The Ephemeral Art of Google Street View Self-Portraiture

After staring at these two images on and off for about the past 20 minutes, a distant hrmmmmmm is still about the sum total of my thoughts. They're the work of artist Carlos Zinni, whose "practice involves the use of Internet data to create time based social consciousness experiences investigating our life." The two pieces are presented on his website without much comment, more a statement that a comment, whatever it is, exists: "Self Portrait With Dog" faces many contemporary issues like privacy and security, among others. And it 'quotes,' in a way, a very important piece by futurist painter Giacomo Balla, 'Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash', 1912." It's simply an unadorned Google Street View cap of himself walking a dog.

So maybe the comment is more on that conflict between everyday banality--the whateverness that helps keep "surveillance society" issues out of the mainstream--and the reality of being photographed by dudes in a secret Google car for publication on nearly the most important website there is. In any case, Rhizome recently asked Zinni about the photos. His thoughts are definitely worth sharing:

Getting your picture taken by Google Street View twice was just luck? Or did you have an idea that they were photographing the neighborhood? What are your thoughts on Street View?

Yes yes, it was just luck. I had no control.

Street view is a great tool but the way it was implemented (imposed) was, in my opinion, at least questionable. They made private agreements with governments to scan the globe skipping any kind of people's feedback, people who happen to be the subjects, beside the public environment, of this pretty intrusive practice.

I would be interested to know if these agreements were "economic". This is an important step because in the end all the Street View material is copyrighted and private owned, resulting in contradiction with the subject matter, and of course, above all when you find yourself featured in it twice.

Apart from sniffing kinda private data broadcasted via wifi (I've no idea what the goal was or if this happened on purpose) they shouldn't had used unmarked cars to make their first rides through the cities. Of course we could say it's more a Gov's lack than their fault, but when dealing so evidently with personal privacy I think they should had been more careful.

In the end we all accepted it enthusiastically, emphasizing the common practice of being accomplices in an endless leak of personal privacy (Political profiling through Facebook) that doesn't match the same aim

for a full transparency of the public administration.

Street View helped to solve a kidnapping crime and inspired this amazing way of lose yourself around but the very best feature is yet to come, and it deals with history.

After discovering myself on Street View the first time in 2008, I was telling everybody that as time passes and the Google car keeps crawling, we'd have disappeared from that spot and selfportraitwithdog.com would end in a different picture, with no me and no dog in it, except for a caption at the bottom of the screen recalling the old project.

What is happening instead, is that even if we are gone from that spot http://goo.gl/maps/6c6jE  we are still there if you access the same section from the art project. And you can browse it of course.

So, it's like Google is keeping Street View layers from previous years, but it shows only the latest one except you have saved an old address, like mine pointing to "Self Portrait With Dog".

I think they are working on a Street View Time Machine to let people browse a selected area back in time. This will be of extreme help for historian and urbanists to name a few and gives an unpredictable depth and a final raison d’être to a contemporary apparatus.

Street View, of everything in this great technological world, has got to be one of the strangest and most difficult things to get a handle on. It's extremely passive and extremely active at the same time, mostly dull but conceptually super-intense. I was caught several years ago walking an old editor/friend's dog, and was struck by the fact that more people saw me in real life with the dog in a relatively quiet Baltimore neighborhood than probably ever saw me in the Street View image. Which is different now, by the way. Even the season and picture quality are different.

The original image is still on a server somewhere, but would it ever come back to life? Why would it? Honestly, having moved away from Baltimore and said friend, the thought of the picture being gone makes me more sad than relieved, like Marty McFly disappearing from that photo in Back to the Future while also disappearing from the past. I probably could have screen-grabbed it, but that's hardly the same thing, is it?

Reach Michael at michael@motherboard.tv.