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Jon Rafman: Nine Eyes
Nine Eyes documents screen captures taken from Google Street View. In 2007 Google began adding street views to its maps, photographs taken by a worldwide fleet of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing a nine-lensed camera mounted on a rooftop pole. This clothbound volume includes images from The Nine Eyes of Google Street View , an ongoing project by artist, filmmaker and essayist Jon Rafman (born 1981), whose work explores the impact of technology on consciousness. The photographs range from the beautifully symmetrical to the disturbingly violent―each, in some way, an extraordinary moment captured forever through a mapping service. Rafman's project reveals that while the world as presented by Google appears to be truthful and transparent, this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist can assist in constructing and deciphering.
96 pages, Hardcover
Published May 24, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 23, 2024
A collection of screenshots, taken from Google Street view, accompanied by a few texts (including one by the artist) exploring various readings of the work.
Some passages that stuck out to me:
"Nine Eyes both reflects and reiterates the ways we increasingly produce ourselves through images, maps, and online interfaces." (p64)
"[...] the abstract blurred face paradoxically brings into focus both the asociality of the Street View space [...] Like the inhabitable space of online games, Google Street View is a zone embodied human-machine interaction, but unlike them, it is one of solitude. [...] it is a paradigmatically neoliberal milieu in which we enjoy the fantasy of of self-determination, autonomous empowerment, and isolated selfhood, all while remaining a coded subject in a coded landscape." (p66)
"[...] a machine has no sense for what is has accumulated. That isn't something a machine can learn, either. Only a human can recognize humanity. Rafman brings intention to Google's databases, privileging life over geocoordinates and location." (p68)
"Wherever it goes, the camera will continue to scan for data, not meaning." (p69)
"In this model of photographic mapping, impaired citizenship is everywhere, happening all around us, but it is viewers who are responsible for their own self-surveillance, monitoring the Street View for representations of themselves that make them uncomfortable and requesting that they be made unseeable through digital blurring." (p74)
"[...] the type of sight provided by the aesthetics of Street View - pixellated, blurred, and digitally textured - is an apt analogy for the ways we increasingly fail to recognize one another's identities under biopolitics." (p74-74)
"The project highlights the paradoxical relationship between an automatic camera and a human viewer who seeks intention and meaning. The vast, ever-expanding project can lead us to feel that we are observed simultaneously by everyone and yet by no one, that everything is recorded and yet no particular significance is accorded to anything." (p76)
"[...] it is not surprising that Google blurs our identities. For are not the faces of our neighbors already obscure to us?" (p76)
Some passages that stuck out to me:
"Nine Eyes both reflects and reiterates the ways we increasingly produce ourselves through images, maps, and online interfaces." (p64)
"[...] the abstract blurred face paradoxically brings into focus both the asociality of the Street View space [...] Like the inhabitable space of online games, Google Street View is a zone embodied human-machine interaction, but unlike them, it is one of solitude. [...] it is a paradigmatically neoliberal milieu in which we enjoy the fantasy of of self-determination, autonomous empowerment, and isolated selfhood, all while remaining a coded subject in a coded landscape." (p66)
"[...] a machine has no sense for what is has accumulated. That isn't something a machine can learn, either. Only a human can recognize humanity. Rafman brings intention to Google's databases, privileging life over geocoordinates and location." (p68)
"Wherever it goes, the camera will continue to scan for data, not meaning." (p69)
"In this model of photographic mapping, impaired citizenship is everywhere, happening all around us, but it is viewers who are responsible for their own self-surveillance, monitoring the Street View for representations of themselves that make them uncomfortable and requesting that they be made unseeable through digital blurring." (p74)
"[...] the type of sight provided by the aesthetics of Street View - pixellated, blurred, and digitally textured - is an apt analogy for the ways we increasingly fail to recognize one another's identities under biopolitics." (p74-74)
"The project highlights the paradoxical relationship between an automatic camera and a human viewer who seeks intention and meaning. The vast, ever-expanding project can lead us to feel that we are observed simultaneously by everyone and yet by no one, that everything is recorded and yet no particular significance is accorded to anything." (p76)
"[...] it is not surprising that Google blurs our identities. For are not the faces of our neighbors already obscure to us?" (p76)
Displaying 1 of 1 review