.

The result of these robots creating maps of the world? Trees melting into houses, bridges bending under the weight of cars that cross them and street corners that resemble the scary red slide from Playworld. Like peeping into a weird, dystopian parallel universe, the images are strangely alluring in their interpretations of the changing representations of the Earth’s surface.