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.