Paper Machines

"Things are the unique occult meaning of things"
Still from Ben Kinsley’s Street With a View http://www.streetwithaview.com/ This proliferation of “Google Street View art” has me thinking.  On the one hand, Wolf underscores the technology’s paradoxical knack for rendering bodies and neighborhoods ambiguous.  The faces of residents caught candidly on the Street View camera are magnified in such a way that the pixel, the typically self-effacing component of visual information in a digital photograph, takes precedence, and all facial detail is effaced.  On the other, Kinsley’s work posits the technology of Google Street View as an arena for simultaneous creation and the assertion of a local identity.  In this instance, the surveillance model—a car with a camera attached to it drives down the street and records all viewpoints present along it—presents an optimal platform for micropirating, for working towards an individual (or communal) creative means within an established system.  Staged performances, such as impromptu marching bands and parade-style costuming, become incorporated into the information retrieved, which is then organized and transmitted as fact when it is uploaded to Google Street View. 

Still from Ben Kinsley’s Street With a View

http://www.streetwithaview.com/

This proliferation of “Google Street View art” has me thinking.  On the one hand, Wolf underscores the technology’s paradoxical knack for rendering bodies and neighborhoods ambiguous.  The faces of residents caught candidly on the Street View camera are magnified in such a way that the pixel, the typically self-effacing component of visual information in a digital photograph, takes precedence, and all facial detail is effaced.  On the other, Kinsley’s work posits the technology of Google Street View as an arena for simultaneous creation and the assertion of a local identity.  In this instance, the surveillance model—a car with a camera attached to it drives down the street and records all viewpoints present along it—presents an optimal platform for micropirating, for working towards an individual (or communal) creative means within an established system.  Staged performances, such as impromptu marching bands and parade-style costuming, become incorporated into the information retrieved, which is then organized and transmitted as fact when it is uploaded to Google Street View. 

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