Google's Street View as Representation
December 19, 2011 by christinamcc
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The scale of Google’s Street View project is enormous. In 2007, the corporation sent out a fleet of cars (and, more recently, tricycles and snowmobiles), each equipped with nine cameras and GPS, with the apparent goal of taking pictures of every mappable route on earth. So far, Google has managed to photograph roads and byways in most of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Western Europe. The cameras mounted on the cars are programmed to take a picture every ten to 20 meters, without regard for the content. For its users, Google Street View serves as an interactive map, giving them a photographic reference for route-making, or allowing them the particular satisfaction of navigating streets they know well (or streets they don’t know at all) through the nine eyes of the Street View camera-cars. In the program’s ability to “[let] you explore places around the world”—to take users, virtually, to real places that they are not located in physically—it recalls the terms and theories introduced by Tara McPherson, Lev Manovich, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin regarding the liveness and volition in digital media interfaces (Google Maps With Street View). Art practices such as Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes, which takes select images captured by the Street View cameras out of their intended context, play out these theories while also revealing their limits as they apply to photographic images that purport to do objective work.
In general, the Street View program’s interface calls to mind McPherson’s notion that, unlike television, the web functions on a “sense of causality in relation to liveness” (462). Street View is of course not live, but there is a sense of “liveness” in its indiscriminate relation of the real world, and therefore a tacit sensation that when you click your way down a city street on Street View, you are actually causing the navigation, “a feeling that our own desire drives the movement” (462). This impression of liveness is why it’s so disorienting when Street View’s images aren’t seasonally accurate, or have not kept pace with construction. In McPherson’s terms, Street View has an illusory liveness—“what is crucial is not so much the fact of liveness so much as the feel of it” (462). In this, the sensation that Street View gives its user is perhaps a literalization of McPherson’s volitional mobility, which she illustrates with programs not completely unlike Street View, such as MSNBC’s ‘Kennedy Remembered’ webpage (463).
The sensation of liveness integral to McPherson’s concept of volitional mobility is related to the immediacy in Bolter and Grusin’s discussion of the logics of remediation. Just as in the Internet webcams that show backyard birdfeeders, in Street View, too, there is a “logic of immediacy” that “dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented” (6). Inasmuch as photography is popularly understood as an invisible medium—that is, when photographs are looked at with an uncritical eye, it is assumed that what they depict is a pure or true representation—there is an extent to which the Street View images are indeed immediate. The fact that these images are created by the impassive gaze of the camera-cars both extends and undermines this sensation of immediacy. Extends, because there is therefore no subjective photographer (or her attendant intentions inscribed upon the images) to worry about; undermined, because this immediacy thus depends on the very existence of the technological medium. As Bolter and Grusin put it (writing about video games) “the immediacy can only come through acknowledging the medium” (91). In an essay for Art Fag City, Jon Rafman expresses a similar contradiction, writing that even the features of the images that reveal how they are produced, “such as the visible Google copyright and the directional compass arrows … enhance, rather than destroy the thrill of the present instant projected on the image” (Rafman). Recalling McPherson’s discussion of volitional mobility, the interactive controls presented to the Street View user—such as the zoom in or out buttons—function to make the user feel more powerful in regard to the image as well as, via these hypermediate indicators, to deepen the sense that these images are authentic and thus could stand a detailed examination.
Google’s claim to enabling its users to explore far off, perhaps unreachable places, is most explicitly embodied in an offshoot of the traditional Street View—Museum View. Google built a trolley that can navigate museums around the world, and users can click through the museums to, presumably, see the artwork, though, of course, the quality of the images is not high enough that this would be in any way comparable to actually visiting the museum. This function, of giving users interactive visual access to other places, clearly recalls Bolter and Grusin’s discussion of media that “pretend to locate us in various natural environments”—such as webcams that show the Rockies or a “a backyard bird feeder” (5). Manovich, too, refers to this ability when he writes that the computer monitor “connected to a network becomes a window through which we can enter places thousands of miles away” (94).
In his exploration of the genealogy of the screen as a window into a “virtual space … [a] space of representation,” Manovich introduces the concept of the viewing regime, which, for him, is a “certain relationship between the image and the spectator” (96). This relationship—the viewing regime—has to do with the screen’s image striving “for complete illusion … while the viewer is asked to suspend disbelief” (96). In a practical sense, in order for Street View to serve its function as an interactive, photographic map, the user must indeed suspend disbelief and trust the image. However, of the computer screen in particular—which he calls the “real-time screen”--Manovich writes that its image can change in real time “reflecting changes in the referent “ (97). For him, this leads to the conclusion that “the image, in a traditional sense, no longer exists … it is only by habit that we sill refer to what we see on the real-time screen as ‘images’” (98). Interestingly, Street View’s images do not change in real time at all—recall the sensation of looking at a Street View image that is seasonally out-of-synch with the actual time of year—and therefore, perhaps, a viewing regime for Google Street View might have to revert to an understanding of the images as actual images, in a “traditional sense,” while also depending on a trust that comes with the interplay between Bolter and Grusin’s twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy. This is what I argue that Rafman’s art practice does.
As referred to earlier, this trust comes partly from the fact that Google Street View’s images are unique in that they don’t have a human—and therefore subjective—photographer. Much of the trust in these images is due to the viewer’s knowledge of the purely mechanical photographer (though perhaps, with greater knowledge of how the Street View camera-vehicles are managed, the role of the driver might bear some looking into). There is a temptation to, as Rafman puts it, see them as “true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.” It's likely—and entirely reasonable--that users of Google Street View think of these images as true representations of reality (albeit a bit warped by the strange angle of the cameras)—they have no reason not to do so. Rafman’s recontextualization of the Street View images puts pressure on this sense that the images are purely objective and, in doing so, plays out the tensions among the related theorizations of web interfaces discussed here--particularly between the notions of immediacy and hypermediacy as posed by Bolter and Grusin.
Rafman began extracting images from Google Street View and collecting them in a piece called Nine Eyes in 2009. Since a Street View vehicle captures whatever happens to be in its path as it progresses down the street, strange things often end up being photographed.
These images show the Street View cameras’ occasional and accidental capture of images that appear sophisticated or intentional in terms of both form and content. By removing the images from their original and intended context as something purely informative and archival—that is, immediate--Rafman has transformed them into art images and thus highlighted their hypermediacy. Suddenly these photographs have been given the status of media and a viewer is forced to consider the way they were produced beyond the potential recognition dependency between immediacy and hypermediacy that contributes to their intended effectiveness. As art objects, their manner of production is foregrounded, and much of their impact comes from the knowledge that they were created by machines—that is, their hypermediacy.
However, in those of Rafman’s selections that bear evidence of camera or computer errors—such as the images where the face-recognition technology that is meant to blur human faces blurs something else instead, or the image that shows a Street View vehicle driver attempting to adjust a camera—there is a sense that Rafman’s art practice somehow cuts down the power of these nonhuman photographers. This could be considered a stronger reiteration of the way that Street View’s captures don’t align with Manovich’s impression of the computer screen’s images as not actually images at all. Despite their claim to authenticity and liveness, Rafman’s project highlights the Street View images’ status as images, thereby echoing McPhereson’s reminder that the sensation of volitional mobility is a manufactured, false sensation. Though the user’s clicks do impact the image at the virtual level—the image on the screen does change—the user is, of course, not actually moving anything. They are not navigating through real space at all, but rather through a representation of real space as it was at one point in time.
Indeed, Rafman conceives of his curatorial work on these images as a “reassertion of the significance of the human gaze within Street View” (Rafman). Rafman is pinpointing the tensions among the way that these images are understood in relation to their function (machine made, purely informational), how this understanding relates to understandings of photography in general (as either objective and realistic or subjective and framed), and his practice of selecting images to designate as art. Through all of this, he wants to make a commentary on Google’s status as a creator of a “cultural text like any other,” despite the “weight accorded to external reality [and] the perception of a neutral and unbiased recording” (Rafman). Bolter and Grusin write, "the analog representations on our screen are powerfully connected to life off-screen" (10). Rafman's art practice expands on this: Though, in a literal sense, Google Street View does bear a photographic connection to "life off-screen," Rafman points out the degree to which we impose intention and meaning on these images, and thus suggests that the work that Google Street View performs is perhaps closer to framing and representation than one might think.
Bibliography:
1. Bolter, Jay David., and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. London: MIT P., 2001. Print.
2. "Google Maps with Street View." Google Maps. Google. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. <http:/
3. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Print.
4. McPherson, Tara. "Reload." The Visual Culture Reader. By Nicholas Mirzoeff. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. 458-70. Print.
5. Rafman, Jon. "IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View." Art Fag City — New York Art News and Reviews. 12 Aug. 2009. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. <http:/
