Street View interpreted

Local artist Jon Rafman collects and examines the images and meaning of Google’s coolest app

VIA VALASSA, RHO, ITALY: Roadside prostitutes

Outside a few little old ladies, a good number of privacy advocates and circumspect countries like Switzerland and Japan, a lot of people are having a lot of fun with Google Street View. Users can drop in wherever they please, from the ghettoes of Baltimore, where fans of The Wire can find real life corner boys, to the hectic roundabout traffic of London’s Piccadilly Circus. Being an armchair tourist has never been easier.

Since Google Street View added Canada to its stable of countries on Oct. 7, we have been able to spend hours cruising by our old school, our first apartment, our first crush’s apartment, our parents’ place or our office. But Jon Rafman, a 27-year-old local artist, is using the medium to consider technology, voyeurism and its interpretation of our daily, humdrum lives. As a self-described member of the Net.Art movement—“investigating culture after Web 2.0” is a shorthand definition he provides—Rafman has collected countless images culled from Street View and other blogs and friends and has written thoughtful, articulate mini-essays about them online. He’s recently had a book, Sixteen Google Street Views, published by Chicago’s Golden Age. His website, googlestreetviews.com, has dozens more. And Harper’s magazine is going to publish three of his images in its upcoming issue.

Rafman says he is drawn to Google Street View by its “noisiness, the amateurish quality of the images, the innate sense of voyeurism. There is a limited amount of information, and the photographs are like an unbiased machine. I find the images are hard-boiled, like American street photography. The images weren’t affected by the sensitivities of a human photographer. It’s a more privileged view of reality.”

MAIN ST., RAPID CITY, SD: Well-armed American

CLAREMONT ST., EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND:
Home of Rod Stewart fans

To anyone who has used it, Street View is indeed a raw peek into whatever part of any city a user visits. Unlike conventional photography or photojournalism, it offers no context beyond mundane reality or any manipulation of environment. But that has not kept it from controversy. Canada, Switzerland, Japan and other countries have called for improvements in face and licence plate blurring and lowering the height of the car-mounted cameras. Google has grudgingly complied in some but not all cases. Others see it as a creeping step towards a total surveillance state.

Rafman, while acknowledging privacy concerns as legitimate, takes a less jaundiced approach to Google Street View. By using an artist’s sensibilities to interpret the images, he says he has received “two broad reactions to my work. One is from people who see Google Street View as a benign tool. It’s just information, there is no moral compass to look at that information. Surveillance has become tolerated, almost friendly, like it’s a kind of spectacle.

“Other people consider Google an evil corporation that is basically building an empire and has complete and total control, or at least access to an incomprehensible amount of information. They feel Street View is a representation of how Google has stripped bare our personal space.”

For his part, Rafman does not believe Google is out to build some sort of Cheney-esque brave new Orwellian world. It’s in it for the money. “I think it’s just like any other corporation, subject to the laws of the world, which are dominated by capitalism.”

The images he picked, though neutral in themselves, are not when interpreted by human eyes. One shows dark-skinned roadside prostitutes in Italy wearing bikini tops and holding an umbrella to keep the sun off. That image, he says, triggered a vocal outcry in Italy about immigration, prostitution and racism. It also raised the question about just who, exactly, is seen on Street View. In this, the app lives up to its name. Rich folks are usually at work, in their homes or driving somewhere between them. In many instances, says Rafman, “The people it captures tend to be marginalized.”

Behind the camera

PRIVACY INVADED? Mirror assistant editor,
editor-in-chief’s mother

• Google, being its secretive self, did not respond to the Mirror’s repeated queries for a detailed interview with a spokesperson. In the past however, it has stated that Street View images are only taken from public roads and are minimally intrusive.

• Street View Canada became available on Wednesday, Oct. 7. Cities shot include Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax, Banff and Whistler.

• According to several reports, the Google Car was first seen in Montreal in September 2007.

• Google does not rely on one specific brand of car, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, but rather uses locally available vehicles. In North America, these include the Chevrolet Cobalt, Saturn Astra and the Toyota Prius.

• There is usually a three-month delay between gathering the images and publication.

• In the Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb of North Oaks, all the streets are privately owned. They successfully prevented Street View from photographing their town.

• Kevin Bankston, a privacy advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, was captured by Street View in 2007. He demanded the image be removed, only to be told he had to fill out a sworn legal document and provide a copy of his driver’s licence before Google complied. Google later relented and removed the image.

• Not all cities are seen the same way. As the technology improved since Street View’s introduction in 2007, the scope of images has changed. Viewers, for instance, cannot pan up in New York City, but they can in Montreal.

• Google Trike records images by camera-mounted tricycles of interesting, hard to view spots like the Santa Monica Pier and Legoland California. Google is accepting nominations for other locations at google.com/trike.

-PL