Turning Street View Into Street Art
As Google’s Street View cars rumble through our cities and towns, they don’t capture merely the geography of our streets and buildings. They see and record the life there, people going about their days.
Those inadvertent portraits are now moving back from the digital realm to our earthly one, in artist Paolo Cirio’s projectStreet Ghosts.
Cirio finds images of humans on the streets of Street View and creates life-sized prints of them, and places them back on the spot where they were originally captured, such as in the picture above, taken from a Street View image of Dircksenstrasse in Berlin. As he describes it, his project exposes “the specters of Google’s eternal realm of private, misappropriated data: the bodies of people captured by Google’s Street View cameras, whose ghostly, virtual presence I marked in Street Art fashion at the precise spot in the real world where they were photographed.”
