CECIL B. DEMILLE should be proud. A satellite image of the parting of the Red Sea has confirmed that the boiling wall of water he depicted in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments was right on the mark.
Look at the satellite picture and you can see Moses and the Israelites scurrying into the corridor formed by the sea's bisected waters. The Egyptian army, minutes from obliteration, is just out of shot.
The picture appears to have been plucked directly from Google Earth. It's a fake, of course, part of a project called God's Eye View created by the Glue Society, the Sydney art and design collective whose melted ice-cream van won the People's Choice Award at last year's Sculpture By The Sea. The other pictures in the set show the crucifixion, Noah's Ark and the Garden of Eden.
The images caused a sensation when they went on display at an art fair in Miami recently. Each set costs $US36,000, and two have been sold to collectors from London and New York.
The Glue Society's co-founder, Jonathan Kneebone, said God's Eye View was not intended to be a theological statement. "Art has always depicted religious events and this is simply a new way to do it," he said. "We're playing with the whole idea that if you can capture something from a satellite it must exist."
Kneebone described the four pictures as digital "jigsaw puzzles" made by piecing together real satellite images. The picture of the Red Sea, for example, uses photographs of Niagara Falls to create the impression of tonnes of foaming water.
Most of the images are geographically accurate, although Kneebone admits that parts of the Garden of Eden are from Belgium.
God's Eye View was commissioned by the producer of a US art fair who was impressed by pictures of the melted ice-cream van he saw on The New York Times website.
The flat van remains unsold and in storage in Sydney, although the publicity generated by God's Eye View had reignited interest in it, Kneebone said.
Oriognal Source