Google Street View: Digital Mapping, Glitching and Social Documentary

Google Street View was launched in 2007 and enabled the user to zoom down from the traditional cartographic bird’s-eye view to an immersive 360° street level environment. The result is a virtual version of a cartographic tool where the users can immerse themselves in a panorama of their chosen environment. These vistas are captured using stitched together images taken from Google automated street view cameras on 2.5 metre photographic masts mounted, for the most part, on the tops of cars. The resulting photographs are unsettling, using wide angle camera lines and fused images, the impact provokes a voyeuristic response in the viewer. Almost immediately, artists have begun to appropriate these images in their own work building on a history of street photography as seen in the works of Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank but also emphasising the different scale and viewpoint that Google Street View generated such as digital artists Eduardo Kac’s Lagoogleglyph series where the artist created artworks that were visible only using the technology. This paper will examine the impact of Google Street View on how place is represented by contemporary artists and the repercussions for the aesthetics of space.