Reappearing places: Geoguessing beyond the digital frame of Google Street View

The essay examines the impact of GeoGuessr, an online game based on exploring Google Street View, which can reconfigure operational images into places imbued with ludic and cognitive value. Through a genealogy that intertwines nineteenth-century landscapes, locative media, and Post- Internet practices, it highlights how localization takes the form of an affective inference, grounded in cues produced by the very techno-industrial logic of computational vision systems. The performances of the most experienced players also reveal a distinctive mode of reading geographic data, in which the screenshot functions simultaneously as evidence and as a device for the mnemonic reactivation of the represented places.