308 1st Ave. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania


Eagle Point Dr, Sherwood, Pulaski, Arkansas


51 E. Claremont St. Edinburgh, Scotland


Warwick Street, Gateshead, England


Subjects of their own gaze: the Street View car departs central HQ in Mountain View, CA to the enthusiastic cheers of Google employees.

“Two years ago, Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, this fleet of cars began an endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world.

Consistent with the company’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” this enormous project, titled Google Street View, was created for the sole purpose of adding a new feature to Google Maps

One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

Street View collections represent our experience of the modern world, and in particular, the tension they express between our uncaring, indifferent universe and our search for connectedness and significance. A critical analysis of Google’s depiction of experience, however, requires a critical look at Google itself.”

Excerpt “The IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View” (August 12, 2009)

Collections (PDF Download)

v1 | v2 | v3

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http://googlestreetviews.com/

 
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Art, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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