In April 2010, interdisciplinary artist Yu-Wen Wu woke up longing to visit her grandmother in Taipei. A quick search informed her that a plane ticket there from Boston – where Wu still lives – was out of her budget. On a whim, she opened Google Maps and searched for the best walking route to Taipei. She didn’t expect to get anything back.
To her surprise, Google Maps returned a 95-page itinerary, composed of 2,052 instructions spanning 11,479 miles. Included were walking directions across most of the United States, nearly 37 days of kayaking from the Seattle area to Hawaii, many miles of jet-skiing across various parts of the Pacific Ocean and countless other turns. The hypothetical journey would take her 155 days (and five hours) to complete. Google Maps advised her to “use caution,” indicating that the route “may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”...
