The wandering eye: When google street view becomes an unintentional art gallery
Imagine this. You’re sitting in front of your screen, coffee in hand, when suddenly, between two clicks, an image appears. A man in a gorilla suit, motionless in the middle of an empty street. A burning car, captured by chance. A woman who seems to be walking on air, as if the ground had vanished be
By Artedusa
••10 min read
The wandering eye: when Google Street View becomes an unintentional art gallery
Imagine this. You’re sitting in front of your screen, coffee in hand, when suddenly, between two clicks, an image appears. A man in a gorilla suit, motionless in the middle of an empty street. A burning car, captured by chance. A woman who seems to be walking on air, as if the ground had vanished beneath her feet. These scenes aren’t taken from a surrealist film, nor from a waking dream. They come from Google Street View, that unassuming service that maps the world in images. And it was precisely there that Jon Rafman, a Canadian artist, found his raw material.
In 2009, as he explored the digital recesses of this vast database, Rafman stumbled upon snapshots so strange, so poetic, they seemed to have escaped a Magritte painting. He began collecting them, like someone picking up seashells on a beach. But these images weren’t seashells. They were fragments of reality captured by algorithms, visual accidents born from the encounter between technology and chance. And so The Nine Eyes of Google Street View was born—a work that would redefine the boundaries between art, surveillance, and digital poetry.
When the machine becomes a flâneur
There’s something deeply Baudelairean in Rafman’s approach. Just as the poet of Les Fleurs du Mal roamed the streets of Paris to capture its soul, the artist wanders through the labyrinths of Google Street View, searching for those moments when reality tips into surrealism. But his flâneur isn’t human—it’s a machine. Nine cameras, mounted on cars, traverse the world, capturing everything in their path. Grand landscapes, mundane scenes, stolen moments. And sometimes, images that seem plucked straight from a dream.
Take this photo, for instance. A woman in a white dress stands on a sidewalk, staring directly at the lens. Her face is blurred, as if she’d been caught mid-stride. Behind her, a man in a dark suit seems to be following her. The image has something Hitchcockian about it, as if it foreshadows an impending drama. Yet it’s nothing more than an algorithmic fluke, a moment seized by a camera without consciousness. Rafman spotted it, isolated it, framed it. And suddenly, this ordinary image becomes a work of art.
What fascinates about The Nine Eyes is this tension between control and chance. Google Street View is a mapping tool, not an art gallery. Its images are meant to be useful, not beautiful. Yet by extracting them from their context, Rafman reveals their aesthetic potential. He transforms data into poetry, pixels into emotion. And he invites us to see the world differently, to find beauty where we least expect it.
Archipenko, or the art of sculpting the void
If Rafman explores the possibilities of digital art, he’s not the first to play with the limits of representation. Long before him, in the early 20th century, a Ukrainian sculptor named Alexander Archipenko was already revolutionizing how we conceive of form. In 1912, he unveiled Walking Woman, a work that would shock the art world. Unlike classical sculptures, which fill space with matter, Walking Woman is hollow. Her body is an assemblage of geometric planes, voids and solids, as if the artist had decided to sculpt absence as much as presence.
At the time, critics were outraged. How dare he present a woman without a face, without arms, without legs? Yet it was precisely this fragmentation that made the work so modern. Archipenko wasn’t trying to represent reality—he was capturing its essence. By leaving empty spaces, he invited the viewer to complete the image in their mind. And that’s where the genius of his approach lies: he turned sculpture into an interactive experience, long before the digital age.
Today, when we look at Walking Woman, we can’t help but think of 3D models. Those hollow forms, those volumes cut like puzzles, eerily foreshadow modeling software. Archipenko had no computer, but he understood something essential: art isn’t limited to what we see. It includes what we sense, what we imagine. And it’s this idea that connects his work to Rafman’s. Both play with the gaps, the blanks, the spaces where reality slips away.
The glitch as a new aesthetic
In Rafman’s universe, accidents aren’t mistakes—they’re opportunities. Take Still Life (Betamale), a 2013 video made from synthetic images. At first glance, it’s a digital nightmare: avatars distorting, objects floating in space, scenes that seem straight out of a failed video game. Yet beneath this chaotic surface lies a biting critique of our era.
Rafman explores the dark side of the internet, those toxic communities where hatred and loneliness feed off each other. We see a man eating a computer mouse as if it were forbidden fruit, a woman trapped in a virtual reality headset, an avatar disintegrating before our eyes. These images aren’t beautiful in the traditional sense. They’re brutal, unsettling, almost unbearable. And that’s precisely what makes them powerful.
What strikes us in Still Life (Betamale) is this glitch aesthetic, this beauty born from failure. In a world where everything is smoothed, optimized, filtered, Rafman chooses to show the cracks. He uses bugs, rendering errors, digital artifacts as artistic tools. And he reminds us that behind the apparent perfection of the digital world lies something far more fragile.
This approach isn’t without precedent—it recalls Duchamp’s readymades. Like the urinal or the bicycle wheel, Rafman’s glitches are found objects, repurposed from their original function. They become art simply by the artist’s will. But where Duchamp played with irony, Rafman delves into melancholy. His images don’t make us smile. They unsettle, they question, they reveal the flaws in our hyperconnected society.
The memory of pixels
One of the central questions in Rafman’s work is that of memory. How do we remember in the digital age? What happens to our recollections when they’re stored in clouds, compressed into JPEGs, shared in fleeting stories? In Dream Journal, a series of virtual reality videos, the artist attempts to answer these questions by exploring his own dreams.
For a year, Rafman recorded his dreams upon waking, then recreated them in synthetic images. The result is both mesmerizing and disorienting. We see oneiric landscapes, transforming characters, scenes that shift from the real to the abstract. But above all, we perceive that special quality of dreams: their ability to blend the familiar with the strange, the beautiful with the monstrous.
What’s interesting about Dream Journal is how Rafman uses technology to explore the intimate. Virtual reality isn’t just a tool here—it becomes a language, a way to translate the unspeakable. And it raises a fundamental question: in a world where everything is recorded, archived, shared, what remains of our inner lives?
This isn’t a new question. The surrealists, too, sought to capture the unconscious. But where Dalí painted melting clocks, Rafman creates virtual worlds. His approach is resolutely contemporary, yet it belongs to a much older tradition—one of artists who, for centuries, have tried to give form to the formless.
Archipenko’s invisible legacy
Though Rafman is often described as a post-internet artist, his work owes much to precursors like Archipenko. The Ukrainian sculptor never touched a computer in his life, yet his technical innovations paved the way for digital art. Take Medrano II, a work he created in 1914. It’s a kinetic sculpture, composed of several mobile elements that rotate on themselves. At the time, it was revolutionary. Today, when we look at this piece, we can’t help but think of 3D animations.
What links Archipenko to contemporary artists is this idea that art must be dynamic, interactive, in motion. In Medrano II, the viewer is invited to turn the elements to discover different perspectives. It’s a participatory experience, long before the era of touchscreens. And it’s this same logic that drives artists like Ian Cheng, whose works evolve in real time thanks to algorithms.
Archipenko also understood something essential: sculpture isn’t limited to matter. It includes the space around it, the light that passes through it, the movement that animates it. This idea has profoundly influenced digital artists. When Rachel Rossin creates sculptures in virtual reality, she doesn’t just work with form—she sculpts space, time, the viewer’s experience. And that’s where Archipenko’s legacy becomes visible, even if it often remains unseen.
The beauty of accidents
Let’s return to Google Street View. Among the thousands of images Rafman selected for The Nine Eyes, one in particular encapsulates the poetry of his project. We see a man standing in the middle of an empty road. He’s wearing a gorilla suit. Behind him, a snowy landscape stretches into the distance. The image is both absurd and deeply melancholic. As if this human gorilla were wandering through a world that no longer makes sense.
This photo has a story. It was taken in Winnipeg, Canada, in 2009. The man in the gorilla suit is named Mike, and he’s part of a performance art group. That day, he decided to walk around his city in costume. No one noticed him—except Google Street View’s camera. And so he became a work of art without knowing it.
This anecdote says a lot about our time. In a world where everything is surveilled, recorded, archived, accidents become treasures. The most poetic moments aren’t the ones we plan—they’re the ones we stumble upon. And it’s this idea that makes The Nine Eyes far more than a simple collection of images. It’s a meditation on chance, beauty, and how technology transforms our relationship with the world.
Art in the age of the algorithm
In 2019, Rafman was invited by Louis Vuitton to create an installation for their Paris flagship store. The result was a virtual reality experience titled View of Pariser Platz. Visitors were plunged into an oneiric Berlin, where monuments deformed, streets turned into labyrinths, and time seemed to stretch and contract. It was an immersive work, but also a reflection on how algorithms shape our perception of space.
What’s fascinating about this installation is how Rafman uses technology to create an experience that’s both personal and collective. Each visitor experiences their own version of View of Pariser Platz, depending on their movements and choices. Yet all share the same sensation: that of being both actor and spectator, present and absent.
This duality lies at the heart of post-internet art. In a world where everything is connected, where our lives unfold as much online as offline, the boundaries between real and virtual blur. Artists like Rafman don’t try to restore them—they explore, question, and push them to their limits. And they invite us to do the same.
When art looks back at us
Perhaps this is the greatest lesson from Rafman and Archipenko: art doesn’t just represent the world. It looks back at us. When you contemplate Walking Woman, you’re not just seeing a sculpture—you’re looking into a mirror held up to your own imagination. When you explore The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, you’re not just looking at images—you’re seeing fragments of your own memory, echoes of your own wanderings.
In the digital age, this idea takes on new meaning. Algorithms observe us, analyze us, predict us. Surveillance cameras capture our every move. Social networks archive our thoughts, emotions, desires. In this context, Rafman’s art becomes a form of resistance. It reminds us that behind the data, there are humans. Behind the pixels, there are stories. And behind the screens, there’s always a gaze waiting to be surprised.
The wandering eye: When google street view becomes an unintentional art gallery | Art History
