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Current Exhibition
JON RAFMAN @
Free, New Museum, New York, USA
20 Oct 2010 - 23 Jan 2011
Selections from "9 Eyes of Google Street View"
JON RAFMAN @
Free, New Museum, New York, USA
20 Oct 2010 - 23 Jan 2011
Selections from "9 Eyes of Google Street View"
Deux articles : Artfagcity http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/ & Vice Magazine http://www.viceland.com/blogs/fr/2011/01/27/jon-rafman-prend-des-photos-de-photos-google-ou-quelque-chose-comme-ca/
The use of search engines and other online services involves an implicit transaction: You benefit from a company’s software, and the company benefits from the information left in the wake of your surfing. User compliance relies on the trust that this information won’t be abused, and compliance continues because, in most cases, the chances of abuse seem trivial. Whether you embrace this reality or feel resigned to it, you have to admit that internet companies have introduced a dramatic paradigm shift with the proposition that everyone’s preferences and interests belong to the commons, as public as streets, parks, air, and water. Google added a brazen twist to that idea in 2007, when it dispatched a fleet of camera-equipped cars to photograph every public place in the world, in order to add a new feature—Google Street View—to its popular application, Google Maps.
Jon Rafman has spent countless hours exploring the world through the window of Google Street View, saving striking images from the service’s panorama of stitched-together snapshots. The images displayed here represent his collection’s range of sights and moods: a burning house on an eerily unpopulated Arkansas street, which the Google vehicle passes with utter detachment; teenage boys in Northern Ireland, their faces automatically blurred in Google’s gesture toward privacy, even as they make gestures of their own at Google; the haunting, cinematic shot of a spectrally pale woman alone on a beach. Rafman has compared his work with Google Street Views to that of classic street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, who sought out moments of urgency and serendipity. If Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” then Rafman has decided that his is to make it meaningful. -B.D.
The use of search engines and other online services involves an implicit transaction: You benefit from a company’s software, and the company benefits from the information left in the wake of your surfing. User compliance relies on the trust that this information won’t be abused, and compliance continues because, in most cases, the chances of abuse seem trivial. Whether you embrace this reality or feel resigned to it, you have to admit that internet companies have introduced a dramatic paradigm shift with the proposition that everyone’s preferences and interests belong to the commons, as public as streets, parks, air, and water. Google added a brazen twist to that idea in 2007, when it dispatched a fleet of camera-equipped cars to photograph every public place in the world, in order to add a new feature—Google Street View—to its popular application, Google Maps.
Jon Rafman has spent countless hours exploring the world through the window of Google Street View, saving striking images from the service’s panorama of stitched-together snapshots. The images displayed here represent his collection’s range of sights and moods: a burning house on an eerily unpopulated Arkansas street, which the Google vehicle passes with utter detachment; teenage boys in Northern Ireland, their faces automatically blurred in Google’s gesture toward privacy, even as they make gestures of their own at Google; the haunting, cinematic shot of a spectrally pale woman alone on a beach. Rafman has compared his work with Google Street Views to that of classic street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, who sought out moments of urgency and serendipity. If Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” then Rafman has decided that his is to make it meaningful. -B.D.
All Images © 2010 Jon Rafman / Google Street View
