In the well-known legend of Zeuxis choosing his models for the image of Helen from among the Girls of Croton, the ideal composition desired by the monarch and executed by the artist necessarily involves the power over bodies to create an ideal beauty. The notion of the composite can be found throughout the representation of the canon, which is found in all ages, as an intrinsic fact of our way of representing and therefore of considering the world. Its role is unifying and soothing, and in this it would be an opposition to the collage: where the collage assumes its unnatural alliances, the composite pretends to recreate a unity. From Mary Shelley's conception of the world to George Orwell's, this article puts forward the hypothesis that cartography, performed today by satellite imagery, has, since its origins, been the precious ally of these totalitarian methods aiming, through a composite assembly, to give a false image of a unified world, all centred on the West, which has since become the undisputed master of maps and compasses. But is it all truly for the best in the best of all possible worlds? It would be to forget that the compositing that gives us these images ontologically implies the space in between, the gap, the white zone; in short, it would be to forget that something is rotten in the realm of Google Earth... If a large number of artists and image-makers have exploited the spectacular but top-down beauty of the "cartographic eye of art", others are sneaking into forbidden and unmapped places to try to deliver a bottom-up version of the world in which we live, in the tradition of what the situationists initiated more than sixty years ago, followed by the walkers and the artists of counter-mapping, critical mapping or alternative mapping.