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walks her day trips on Street View before leaving the house. Places shes never
been feel a bit more familiar when shes seen them earlier in the day on her laptop.
As one can see, Google has tasked itself with organiz[ing] the worlds information
2 Rafman, Jon. "IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View." ArtFCity.
http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/
(accessed April 25, 2014).
3 Harmann, Maren. Technologies and Utopias: The Cyberflanuer and the Experience
of being Online. Berlin: Nomos Publishers, 2001.
4 Ibid.
that the more marginal, the more ephemeral the culture is, the more fleeting
the object[,] the more it can actually reflect and reveal culture at large 5. In
the case of Google this seems to hold true, for the fleeting moments of
accident, death, and destitution are rendered truly momentary by censorship.
Rafmans excursions typically follow the paths of the Street View cars as posted
online, meaning he or his assistants are often the first to see the images (as the
photographs are taken by a robotic camera); and, as Google takes down any image
that might distract from its products use, they are often of the few that see the
images within their original environment at all 6. In this sense Rafmans work
functions as a sort of archive, a documentation of hyper-temporal, privately
produced cultural objects that are valued on their rapid obsolescence 7.
Not unlike the tradition of street photographers before him, Rafman seeks
what Henri Cartier-Bresson titled the decisive moment. But unlike the father of
photojournalism, the compositions Rafman captures dont exist for a fraction of a
second8. They exist in a slowly refreshed world of mechanically captured still
images, a seamlessly stitched panorama that exists publically for anyone with
5 Stephen Froese, Jon Rafman. "Jon Rafman." Pin-UP: Magazine for Architectural
Entertainment: Pin-Up, 2014.
6 Staley, Willy . "Poaching Memories from Googles Wandering Eye." The 6th Floor:
Eavesdropping on the Times Magazine.
http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/poaching-memories-from-googles-wanderingeye/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=3
(accessed April 25, 2014).
internet access to utilize. The actual photographer of the images was not directed
by an artistic gaze, creating a sense of happenchance to the images Rafman
archives that only elevates their aesthetic aura 9. In viewing the works I cannot help
but feel an ownership of these images; not only do they denote our shared world
(incomprehensible really), they also exist in a world of images which I was privy to.
Its certainly possible that I could have stared through my screen at the exact same
moment, frozen and ready for the taking. In speaking of his series, Rafman has said
that the Street View collections represent our experience of the modern world, and
in particular, the tension they express between our uncaring, indifferent universe
and our search for connectedness and significance 10. Googles virtual world exists
as a commercial tool; wandering the streets I often find the relative lack of people
alarming, and whatever pedestrians do exist are devoid of identity, their faces
blurred by algorithms. This loveless space rings of dystopia, yet Rafman is able to
weed out moments of tension, intimacy, violence, and connectivity. Perhaps even
more than traditional photographers, Rafman is sure to be found exploitative or
otherwise problematic by many, yet his gaze is one of empathy and respect, aiming
to subjectivize the dispassionate online realm.
In this way, 9-eyes falls in line with much of Rafmans work, which often deals
with the crisis over individual subjectivity in the face of the perceived void that is
the internet. In the work Still Life (Beta Male), made in collaboration with musician
Oneohtrix Point Never, the narrator speaks:
As you look at the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into
eternity. You see the things that were inside you. This is the womb. The
original site of the imagination . You can't find your way out of the maze
you are convinced has been solely created for you 11.
The narrator describes a disembodying sense of connectivity with the seemingly
infinite mass of information online that is reminiscent of the language that has been
used to describe the conventions of Romantic landscape painting. As a human
constructed environment, the Internet functions similarly to both historical
representations of landscapes and to the actual lived landscape in which a subject is
embedded. Representations of landscapes within Western art have been seen as a
way to order the world in relation to man (as if we are the subject and the landscape
an object; as if the landscape exists for our consumption), yet online this
representations vastness allows our experience to simultaneously function
phenomenologically, resulting in an indistinct subject-object relation 12. I believe that
in representing this mass of information in the form of a landscape, Rafman invites
the viewer to conceptualize this experience in terms of the sublime. Surely, one
may counter, it has been abstracted, distanced enough that any feeling of terror or
awe would be rendered innocuous. One is more likely to be met with frustrated
boredom instead, the movement through hyperlinked arrows feeling remarkably like
an afternoon spent in heavy traffic. This experience of moving through finite scraps
of virtual space rather aptly demonstrates a concept by literary and cultural theorist
Sianne Ngai termed stuplimity. Kant defined the sublime as an experience in
11 Rafman, Jon. Still Life (Betamale). Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube,
November 2013. Web. 25 April 2014.
12 DeLue,RachaelZiady."TheArtSeminar."InLandscapetheory.NewYork:Routledge,2008..
human power and yet simultaneously [as] evoking the sense of individual
insignificance and powerlessness. As an extension and affirmation of reason [and,
simultaneously, as an] expression of a crushing, omnipotent force outside the
self16. When truly confronted with the wealth of information available online it
seems inevitable that one would experience a sensation not unlike vertigo; the
amount of human capital invested in the simplest of softwares is beyond the
capacities of our imagination. But Rafmans series doesnt immediately conjure the
vastness of Googles application or its technologys opacity. Unlike 19 th century
paintings of the sublime meant to replicate the awe evoked by their subjects
Rafmans images create a dialogue of familiarity. Looking through the images I
almost expect to see someone I know, their face blurred as they gaze curiously at a
car crash or a homeless man begging for change. Rafmans world draws its viewer
in.
Much of Rafmans work deals with this connectivity with technology, but often
situations which border the obsessive. Interviews with professional gamers,
explorations of online fetish cultures, live tours through Second Life, and narrative
films made from the game play of video games, Rafmans work challenges the
separation we maintain between subjectivity as it exists through our bodies and
through our screens. In describing the virtual worlds of videogames, Eugnie
Shinkle asserts:
The job of the interface is to maintain [an] alternate reality by supporting a
perceptually coherent gameworld. A properly functioning interface
humanises the technology, acting as an extension of the body and enabling
17 Ibid.
18 Hayles, Katherine. How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics,
literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
ourselves more fully into our subjectivities as played out through social media, in
video games, or simply in navigating our browsers, a sense of anxiety still persists.
Shinkle proposes a contemporary notion of Nyes technological sublime: an
experience in which the subject that has merged with technology is met with a
breaching of this bond, and a return of the technology to the realm of the banal 19.
Typically experienced through glitches or hardware failure, this experience of the
sublime is a moment in which the posthuman recognizes the sublimely immersive
realm in which they were immersed as outside themselves and as a mass-produced
consumer object. The incomprehensible mass of information that makes up such a
worlds software is reduced to an opaque and mysterious set of hardware, and the
posthumans agency within such a system or sense of power over it is called into
question.
In a similar sense, the realism of Rafmans images is undermined by their
materiality (in galleries they are printed large and framed, online the series is an
ongoing tumblr). Intermittent and out of context through the Google compass,
navigation arrows, and street lines; glitches and errors the representationality of
the images is laid bare. One looks at the images and feels immersed within their
world, yet as humanized as this realm is, complete conviction that the world exists
as shown is disallowed (in real life or even online anymore). Rafmans work
straddles the line of the sublime; half immersive and half opaque, the world
challenges our ability to separate ourselves from technology and poses questions
on such a dilemmas repercussions. In looking at the series one cannot help but
conjure thoughts of Rafman and his studio deliriously clicking through the Streets
for days, of the thousands of images that were never documented that no longer
exist, or of the simple ambition of Googles project and the power that that entails.