Archive for the ‘Jon Rafman’ tag
Visualizing The Experience
I just discovered the site Art Fag City through their IMG MGMT image based artist essay series.
In the essay, IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Jon Rafman discusses amongst other things, the contemporary experience, organizing the worlds information, and documentary photography. From the article…
These collections seek to convey contemporary experience as represented by Google Street View. We are bombarded by fragmentary impressions and overwhelmed with data, but we often see too much and register nothing. In the past, religion and ideologies often provided a framework to order our experience; now, Google has laid an imperial claim to organize information for us. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have compared their search engines to the mind of God and proclaimed as their corporate motto, “do no evil.”
Although the Google search engine may be seen as benevolent, Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.
I feel a strong sense of nostalgia when viewing the curated Google Street View images. Place seems to be slightly separated from time. It is an incredible archive and will shape our visual culture for years to come.
