All of the notorious glitches on Apple’s Maps app make it incredibly frustrating to use for practical purposes, but it still has value – as accidental art. When two-dimensional images are incorrectly mapped onto three-dimensional topography, the results can be fascinating, creating landscapes and architecture that look alien and futuristic.

Peder Norrby, founder of graphics company Trapcode, has collected the many glitches on the Apple iOS Maps app into a trippy gallery on Flickr. Houses in Barcelona appear to be puking trees from their windows. A vortex has opened in the middle of a Stockholm highway. Skyscrapers and stacked shipping containers look like they’re melting.

In this parallel universe, the laws of physics have apparently been suspended. Norrby explains that some structures, like bridges, viaducts, tunnels and roller coasters, are too complex for the app’s algorithms to handle. While criticism of Apple’s Maps app has increased reliance on its competitors, Google Maps isn’t entire free of glitches, either.

The mesmerizing beauty of glitches has led to an entire genre of art revolving around reproducing their eerie effects on purpose. Glitch art creates digital or analog image errors by intentionally corrupting files, or mimicking their appearance in traditional artistic media like paintings and sculptures.

Can you guess where in the world this unidentified Google Maps location is by landscape, road signs, architecture and cars? Test your geography skills with GeoGuessr, a site that drops you into a random Street View and challenges you to answer correctly five times in a row. Brilliantly simple, this virtual travel guessing game will stump you with featureless fields, and city scenes that seem to belong on entirely different continents.

Once placed in a location, you can move up and down the streets and use the arrows to view it in 360 degrees, just like on Google Maps and Google Earth. Sometimes, you might get lucky, and see some kind of identifying signs. Sometimes, there’s nothing but farmland and trees.

When you think you’ve determined the location, drop a pin on the world map on the right side of the screen and make your guess. You might be surprised how many times you’re about as off as you can possibly be. Some streets in Northern Canada look an awful lot like those in Argentina. Try it for yourself at GeoGuessr.com (via Laughing Squid).

As beautiful as a display of fireworks can be, they’re passive: viewers are just viewers, rarely having a hand in the actual design of the show. But a project going on right now in Vancouver called Vectorial Elevation allows people around the world to light up the city’s sky with a customized light show, all from their own computers. Commissioned for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the installation began transforming the city’s skyline on February 4th and will continue until Sunday the 28th.

“This website includes a virtual model of Vancouver where you are able to design “light sculptures” with 20 robotic searchlights located along English Bay. Once you are happy with your design you submit it together with your name, location and dedication or comments. Every night from dusk to dawn new designs are quietly rendered sequentially as they are added to a queue.”

“The project automatically creates a personal webpage for each participant, documenting his or her contribution with views from 4 project webcams. With a 15 Km visibility radius, the installation intends to blend the virtual space of the Internet with one of the most emblematic public spaces in Vancouver.”

Using the Google Earth plug-in, users view Vancouver in 3-D with an overlay of the project’s models, markers and controllers. The interface allows the participants to select and direct individual searchlights and move virtual cameras to capture the action. All of the users’ requests are sent wirelessly to the command center in Vancouver in the form of x, y and z coordinates. Those who don’t want to wait in line to take an active part in the lighting design can watch each evening’s shows live on the Vectorial Vancouver website.

Previous versions of the project have taken place in Ireland, France, Spain and Mexico starting in 1999. The first, developed for the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City’s Zócalo Square, drew over 800,000 participants from all over the world.