Opinion: When online censorship is beautiful

Story highlights John Sutter talks with artist Mishka Henner about his "Dutch Landscapes" series The series focuses on an artful effort by the Dutch government to censor Google Maps

It would be hard not to smile, right?

I mean, what is that alien thing?

An oversized kaleidoscope?

A rip in the Matrix?

Some kind of freakish, town-sized cauliflower?

When Mishka Henner, a 38-year-old artist and photographer, came across these "blurred" images of Dutch landscapes on Google Maps, he was similarly perplexed and amused.

"Well, I laughed," he said of the initial discovery.

The hidden zones are "not only bases, they're also royal palaces and fuel depots and ammunition depots and that sort of thing," Henner told me. The Dutch government "used a pretty spectacular method for hiding these locations, which does everything but hide them, basically."

Photographer Mishka Henner

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Opinion: When online censorship is beautiful