— unpredictable thoughts

Google street view : the unadorned truth about us

I imag­ine a Star Trek episode. The explor­ers have landed on a bar­ren planet and deep in some bunker is an access point to a data­base left by a lost civ­i­liza­tion. The away-team hits a but­ton in error and a series of images are pro­jected on a huge screen. The images are both excit­ing and dis­turb­ing; they are detached from events. They are a cap­ture of moments past. A street photo of an apart­ment build­ing, a restau­rant, a gro­cery. The images are from many geo­graphic areas and cultures.

This isn’t science-fiction this is Google, today.

Chances are that you’ve also seen some of these images when you have used google maps. Street View is an enhance­ment to the ser­vice. You can look at the land­mark sur­round­ings; make sure you are going to the right place; find out what the neigh­bor­hood is like. The cam­era cap­tures these images with­out any other inten­tion than a street view. But when one takes the time to look at more than just a cou­ple of these images we can see the unadorned truth about us.

2588 N Hutchin­son St. Philadel­phia, Pennsylvania

10 IJs­selmeerdijk, Zee­vang, Netherlands

These thoughts came to mind after ready­ing a very inter­est­ing piece in Art Fag City writ­ten by artist Jon Raf­man who lives and works in Mon­treal Canada. He raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions about the cul­tural texts of the images one can find in this vast ever-expanding library.

I encour­age you to give it a read and I would enjoy your comments.

Art Fag City : IMG MGMT : The Nine Eyes of Google Street View.