Interesting Pictures of Google Street View

This col­lec­tion presents a small selec­tion of var­i­ous finds by the artist John Raf­man. As if try­ing to find a nee­dle in a haystack, she care­ful­ly reviewed the Google Street View images and he real­ly man­aged to find a lot of inter­est­ing things. This painstak­ing work helped to find fleet­ing moments of life from dif­fer­ent parts of the world that real­ly deserve atten­tion.

John Raf­man (1981) is an artist, film­mak­er and essay­ist. He received degrees in Phi­los­o­phy and Lit­er­a­ture from McGill Uni­ver­si­ty and grad­u­at­ed from the School of the Arts at the Insti­tute of Chica­go. Many of his works and films have been shown inter­na­tion­al­ly, includ­ing the Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art in Rome and the New Muse­um of New York.

Raf­man’s art explores the para­dox­es of moder­ni­ty, mix­ing irony, humor and melan­choly. As an artist, he uses dig­i­tal media, which gives his work great poten­tial, backed by the pow­er of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. The sub­ject of his research is human expe­ri­ence, John tries to show the his­tor­i­cal role of art by depict­ing ambigu­ous con­texts

Raf­man’s most pop­u­lar project is cur­rent­ly the Nine Eyes Google Street View series. The project has been fea­tured in numer­ous major pub­li­ca­tions such as The New York Times, The Guardian and Harper’s

The name of the project “9 Eyes” par­al­lels the nine cam­eras installed on the roofs of Google cars, which play an impor­tant role in map­ping the world. These nine cam­eras auto­mat­i­cal­ly cap­ture the entire land­scape every 10–20 meters, cre­at­ing a three-dimen­sion­al pic­ture at the same time. Here is what Raf­man him­self says about this:

“The view of these cam­eras tes­ti­fies, but does not affect the sto­ry. Google Street View pho­tos are sim­ple and impar­tial, do not attach any spe­cial mean­ing to a par­tic­u­lar case or per­son. Devoid of con­text, his­to­ry, or mean­ing, it is rein­forced only by geospa­tial adja­cen­cy”