The Virtual Flaneur? Exploring Google Street View

Ben Connor The Virtual Flâneur? 1

THE VIRTUAL FLÂNEUR?

EXPLORING GOOGLE STREET VIEW

BENJAMIN CONNOR

MAY 2010

Presented as part of, and in accordance with, the requirements for the Final Degree of M.Sci

at the University of Bristol, School of Geographical Sciences, May 2010


i. Abstract

As the Internet becomes ever more deeply embedded in everyday life, cartography is

undergoing a radical transformation, with interactive, transient, online mapping

environments replacing static, durable map objects (Crampton, 2003a). Internet behemoth

Google has played an integral role in these developments, and with its latest technology,

Google Street View, has proclaimed to take “mapping to a level not possible before”

(Google, 2010a). Rather than adopting the abstracted, “God’s eye” view of the

“conventional” map, Street View represents the world from a decidedly more human

perspective, offering a navigable mapping environment consisting of linked 360°

photographic panoramas of the world’s streets, providing the viewer with an experience

akin to that of a virtual flâneur. Taking what I have termed a more-than-representational

approach to mapping, this study aims to explore some of the webs of meaning that have

been spun around Street View, understood as both a partial, situated representation of the

world, and a contested, affective element of material culture. I address Street View in three

parts: first by focusing closely on the visual form and interactive experience of using the

mapping environment itself, before second examining how it has been discursively

constructed in the media as a “controversial” invasion of privacy, then finally highlighting

how it has been reinscribed through a number of artistic practices that draw attention to its

affective and imaginative qualities. Thus I argue that Street View cannot be assigned any

intrinsic meaning or logic, but rather is open to constant reinterpretation, and while novel in

its precise form, must be placed in a longer-run context of efforts to objectify and represent

the world around us.

Total word count: 14995 words.


ii. Acknowledgments

Thanks go to all who have assisted me over the course of this project:

My supervisor, Dr Veronica della Dora, for her enthusiasm, advice and support;

Jennie Meredith, for her insightful comments during tutorials, and healthy scepticism

towards all things technological;

Dr Mark Jackson, Ivan Wu, Jon Wringe, Caroline Wright, Won-Seob Song for their

suggestions and lively discussion at the MSc reading group;

Bill Guffey, and especially Jon Rafman, for giving up their time to provide me with invaluable

information.

This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, Peter Swann, although in his eyes, an

Ordnance Survey map can never be bettered.


iii. Contents

iv. List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... 6

v. List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... 7

1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 8

1.1. Why Google Street View? ............................................................................................... 8

1.2. Methodology ................................................................................................................. 10

1.2.1. Visual ethnography ................................................................................................ 11

1.2.2. Discourse analysis .................................................................................................. 12

1.2.3. Interviews............................................................................................................... 13

1.3. Outline .......................................................................................................................... 15

2. Representing the world ....................................................................................................... 16

2.1. The cartographic gaze ................................................................................................... 16

2.2. Critical cartography: representational and post-representational ............................... 19

2.3. More-than-representational mappings ........................................................................ 21

3. Contextualising Street View: a new mode of mapping? ...................................................... 23

3.1. “Is Google good for geography”? .................................................................................. 24

3.2. Beyond the fear-hope dialectic ..................................................................................... 27

4. Street View in focus ............................................................................................................. 29

4.1. Experiencing Street View .............................................................................................. 29

4.2. The virtual flâneur ......................................................................................................... 32

5. Contesting Street View ........................................................................................................ 36

5.1. Maps, surveillance and privacy ..................................................................................... 36

5.2. Survey/Surveillance ...................................................................................................... 38

5.3. Representation/Misrepresentation .............................................................................. 40

5.4. Use/Abuse ..................................................................................................................... 42

5.5. An Invasion of Privacy? ................................................................................................. 44

6. Rethinking Street View......................................................................................................... 45

6.1. Street View as virtual travel .......................................................................................... 46

6.2. Street View as self-expression ...................................................................................... 48

6.3. Street View as modern experience ............................................................................... 50

6.4. Multiple meanings ........................................................................................................ 54

7. Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 55

7.1. A world-as-picture ........................................................................................................ 57


7.2. Where next? .................................................................................................................. 58

8. Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 60

Appendix A ............................................................................................................................... 76

A.i. Semi-structured Interview schedule for Jon Rafman .................................................... 76

A.ii. Interview Transcript ...................................................................................................... 78

Appendix B ............................................................................................................................... 89


iv. List of Tables

1.1. Sources for discourse analysis p14


v. List of Figures

1.1. The familiar and the exotic in Google Street View p9

1.2. Guidelines for discourse analysis p12

3.1. Google Maps p25

3.2. Google Earth p26

4.1. Three visual representations of Jacob’s Wells Road, Bristol, from Google Maps p31

4.2. Moments in time captured by Google Street View p33

4.3. Times Square, New York represented in Street View, and by an overhead

satellite image p34

5.1. “Report a concern” on Google Street View p37

5.2. British Special Air Service base, Credenhill, Herefordshire p42

6.1. Bill Guffey’s Street View art websites p47

6.2. Scenes from Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, staged as part of the Street With a View

project p49

6.3. Examples of scenes from Street View used by Jon Rafman p52


1. Introduction

“Street View takes mapping to a level not possible before” (Ed Parsons, Google Geospatial

Technologist)

“we are confident that the Street View system must be regarded as operating outside of the law”

(Simon Davies, Director, Privacy International)

“Google Street View is a great manifestation of the present view of reality, which is a “Google-ised

reality” (Jon Rafman, new media artist)1

Maps are changing. As computers and the Internet become ever-more deeply embedded in

the fabric of everyday life, “the ways we visualize and understand the world around us – its

places, geographies, and relationships – are undergoing a radical transformation”

(Crampton, 2010: p38). It has been argued that cartography is undergoing a profound

epistemic break, as people’s everyday experience of maps is increasingly not of static,

printed, durable map objects, but of interactive, transient, online mapping environments

(Crampton, 2003a). In this context, Internet behemoth Google has established itself as a

major player in the burgeoning field of online mapping, and in May 2007 launched its most

ambitious and innovative project to date: Google Street View. Integrated into the existing

Google Maps and Google Earth platforms, Street View “takes mapping to a level not possible

before” (Google, 2010a), by representing the world not from the “God’s eye” view of a

“conventional” map or satellite image, but from a decidedly more human street-level

perspective. Thus during the last three years, Google has commissioned a fleet of cars, vans,

and even trikes fitted with GPS systems, laser scanners and a set of nine cameras to produce

360° panoramic photographs of the world’s streets, which are then digitally stitched

together to produce an interactive, navigable mapping environment (Figure 1.1.).

1.1. Why Google Street View?

Google Street View presents an interesting and pertinent focus for research for three

primary reasons. First, while there is a growing body of work engaging with current

transformations in the technologies and practices of mapping (Crampton, 2009), the relative

1 Ed Parsons quoted in Google (2010a); Davies (2009); Jon Rafman from interview (2010).


novelty of Street View means that this particular mapping environment has not yet been

examined from a critical geographical perspective. Second, I would argue that this absence

needs to be addressed due to the extent to which Street View has attracted the interest of

Figure 1.1 The familiar and the exotic in Google Street View. [Top] School of Geographical Sciences, University

Road, Bristol; [Bottom] Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. The top image shows the default mode of viewing

Street View, displaying the Google search term, navigational arrows and road, and an inset satellite view.

Alternatively Street View can be experienced in a more immersive way in full screen, without an accompanying

bird’s eye view *bottom+ [Author’s screenshots 14 April 2010]


the general population in a manner that most online mapping tools have not; Google

(2010a) has recorded a 30% increase in visitors to its Maps site since the launch of Street

View, and from personal experience, it is apparent that Street View is being used

increasingly frequently in a range of everyday situations2. Finally, Street View is of particular

interest not just for its popularity, but for its attendant notoriety. Since its UK launch in

2009, it has been almost impossible to see Street View referred to in the media without it

being prefixed by the word “controversial” (e.g. Harvey, 2009; Warman, 2010), an epithet

not often applied to online mapping applications.

If maps can be regarded as “a hinge around which pivot wholes systems of meaning, both

prior and subsequent to its technical and mechanical production” (Cosgrove, 1999: p9), then

it is my intention in this study to gain something of a partial handle on those systems of

meaning that revolve around Google Street View, by considering how this novel mapping

technology, like all others, is constituted through its mutual relations with society

(Crampton, 2003a). My approach is necessarily partial and exploratory, and I will not

attempt to give a comprehensive overview of by whom or for what purpose Street View is

being used, nor canvass public opinion on the technology, even though these remain

pertinent questions. Rather I will focus my analysis around three main aims:

1. To investigate the significance of mapping the world not from an

abstracted, “God’s eye” perspective, but from a street-level viewpoint;

2. To understand and explain the media discourses that have constructed

Street View as “controversial”;

3. To consider how we might look beyond the restrictive purview of these

popular discourses through an examination of more creative modes of

engagement with Street View.

1.2. Methodology

In general terms, this study will follow the approach of “critical cartography”, a perspective

that addresses maps not as neutral mirrors of the world, but as “active means by which

2Just in the last few weeks I have seen Street View being used as a navigational aid; a means to gain a “sense of place” for

potential holiday destinations; and as a mnemonic device when recounting stories from time spent living in a foreign city.


meanings are produced, circulated and exerted as well as negotiated and contested”

(Pinder, 2003: p173). In this context, I have adopted what I shall refer to as a more-than-

representational approach to maps and mapping, which I explain more fully in Chapter Two.

While acknowledging the continued relevance of social constructionist approaches that have

sought to deconstruct the partial and contingent ways in which maps represent space, I also

wish to look beyond this focus on representation by engaging with the affective, imaginative

and material dimensions of maps. Concurrent with this approach, I have employed a range

of qualitative methods in order to analyse not just Street View itself, but also the discourses

and practices through which it is made meaningful. Accordingly, I acknowledge that my

interpretations are inevitably partial and subjective, and do not imply a singular “true”

reading of Google Street View (Rose, 1997).

1.2.1. Visual ethnography

While most attempts to advance a critical methodology for analysing maps have suggested

approaches such as iconography, discourse analysis, and deconstruction that rely upon a

view of maps as “texts” (e.g. Pinder, 2003), theoretical moves to be more attentive to the

non-representational aspects of maps, and the novel empirical context of online mapping

each present new methodological challenges. In analysing Street View itself, I therefore

adopted an experimental approach that constituted something of a visual ethnography3. My

starting point for analysis was thus based on interpreting my own experiences of using

Street View in a number of deliberately different ways: conducting focused searches;

virtually visiting familiar, iconic, and completely unfamiliar locations; and engaging in virtual

flânerie by interactively navigating within the Street View environment.

Thus rather than focusing solely on a semiotic or iconographic interpretation of the

multitude of images that make up this mapping environment, I aimed to pay attention to the

material, affective and imaginative qualities both of Street View as a virtual “object, and of

the embodied experience of engaging with the technology. Therefore while considering the

visual dimensions of Street View in a manner attentive to the view that an image (or map) is

not just a “representational snapshot”, but also has a “pre-signifying affective materiality”

(Latham and McCormack, 2009: p253), this approach also responds to calls for researchers

3 In some ways this work draws upon the growing number of virtual ethnographies being conducted in various online

spaces. However these studies have focused primarily on participant observation of online interaction between people, rather than on the software itself (e.g. Williams, 2007; Jordan, 2009).


to employ more “ethnomethodology” in map studies by analysing the “use and practices of

digital mapping systems” (Dodge et al, 2009: p233).

1.2.2. Discourse analysis

Textual analysis, in the form of discourse analysis, was employed primarily in order to

examine how Street View has been discursively constructed as a “controversial” technology,

and to consider how this construction has been challenged by more creative interpretations

of this mapping environment. Discourse analysis seeks to understand how discourses are

constituted and circulated within texts “to produce a particular understanding or knowledge

about the world that is accepted as truth” (Waitt, 2005: p148), and was therefore employed

in order to examine how the meaning of Street View has been “fashioned through a pattern

of discursive structures” (Waitt, 2005: p171) repeated across a collection of texts. Analysis

focused primarily on the newspaper press, using the online archives of British national

newspapers to find and select sources. Additional texts were also obtained from some local

newspapers; the websites of groups who have campaigned against Street View; and from

the website of artists who have worked with Street View. These texts were selected on the

basis of qualitative richness, and in order to gain a range of source, rather than attempting

to analyse every single text about Street View (Table 1.1.). I restricted my focus to the UK, as

there are significant geographical contingencies in the way that Street View has been

received and understood, which in themselves could form the basis of a separate study.

While there is no prescriptive or “standard” approach to discourse analysis (Tonkiss, 2004), I

adopted a set of seven recommended strategies as a general guide to analysis (Figure, 1.2)

(Waitt, 2005; Rose, 2001).


1.2.3. Interviews

Finally, interviews were used in order to bridge knowledge gaps and investigate the complex

motivations and behaviours of key actors involved in debates surrounding Street View

(Dunn, 2005). However, a number of identified potential informants were either unwilling or

unavailable for interview, namely: Ed Parsons, Google Geospatial Technologist; Robin

Hewlett, organiser of the Street with a View project; and representatives from the campaign

groups Privacy International and Big Brother Watch. Interviews were therefore carried out

with two informants, Jon Rafman and Bill Guffey, both artists who have worked with Street

View. Due to the location of both of these informants in North America (Montreal and

Kentucky respectively), conventional face-to-face interviews were impossible, and therefore

I overcame this problem by holding a telephone interview with Jon Rafman, and conducting

an asynchronous email interview with Bill Guffey.

Comparative studies have demonstrated that despite the lack of non-verbal communication,

when the research topic is appropriate, telephone interviews compare favourably to those

conducted face to face in terms of data quality (Sturges and Hanrahan, 2004). Having

contacted Jon Rafman via email, an interview was arranged and conducted using the

Internet phone service Skype, using a semi-structured interview schedule to guide the

conversation (Appendix A.i.). The conversation was recorded with permission and then

Guidelines for discourse analysis

1. Suspension of existing categories:

2. Familiarisation: immersion in texts through repeated re-reading;

3. Coding: identify key themes and discursive structures without imposing top down cate-

gories;

4. Persuasion: Investigate construction of “truth” claims within texts;

5. Incoherence: note inconsistencies within texts;

6. Active presence of the invisible: look for mechanisms that silence;

7. Social context: when, where, how, why, for whom and by whom was a text produced.

Figure 1.2 Guidelines for discourse analysis (Waitt, 2005; Rose, 2001)


Category Title Author Source Date

Newspaper Report/Editorial

A very English revolt sees off Google’s spies

R. Hardman Daily Mail 6/4/09

Google Street View: a dangerous Gizmo Anon. Daily Telegraph 19/3/09

Who allowed Google to put my big knickers online

B. Gordon Daily Telegraph 20/3/09

Google view is good for thieves R. Taylor The Sun 12/7/08

Google Street View forced to remove images

J. Merrick The Independent on Sunday 22/3/09

Can Google Street View stay ahead of the privacy lawyers?

S. Webb The Times 2/4/09

Why I want Google to keep its damned nose out of my home

H. Phibbs Daily Mail 19/3/09

Google ‘burglar’s charter’ street cameras given the all clear by privacy watchdog

D. Derbyshire, A. Martin

Daily Mail 31/7/08

You’re not Googling us: The Blairs, House of Commons and Google boss won’t have THEIR privacy invaded on Street View

I. Gallagher, T. Harper, M. Delgado

Daily Mail 22/3/09

Defending the public space M. Cross The Guardian 26/4/09

Just what we needed Google, more cameras

T. Blackburn The Sun 11/4/09

Fears Google Street View could be used to plan attacks

K. Mullan Londonderry Sentinel 28/1/10

Bradenham residents: ‘Google programme will help burglars’

L. Dunhill www.thisislocallondon.co.uk 26/1/10

Honestly, Google, I was only out to lunch R. Nicoll The Observer 22/3/09

Don’t zoom in on Google’s Street View M. Cross The Guardian 7/4/09

Google forced to black out hundreds of Street View photos after privacy protests – but site gets record number of visits

Anon. Daily Mail 21/3/09

Village Mob thwarts Google Street View car

M. Ahmed The Times 3/4/09

Ashleigh Hall captured on Street View just weeks before she was killed by facebook predator


Fury as Google puts the SAS’s secret base on Street View in ‘very serious security breach’


Google Street View criticised for ‘showing images of secret SAS headquarters’

Anon. The Telegraph 20/3/10

SAS base images to stay on Google Street View

Anon. The Times 20/3/10

Other media report

The Battle of Broughton R. Cellan-Jones BBC “dot.life” Blog 3/4/09

Campaign Group Material

Complaint: Google Street View technology

S. Davies Privacy International 23/3/09

Google Street View A. Deane Big Brother Watch 12/3/10

Want out of Google’s all seeing eys? E. Hockings Big Brother Watch 25/2/10

Google Material Can you “identify” the person walking down the street?

P. Fleischer “Peter Fleischer: Privacy…?” Blog

23/10/07

Street View and Privacy P. Fleischer Google LatLong Blog 24/9/07

Street View artists

Street With a View project brings real public art to the virtual streets – in Google Maps Street View

Street With a View

Press Release from www.streetwithaview.com

10/10/08

Introduction: Sixteen Google Street Views Jon Rafman Text from Sixteen Google Street Views book; obtained from author

2009

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View Jon Rafman Art Fag City blog 12/8/09

Table 1.1. Sources for discourse analysis


manually transcribed (Appendix A.ii.), before being analysed adopting the method of

discourse analysis outlined above. For Bill Guffey, an asynchronous email interview was

carried out, a method that while lacking the interactivity of a verbal interview, is

advantageous in allowing informants to take time to develop their answers and respond at

their own convenience (Kivits, 2005; James and Busher, 2006). Having made initial contact

with Bill Guffey explaining the purpose of my research, I sent a set of questions in one email,

receiving replies a few days later (Appendix B). Ultimately, while this method generated a

substantially less rich set of answers than the telephone interview due to the inability to

probe the informant, both methods were able to overcome the constraints of distance and

enable me to obtain useful information that I would not otherwise have been able to access.

1.3. Outline

This study is organised into six further chapters. In Chapters Two and Three I will set this

study in context, first by providing a theoretical framework in which I highlight the

significance afforded the visual representation of space and outline a more-than-

representational approach to cartography, before then outlining the emerging field of

Internet mapping. In Chapter Four I focus in depth on Street View itself, giving an auto-

ethnographic account of the technology that emphasises the manner in which it produces a

strong “sense of place”, yet produces a detached gaze akin to that of a “virtual flâneur”. In

Chapters Five and Six I turn to examine Street View in its wider context. First, I examine how

and why Street View has been discursively constructed as a surveillant technology and an

invasion of privacy at each stage of the mapping process, before demonstrating the

possibility of moving beyond these debates by analysing a number of artistic projects that

have engaged with Street View in a manner that highlights its affective and imaginative

qualities, whilst also opening up space for a more nuanced critical interpretation. Finally, in

Chapter Seven I will conclude by suggesting that Street View cannot be assigned any singular

meaning, but is open to constant reinterpretation, before returning to situate this new

technology within the wider context of the visual representation of space.


2. Representing the world

Historically, the production and circulation of geographical knowledge has been closely

associated with the visual image in a number of forms (Cosgrove, 2008; Rose, 2003; Driver,

2003), with some even suggesting that geographical space can be defined precisely as space

that “can be seen, or at least visualized” (Cosgrove, 2008: p15). It is therefore evident that

“the ways in which the world has been represented visually have, historically, been

important elements of the ways in which we come to understand and act upon the world”

(Pickles, 2004: p9). Geographical representations are not inert, passive objects, but “active,

constitutive elements in shaping social and spatial practices” (Cosgrove, 2008: p15), whose

rhetorical power plays a crucial role in the construction of the geographical imagination –

“the mechanism by which people come to know the world and situate themselves in space

and time” (Schwartz and Ryan, 2003: p6). Thus in a contemporary context in which “visual

images have unprecedented communicative significance” (Cosgrove, 1999: p4), the manner

in which space and place are represented graphically remains highly pertinent.

In this chapter, I will outline a theoretical framework within which to situate this study of

Google Street View. First, I will consider the ways in which the contrasting perspectives

employed in different visual representations have been held to foster different conceptions

of space, before focusing on the map as the visual form most readily associated with

geographical knowledge. Subsequently, while highlighting the imbrication of the “God’s eye”

view of the map with the totalising imperial gaze, I wish to also complicate the assumption

that an aerial perspective automatically implies this association, and that a map must adopt

this vantage point. Working with a broad conception of the cartographic image, I will further

complicate the notion of a map by problematizing the question of representation itself.

Employing insights from critical cartographic theory, I will synthesise work that has

reconceptualised the map both as an always partial, power laden cultural text amenable to

deconstruction (Harley, 1989), and more recently as a constellation of on-going processes

and practices (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007), in order to outline a more-than-representational

approach to mapping that will guide this study.

2.1. The cartographic gaze

If the visual has long been central to geographical thought, then more generally the


privileging of vision and sight is at the heart of the social imaginary of modernity, which has

been historically underpinned by the “cartographic gaze”, implying a “Cartesian

commitment to vision as the privileged source of ‘direct’ information about the world”

(Pickles, 2004: p78). Many have recognised the close relationship between geographical

knowledge and the technologies of vision – both material and social – that underpin the

particular constellation of “ways of seeing” that emerged in the modern era. For example,

Denis Cosgrove (1985: 1988) has argued that the theoretical development of linear

perspective facilitated the rise of the landscape “way of seeing” that offered an illusion of

control and order to a powerful, detached, individual observer, and as such provided a visual

ideology that rendered space amenable to physical appropriation as private property.

Likewise, the myriad of representational forms that emerged in the nineteenth century,

from simple photographs to dioramas, panoramas and even spectacular world exhibitions,

served to structure a modern view of the “world-as-picture, -as-exhibition, -as-museum, and

-as-miniature” (Pickles, 2004: p137). Thus the capacity of photography to dislocate space

and time was repeated in these technologies that reconstituted the visual spectacle of

representations of far-away places as both sources of pleasure, and commodities for

consumption; “the cartographic eye had become a central element of cultural consumption

and technological innovation” (Pickles, 2004: p139; Clarke and Doel, 2005; Arnold, 2009).

If these modern technologies of vision are underpinned by a cartographic gaze, then the

apotheosis of this mentality can be found in that that quintessential visualisation of

geographical knowledge: the map. As Cosgrove (1999: p13) argues, mapping practices have

provided a “vital entry point” into an appreciation of the changing mentalities of Western

modernity. Commonly defined as “a representation of a part of the earth's surface” from a

planar, aerial viewpoint (Wood and Krygier, 2009)4, the map is historically indelibly linked to

geographical thought (Pickles, 2004; Cosgrove, 2008)5. To envisage the world as represented

by the cartographic image is to adopt:

an atypical position, one that disorients the viewer through an absolute abstraction,

an experience of being in two places at once, in which both the gaze and the

intellect are torn away from their physical body and the physical laws of this body's

presences on the earth. (Jacob, 2006: p110)

4Based on a survey of definitions of the English word 'map' over the period 1649-1996.

5Although not necessarily in current academic scholarship, for see Dodge and Perkins, 2008.


For Pickles (2004), this cartographic gaze, underpinned by an observer epistemology and the

aforementioned Cartesian privileging of vision, is central to modern thought. Thus maps

have historically been closely associated with a particular modern way of seeing – distanced,

objective and penetrating – that is “predicated on an epistemology and politics of mastery

and control of earth, nature and subjects” (Pickles, 2004: p83).

The cartographic gaze has subsequently been strongly associated with the exercise of power.

Given its dependence on an impossible omniscient view, “what no eye could ever see”

(Jacob, 2006: p2), many commentators have appealed to divine metaphors to encapsulate

this disembodied perspective: this is the “gaze of the Creator” (Jacob, 2006: p325); the

“Apollonian Eye” (Cosgrove, 1994; 2001); or the vision of the “voyeur-god” (de Certeau,

1984: p93). As a result of both this “God's eye” view, and the particular materiality of the

map, allowing as it does the physical domination of vast expanses of space (Edney, 2009),

the synoptic visuality afforded by the cartographic gaze has been equated with not just

visual, but intellectual mastery of territory (Jacob, 2006; Edney, 2009; Pickles, 2004).

Therefore the view from above has historically been closely associated with the exercise of

imperial power; representing the world as an abstracted order set logically before a

disembodied viewer in a manner that dehumanises the landscape and thus renders it

amenable to conquest and the imposition of colonial rationality (Blomley, 2003; Gregory

2004).

However, to adjudge the representation of the world from above as only ever conducive to

the imperial eye would be unnecessarily reductive. As Cosgrove (2001) recognises, the view

from above may be empowering, but it is also visionary, lending representations of the earth

from this perspective a powerful poetic and imaginative quality, where dreams of ascent to

an omniscient viewpoint are associated as much with the Stoic notion of “human

insignificance in the vastness of creation” (2001: p27) as with imperial desire. Similarly,

Jacob (2006) argues that the “vertical gaze” of the map has resonance beyond the narrowly

political, satisfying the human desire for completeness and totality by providing the pleasure

of seeing the world as a closed entity. The cartographic gaze can even be ludic and

ephemeral, “not only an appropriation of space, but also a projection of the person among

the pictograms” (Jacob, 2006: p383) that allows the viewer to lose oneself in the “labyrinth

of the world” (p325), engaging in the imaginative drift of a “voyage reduced to the gaze”

(p333). Thus while the God's eye view of the map might be totalising and imperialistic, it is


not necessarily so. Recognising the ambiguities inherent in the cartographic gaze is

important, as it highlights the lack of fixity or universality in the meanings attributed to any

way of representing space.

While a map is commonly held as that which represents the world from above, it is

necessary to problematize this elision of object and perspective by recognising the diversity

of ways in which artefacts understood as maps have represented space. Precisely defining

what does and does not constitute a map is perhaps an impossible task, and it is therefore

more productive to recognise that a “map” has no innate characteristics, but rather that its

definition is a historically and geographically contingent discursive construct (Edney, 2009:

p12). While some have even extended the notion of mapping to the exclusively mental and

performative, I do wish to retain the notion of the map as a graphical representation, as

some form of “visible image of the (or at least a) world” (Cosgrove, 2008: p2). However, that

is not to say that a map inherently denotes a planar representation, rather that it is this form

that has been naturalised as a “conventional” map. Historically, there has been a litany of

exceptions to this convention, with many maps blurring the boundaries between the aerial

view and other perspectives, from colonial mappings of tropical coastlines (Martins, 1999) to

early modern townscapes (Cosgrove, 2008: p172). As such, the diversity of visual spatial

representations that have been analysed under the rubric of mappings is huge (Cosgrove,

1999), and thus while its precise form may be novel, Street View has many precedents:

“there is no single essential ‘look of maps’” (Crampton, 2010: p44).

2.2. Critical cartography: representational and post-representational

Having acknowledged that the definition of a map is complex, and that the map is not

limited to a definite visual form, it is also necessary to question what it means to refer to a

map as a representation of a portion of the earth's surface. In recent years, the positivist

assumption that maps are scientific and objective “truth documents” that represent the

world as faithfully as possible (Kitchin et al, 2009: p4) has increasingly been challenged by

the emergence of an alternative current of thought known as “critical cartography”, which

takes as central an explicit questioning of what is meant by representation (Crampton,

2010). Two strands of though can be identified in this tradition, which, following Kitchin et al

(2009), I will term representational critical cartography and post-representational critical

cartography.


Representational critical cartography does not at base reject the notion that maps are

representations of a portion of the earth's surface, but recognises that this act of

representation can never be neutral or objective, but rather is innately subjective and

power-laden. In representing the world, maps do not merely reflect a pre-existing reality,

but actively create knowledge and produce space (Crampton, 2010). Central to inaugurating

this approach to cartography was the late J. B. Harley, who through an eclectic embrace of

social theory, in particular the work of Derrida and Foucault, sought to bring about an

epistemological shift in the interpretation of maps by breaking “the assumed link between

reality and representation” (Harley, 1989: p2). For Harley, the positivist claims of

cartographers that the map could be an objective representation of reality were untenable:

he recognised that there is no such thing as a “true” map, but that all maps were socially

constructed, and as such were always rhetorical, ideological, and partial instruments of

power (Harley, 1988; 1989). This understanding of maps lies at the heart of many

subsequent critical studies, characterised by a non-progressivist view of the history of

cartography, and close attention to the association of maps with practices of power (Harley,

1992; Edney, 1997).

However, for some this approach stops short of fundamentally destabilising the notion of a

map as a representation of space, as maps remain “secure as spatial representations that

say something about spatial relations in the world” (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: p334). Post-

representational critical cartography therefore aims to do away with the notion that maps

“represent” anything. For instance, Wood and Krygier (2009) suggest that defining the map

as a representation naturalises, universalises, and obscures its origins; a map is not a

representation at all, but a proposition, which does not reflect a pre-exisiting reality, but

affirms the existence of everything on it. Much post-representational work privileges

analysis of the processes of mapping over the map object, and the way in which these

processes shape the knowledge claims that mapping makes (Cosgrove, 2008: p159). More

recently, this “processual turn” in critical cartography (Harris and Hazen, 2009: p53) has

sought to reinterpret maps themselves as “constellations of ongoing processes” (Kitchin et

al, 2009: p16) that do not constitute an ontologically secure, stable product, but are

ontogenetic in nature, brought into being only through practice (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007).

Research in a post-representational vein therefore seeks not to deconstruct the meaning of

the map, but to analyse how the map “brings space into being” through situated socio-

spatial practices (p339).


2.3. More-than-representational mappings

It seems therefore that we have reached a position where the notion of a map, far from

being simply defined, is not at all secure. The cartographic gaze is often ambiguous; the map

lacks any definitive visual form; and even its ontological status has been called into question.

How therefore, do we elucidate an approach to maps and mapping to guide this study?

Rather than theorising maps as either static visual representations to be deconstructed, or as

mutable, mobile subjects lacking ontological security, I wish to take an approach to

cartography that recognises the importance, and the inseparability of both representation

and practice. Following debates elsewhere in human geography (Lorimer, 2005), I wish to

term this a more-than-representational approach to maps and mapping, an approach that is

equally applicable to online mapping environments as it is to “conventional” map objects.

First, while rejecting any possibility that a map can ever be an objective “mirror of nature”, I

do not wish to dismiss the notion that mapping, albeit in an always partial, contingent

manner, “remains a way of representing the world” (Cosgrove, 2008: p2, own emphasis).

Indeed, even proponents of a “processual” approach to maps, whilst arguing that

cartography is not a representational science, seem unwilling to completely let go of the

notion of a map as a “spatial representation created by cartographers”, even if they argue

that this representation is only brought into being as a “map” through individual practices

(Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: p338). In other words the map works precisely because it has an

external referent, it allows us to “make connections to other representations and to other

experienced spaces” (Del Casino and Hanna, 2006: p36). Therefore to neglect the politics of

representation inherent in any map, or in any practice of mapping (where representation is

in itself a practice), is to severely limit the scope for analysis. What a map represents, and

how the map represents space, remains of crucial significance.

However, recognising that maps remain important for how they represent space does not

foreclose an engagement with the realm of practice. A map is not merely a representation, it

is more than a representation: it also has a materiality, as “a physical surface encountered

and performed by the user” (della Dora, 2009a: p250), and an affective dimension, that

“draw(s) us in imaginatively and emotionally” (Crane and Aitken, 2009: p152). Furthermore,

any analysis must extend beyond a narrow focus on the map object to also pay attention to

the process of mapping, from the method of survey (Cosgrove, 2008), to the manner in


which all maps are “infused with meaning through contested, complex, intertextual , and

interrelated sets of socio-spatial practices” (Del Casino and Hanna, 2006: p36).

Acknowledging that cartography is more-than-representational suggests a more open-ended

reading of maps and mapping that avoids the risk of lapsing into “reductionist readings of

the power of and in maps” (Pickles, 2004: p30), and is instead attentive to their “partial,

open, and contingent qualities” (Cosgrove, 1999: p14).


3. Contextualising Street View: a new mode of mapping?

Before addressing Google Street View itself, it is necessary to situate this novel visual

representation of space in the context of recent developments in Web-based mapping

technologies and practices. This section will therefore introduce online mapping as a socially

and technologically contingent “mode” of cartography, before focusing on the integral role

of Google in this emerging field. Highlighting Google’s “Maps” and “Earth” products as key

examples of the new Web cartography, I will trace how geographers have largely interpreted

these technologies within a binary logic of democratic possibility against surveillance and

corporate control, before introducing Kingsbury and Jones’ (2009) suggestions for a more

open reading of novel forms of mapping.

The Internet has “fundamentally altered the world of maps” (Plewe, 2007: p133). While the

history of online cartography is nearly as old as the Web itself6, in the last five years there

has been an explosion in both the number of websites and applications dedicated to

mapping, and in the number of users engaging with these technologies. These new web

cartographies take many forms, from simple personalised road maps to encyclopaedic digital

globes, map “mashups” that combine disparate data sources, and even attempts to map the

world relying entirely on volunteered geographical information (Crampton, 2009; 2010;

Graham, forthcoming; Haklay et al, 2008)7. Adopting a non-progressivist perspective, these

new technologies and practices are best characterised as an emerging “mode” of mapping;

not better than what has gone before, but articulating different cartographic techniques and

different conceptions of space, whilst also being intimately tied to their particular social and

technological context (Crampton, 2003a; Edney, 1993). For Crampton (2003a), this new

mode of mapping constitutes an epistemic break in the history of cartography; a shift from

the largely static, durable map object, towards an interactive, transient, mapping

environment, where the boundaries between map producer and map user, and between the

map and other forms of information, are being radically redefined (Monmonier, 2007:

p372).

6 Online mapping is traceable to the Xerox PARC Map Viewer (1993), with publicly accessible websites MapQuest and

Multimap launching in 1995 (see Haklay et al, 2008). 7 Mappings produced through user collaboration, or through the reworking of existing data sets have become known as

“neogeography”.


3.1. “Is Google good for geography”8?

While these new Web cartographies are highly diverse, Internet giant Google has played an

integral role in the development of the “GeoWeb”. Founded in California in 1998, Google’s

self-stated mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible

and useful” (Google, 2010b). From its origins as an Internet search engine, Google has grown

to become one of the world’s biggest technology companies, and in 2005 added online

mapping to its portfolio. Prior to the launch of Street View, the company’s contribution to

mapping consisted of two products. Google Maps offers both satellite imagery and a

conventional topographical map that allows the user to search for spatially referenced

information, or simply explore, through an interactive interface accessible through a web

browser9 (Figure 3.1). Google Earth is a standalone software application that takes the form

of a 3D digital globe based on satellite imagery, and also provides access to numerous

additional data layers such as user-contributed photographs, 3D models of buildings, and

encyclopaedia entries10 (Figure 3.2). Five years after their launch, Google Maps and Earth, by

virtue of presenting “a combination and refinement of incremental innovations that make

online mapping much more accessible to a wide range of people” (Zook and Graham, 2007a:

p1326), have become the world’s most popular online virtual globes; “an everyday part of

life for many computer users” (Crampton, 2009: p92).

As Google Maps and Google Earth have become increasingly ubiquitous, geographers have

begun to consider the significance of the role that these visual spatial representations are

beginning to play in people’s everyday lives. For many, the free, relatively sophisticated,

easy to use mapping tools that Google offer are exciting developments that are re-engaging

the public with cartography, with some even suggesting, perhaps naively, that Google has

“done more for geography” than any company before it (Hudson-Smith et al, 2009a: p141;

2009b). Of particular interest to many researchers has been the democratising potential of

Google Maps in allowing the creation of “map mashups”, whereby any spatially referenced

data can be combined with the Google base layer to create a new, personalised map, a

development that some have argued goes a long way towards meeting the demands of an

8 (Crampton, 2010: p129)

9 Accessible at www.maps.google.co.uk (UK site)

10 Google Earth can be downloaded at http://earth.google.co.uk/ (UK site)


Figure 3.1. Google Maps *Top+ Google Maps UK homepage, with “Map” layer selected; *Bottom+ Results of

Google Maps query for “university of bristol school of geographical sciences”, showing satellite view with

labels, and search results to the left [Author’s screenshots, 11 February 2010]


Figure 3.2. Google Earth [Top] Google Earth start-up screen showing only base layer of satellite imagery (UK-

centred); [Bottom] University of Bristol, showing user-added photographs and Wikipedia entries, example

photograph selected [Author’s screenshots, 22 February 2010].


oft-theorised “GIS/2”11 (Miller, 2006). Others have argued that democratising potential also

resides in the free availability of high-resolution satellite images that Google Earth permits,

for example in the ability of the public to view “secret spaces” and thus subvert the interests

of elite groups (Perkins and Dodge, 2009), or in empowering transnational advocacy

networks vis-à-vis nation states by widening their access to information and their

possibilities for communication (Aday and Livingston, 2009).

Others have approached Google’s forays into cartography with greater scepticism. Zook and

Graham (2007a; 2007b) have questioned the emancipatory possibilities of Google Maps and

Google Earth by stressing that Google’s formulation of “DigiPlace12” is “fundamentally

undemocratic and private” (Zook and Graham, 2007a: p1332), in that the power to include

and exclude information, and thus shape perceptions of place, ultimately rests with a

private, for-profit corporation. Others have levelled their critique at the actual visual

representations produced by Google Earth and Maps. For instance, Parks (2009: p544)

suggests that there has been “too much congratulatory discourse around Google Earth”, and

highlights how the program’s “Crisis in Darfur” layer does little more than reproduce

western tropes of African tragedy. Other interpretations resonate more closely with

previous critiques of the cartographic gaze, with some arguing for the need to question the

“naturalizing power” of its interface, and to guard against the assumption that the detached,

God’s Eye view of satellite imagery represents a faithful facsimile of the real world (Dodge

and Perkins, 2009; Goodchild, 2008). Thus rather than it being an empowering tool, some

readings of Google Earth gone so far as to place it in the same sphere as military satellite

imagery, as a tool that allows users to “appropriate a form of control” by way of a

“totalizing, objectifying transcendent gaze” (Harris, 2006: p119).

3.2. Beyond the fear-hope dialectic

Interpretations of Google Maps and Google Earth therefore appear polarised between an

embrace of the emancipatory possibilities of allowing users to produce their own maps and

gain a reverse-panoptic window on the world on one hand, and concern about the

implications of a detached, God’s eye perspective, mediated by a private corporation, on the

11

Understood as “a geospatial information platform upon which non-GIScientists, but nonetheless interested parties can

read, write, alter, store, test, represent, and present information in ways that they desire and in formats and environments they understand” (Miller, 2006: p188) 12

Defined as “cartographies that result from the melding of data located and ranked in cyberspace with people’s

understandings and use of physical places” (Zook and Graham, 2007a: p1323)


other. Kingsbury and Jones (2009) characterise this binary determination as a “fear-hope

dialectic”, a rigid determination that interprets Google Earth, as with other cartographies

before it, as always either emancipatory or constaining, a logic that often implies a “one-to-

one mapping of technology onto epistemology” (p504). In contrast, drawing on Benjamin’s

open-ended approach to technology, and Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Dionysian

impulse of excess, disorder and uncertainty, they advance a reading of Google Earth that is

not constrained by this binary logic, but understands this mapping environment as “an

uncertain orb spangled with vertiginous paranoia, frenzied navigation, jubilatory dissolution,

and intoxicating giddiness” (p503). While not explicitly couched in such terms, this

understanding of Google Earth resonates with the more-than-representational approach to

mapping that I outline above, emphasizing the often poetic and occasionally bizarre images

that result from this mode of visually representing space, whilst also considering the

practices of virtual exploration and discussion that the software stimulates. It is thus with

this ethos in mind that I turn to consider Google’s latest cartographic innovation: Street

View.


4. Street View in focus

Accessible through both Google Maps and Google Earth, Street View extends the

possibilities of the digital map by representing the world not from above, but from the

perspective of the street. In the company’s own words: “We like to think of Street View as

being the last zoom layer on the map – when you’ve zoomed all the way in you find yourself

virtually standing on the street” (Google, 2010c, own emphasis). Launched in May 2007 in

five US cities, Google has since expanded its street level mapping programme at a rapid rate

across the (developed) world13, launching in several cities in the UK in March 2009, before

being extended to cover 95% of the country’s roads in March 2010. Street View offers 360°

panoramic images captured by a fleet of Google vehicles – vans, cars, and now trikes – fitted

with a nine-directional camera and a GPS unit. While there is a somewhat surprisingly long

history of attempts to map the urban environment at street level through film and

photography, these projects have been small in scope and limited in their sophistication and

accessibility (Lippman, 1980; Vincent, 2007; Cartwright, 2008). Street View dramatically

supersedes these predecessors in terms of quality, accessibility, and its ultimate aim to map

every public road possible (Williams, 2010).

In this section, I do not want to dwell on the technical details of Google Street View, but

instead wish to consider the significance of “virtually standing on the street” in the broader

context of cartographic representations and practices. This analysis is based primarily on my

own experience of using Street View, and is thus an inevitably partial interpretation, yet one

which I hope to use as a starting point from which to engage with the wider discourses and

practices that have become associated with this technology, which will be addressed in

Chapters Five and Six.

4.1. Experiencing Street View

Loading the Google Maps homepage14, I am presented with the now familiar satellite view of

Western Europe, gazing upon the Earth from a lofty height with a detached “Apollonian

Eye”. In the blank search bar I type the address of my house in Bristol, and immediately I am

13

At the time of writing, Street View imagery is available for parts of USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Spain, Portugal,

Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, but this list is being updated regularly. See http://www.google.co.uk/help/maps/streetview/where-is-street-view.html. Note the overwhelmingly Western bias of current coverage. 14

www.maps.google.co.uk


hovering lower, suspended above a city represented through a combination of naturalistic

satellite imagery and labels and symbols more reminiscent of the traditional topographical

map, indicating places of interest selected by the Google map-makers and their “black

boxes” of software code (Zook and Graham, 2007a). However, Google’s “DigiPlace” is no

longer limited to representing the world from this disembodied view from above. In the top

left hand corner of the map image is a symbol depicting a human figure, the “pegman”.

Clicking and dragging this figure onto the map image, the streets of Bristol are briefly

illuminated, indicating Street View coverage, until on selecting a location, I am presented

with a different kind of image, a photographic representation of my street, taken from a

position in the middle of the road. No longer am I gazing from the detached, position of the

cartographic voyeur, but am instead viewing the city from the street, still disembodied, but

virtually occupying a position as if within the map (Figure 4.1.).

Unlike with most precisely framed photographic images, in Street View my gaze is not

restricted to a single view. Although I do not move from my chair, exploring this interactive

mapping environment remains an embodied performance. Manipulating the mouse, that

familiar prosthetic attachment whose movement of the pointer on the screen has replaced

physical contact between finger and map in guiding the gaze (della Dora, 2009a: p251), from

my virtual position on the street I can rotate the view, spinning through 360° to see all

around my fixed position in the centre of the road, or even zoom in on features that catch

my attention. A few finger-taps on the keyboard produce the impression of gliding along the

city streets, passing almost seamlessly to the next point on the map, situated a mere few

metres away in “real” space, around which a new panoramic view is centred. All the while I

am held in an attentive disposition by the computer screen, an object whose materiality is

barely registered in our daily lives as we focus only on the images it shows, but whose ability

to display visual representations that I can directly manipulate creates a different mode of

visuality to the paper map: a sense of movement closer to the phenomenon of lived

experience (Introna and Ilharco, 2006; Ash 2009; Ash et al, 2009).

In contrast to the cold, formal abstraction of the “conventional” cartographic image, Street

View renders visible a multitude of details that could never be represented by a typical

planar map view, capturing all that is visible at a moment in space and time. Whereas the

topographic map reduces the city street to a mere symbolic line, (see Figure 4.1), Street

View captures a wealth of individual moments frozen in time, the daily events of city life


Figure 4.1. Three visual representations of Jacob’s Wells Road, Bristol from Google Maps, *Top+

topographical map; [Middle] satellite image; [Bottom] Street View [Author’s screenshots, 22 February

2010]


reduced to a purely visual register. If the God’s Eye view dehumanises the landscape and

renders it rational and ordered, then the street level representation of the world is quite

different: this is a landscape that is full of human activity and lacking in rational coherence.

Exploring Jacob’s Wells Road in Street View, numerous ephemeral moments are on view: a

street cleaner sweeping the road; water trickling down the street as a window cleaner sets

about his work (Figure 4.2.). These mundane moments of urban experience constitute a

populated, living visual landscape, captured and represented to the world via the Internet.

Street View has an unpredictability that other maps do not; even when viewing familiar

places I am unsure what I might find. Yet this mapping environment remains far from a

facsimile of the real world; the top story of my house is strangely blurry and out of

alignment with the rest of the building, and the weather changes dramatically between

locations just a few metres apart as a result of the Google car passing at different times,

reminding the viewer that, as ever, “true” representation remains impossible.

4.2. The virtual flâneur

If virtually experiencing a street that I have walked up and down hundreds of times is

reassuringly familiar, then Street View also extends the possibilities that maps give in

allowing us to “live a voyage reduced to the gaze” (Jacob, 2006: p333), reinscribing the

possibilities of deriving pleasure from the visual spectacle of representations of faraway

places, just as panoramas and world exhibitions did in the nineteenth century (Pickles,

2000). Like countless cartographic and landscape representations before it, Street View has

a “liberating spatiality…an ability to take the viewer further, visually and imaginatively”

(della Dora, 2009b: p337), without moving from their position in front of the computer

screen. A few key-strokes and mouse-clicks allow me to engage in any number of “imaginary

drifts” (Jacob, 2006: p333), flitting between iconic and exotic locations with ease. If this is

equally possible with a paper atlas, or Google Earth’s satellite imagery, what distinguishes

Street View is the powerful sense of place, and much richer imagined geography, that is

generates in the mind of the virtual traveller. Compare the Street View of Times Square,

New York, with the satellite image of the same location15 (Figure 4.3). While the God’s Eye

view of the satellite image gives little sense of the city below, the Street View image shows

15

I chose Times Square because it is the default location when Street View is accessed through Google’s US Street View

page (http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/maps/streetview/). The default street views for different countries invite some interesting reflections on landscapes of national identity; compare for example the capitalist paradise of Times Square (US), the manicured gentility of Kew Gardens (UK), or an open vista combining the city, the ocean and the mountains (Canada).


Figure 4.2. [Top and Middle] Moments in time captured by Google Street View; [Bottom] Blurred houses and

gaps in telephone lines demonstrating Street View’s imperfections. [Author’s Screenshots, 22 February

2010]


detail the crowded streets, gaudy advertisements, fast food restaurants and yellow taxis that

produce an evocative representation of this iconic American landscape.

Yet the Street View explorer is not limited to viewing cities only through their iconic sites,

but is able to “virtually wander” (Frome et al, 2009) “with the freedom of a vagabond”

(Jacob, 2006: p333). If for Kingsbury and Jones (2009: pp504-505), the “Google Earthling” is

akin to the figure of the flâneur, “an anonymous wandering detective, an active spectator

whose meanderings over the landscape are guided in parts by the former’s ‘distracted

Figure 4.3. Times Square, New York represented in Street View, and by an overhead satellite image (Author’s

Screenshots 22 February 2010)


attentions’ and in other parts by the latter’s web-produced ‘attentive distractions’”, then

this parallel is even more pronounced for the Street View user. From my virtual location in

Times Square I can wander through the city streets as I wish, quickly finding myself away

from the crowd in a quiet alleyway. Navigating without reference to the overhead view of

the planar map, it is easy to get lost in Street View’s virtual world: the city quickly becomes

opaque and illegible, in stark contrast to the familiar omniscience of the cartographic gaze

that renders the world knowable and controllable. Yet unlike the wandering pedestrian in

the material city, the virtual flâneur “need not grow tired of a long walk home when one is

lost…one can just jump out of the situation” (Featherstone, 1998: p922); the Street View

user’s immersion in the city is never complete, but remains purely visual, and is ultimately

restricted by the extent of Google’s imagery. Furthermore, if for the nineteenth centuty

urban flâneur the enjoyment of the modern city was to be found in “the exhilaration, and

display, of promenading to see and be seen” (Lucas, 2004: p4, own emphasis), then the

Street View wanderer is marked by her/his invisibility, possessing a voyeuristic, panoptic

gaze premised precisely on the ability to see and not be seen16.

It is evident that some of the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the cartographic gaze are

reproduced in the gaze of the Street View flâneur. In many ways the street level perspective

acts as a powerful counterpoint to the detached, omniscient gaze from above, representing

not a dehumanised, rationally ordered world, but a landscape that while reduced to a frozen

visual moment, is full of intimate human detail and fleeting events, constructing the

geographical imagination in a manner that produces a more complex sense of place than any

topographic map. However, at the same time, many of the characteristics of the

cartographic gaze are retained in the way that Street View represents space. The viewer

remains ultimately detached and disembodied, exercising a powerful, voyeuristic, one-

directional gaze that while not casting an imperial eye over vast swathes of territory, is now

able to observe with impunity thousands of moments in people’s lives. While the politics of

representation associated with maps, of what is represented, how this is done, and the

subsequent practices of viewing that the map facilitates, have been comprehensively

studied (Harley, 1989; Pickles, 2004), Street View recasts these tensions in a new way. As

such, many have questioned the ethics of allowing a private corporation to lay claim to the

world’s streets in such a way. It is therefore to these issues, of the politics of representation,

visibility and privacy that I turn to in Chapter Five.

16

Except of course in the sense that of being “seen” by Google, as the search terms entered are logged on their servers .

Thanks to Ivan Wu for drawing my attention to this point.


5. Contesting Street View

Google’s mantra is that Street View contains images “no different from what you might see

driving or walking down the street” (Google, 2010d), and as such the collection, compilation,

and dissemination of the millions of photographs that make up this mapping environment is

deemed completely acceptable. Google’s understanding of “the street” thus relies on a

notion of public space where there is a right to act freely within the law, but no expectation

of privacy (Fleischer, 2007a; 2007b)17. However, despite Google’s confidence, following the

initial launch of Street View in the USA, questions were soon raised as to its legality and

ethics, on the grounds that it constituted a gross invasion of privacy of those unwittingly

“mapped” (Kelley, 2008; Lavoie, 2009; Blackman, 2009). Consequently, as Google has

extended Street View across the world, it has adopted a policy whereby visible faces and

license plates are automatically blurred, and a facility is provided for people to request the

removal of images of themselves or their home (Frome et al, 2009; Google, 2010d) (Figure,

5.1.). This stance has generally met with official approval, for example in the UK, where the

Information Commissioner’s Office18 has approved Street View on the grounds that there is

no law against taking photographs in the street, and that blurring is sufficient to de-identify

individuals whose presence on the map is “entirely incidental” (ICO, 2009; Evans, 2009).

However, despite this formal endorsement, in the UK and elsewhere Street View has

continued to generate considerable controversy, as both the media and the public have

questioned the ethics of Google’s latest innovation.

5.1. Maps, surveillance and privacy

Almost all the criticism levelled at Google Street View has been centred on the contention

that, in a number of ways, it constitutes an unacceptable invasion of privacy. It is important

to recognise that the notion of a “right to privacy”, is complex; it is not an immutable or

universal idea, but a social construct that has multiple and contested meanings (Curry, 1998;

Crampton, 2003a; Lyon, 1994). However, in the context of this study, claims to privacy are

perhaps best understood as “political efforts to restrict the ability of others to see or know

specific things”(Haggerty and Ericson, 2006: p10; Iveson, 2009). Thus a binary opposition is

17

Although of course, the ideal of a completely unrestricted public space is something of a myth ( Mitchell, 2003), with

even the right to take photographs subject to restrictions is some cases (Hughes and Taylor, 2009). 18

“The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the

public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals”. See www.ico.gov.uk


created between privacy on one hand, and surveillance – “the collection and analysis of

information about populations in order to govern their activities” (Haggerty and Ericson,

2006: p1) – on the other. While the utility of this opposition has been questioned

(Crampton, 2003a), it is still the case that the right to privacy constitutes the “dominant legal

and public discourse against the proliferation of surveillance” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2006:

p8).

The relationship between mapping and surveillance has a long history; as an instrument of

state power maps have been valued for their ability to provide “a picture of where things are

so that there can be a ‘right disposition’ of resources and people over the territory”

Figure 5.1. “Report a concern” on Google Street View *Author’s Screenshots, 20 April 2010]


(Crampton, 2003b: p138). Given that some have argued that “privacy is dead, killed by a

computer technology that has created a world in which, increasingly, everything is open to

view” (Curry, 1999: p757), the shift towards digital mapping has brought issues of

surveillance and privacy to the fore for cartographers (Monmonier, 2002). Increasingly,

maps are being integrated with a host of “geospatial technologies” such as geographical

information systems, global positioning systems, remote sensing and video surveillance,

leading some to argue that “the age of surveillance, a geospatial-technology-driven

Panopticon, has arrived” (Klinkenberg, 2007: p353).For example, through the manipulation

of personal, geo-coded data, digital mapping systems such as those used in commercial

geodemographics19 are able to create “digital individuals”, which when linked to systems of

remote surveillance means that “one can in principle keep almost constant track of

individuals” (Curry, 1997b: p257). Street View on the other hand can show at most a

person’s image (in most cases blurred) and their location at a particular time. This image is

never live, and does not identify the individual concerned in any way beyond the visual,

lacking even a name connected to a person’s photograph. Thus when placed in a wider

context, at first glance the threat to privacy posed by Street View appear negligible.

However, despite these limitations, Street View has generated a considerable amount of

controversy and media criticism. In the following section, focusing on the UK context, I will

suggest that the manner in which Street View has come to be understood as an “invasion of

privacy” can be best understood by examining how this discourse has intersected with the

process of mapping at three different sites. First, at the site of surveying, where Google’s

methods have been conflated with state surveillance; second, at the site of representation,

where the perspective and detail offered by Street View has raised concerns over

misrepresentation; and third, at the site of viewing practices, where anxieties over who is

casting their gaze on the map have been brought to the fore.

5.2. Survey/Surveillance

The first site of mapping at which discourses of privacy have intersected with Street View

concerns Google’s method of surveying: “the direct collection and production of the spatial

data to be represented” (Cosgrove, 2009: p158). While practices of surveying have

historically entailed a shift away from the body as a recording surface towards the use of

19

Geodemographic systems combine areally coded data with that about individuals and households to create social,

economic and cultural profiles of areas and their residents (see Curry, 1997a).


instrumentation, Street View modifies this process further through its use of vehicle-

mounted cameras to map the world. It is perhaps at the site of the survey that Street View

has encountered the most direct opposition, with the campaign group Privacy

International20 arguing in their formal complaint to the UK government that “the process of

capturing the image per se is unlawful” (Davies, 2009). At a more visceral level, in what has

inevitably been praised by the tabloid press as “a very English revolt” (Hardman, 2009), a

group of residents from the village of Broughton, Buckinghamshire, actively prevented a

Google car from mapping their street, forming a human chain around it in order to block its

passage through the village (Ahmed, 2009; Kennedy, 2009; Pyatt, 2009). For the protestors,

Google’s survey method was unacceptable, as the leader of the protest stated: “My

immediate reaction was anger; how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my

consent” (Paul Jacobs, quoted in Ahmed, 2009)21.

The manner in which media discourse in the UK has depicted Street View goes some way to

explaining this hostile reaction to Google’s survey technique. In many cases, the mapping

practices of Street View have been discursively constructed less as an act of surveying, and

more as a case of covert surveillance. Google has been depicted as an “all-powerful” “cyber

empire” (Hardman, 2009) engaged in a programme of “spying” on the public by sending out

a fleet of “spy cars” equipped with “periscopes” and “all-seeing spy cameras” (Hardman,

2009; Derbyshire and Martin, 2009; Gallagher, et al, 2009). As well as being framed in the

language of covert surveillance, the tabloid press has placed Street View firmly within the

context of an existing “surveillance society” (Gallagher et al, 2009), conflating it with the

excessive extension of “state snooping” (Phibbs, 2009), where there is a perceived desire to

“spy on everything and everyone” (Blackburn, 2009). This elision between Street View and

technologies of state surveillance is reinforced by the manner in which the campaign against

Street View has been taken up by right-wing pressure group Big Brother Watch22, who have

become journalists’ “go-to” source for a quote deploring its dangers (Daily Mail, 2010a;

Telegraph 2010a), despite their stated aim being to campaign against excessive state power

and surveillance (Big Brother Watch, 2010).

20

“Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy

invasions by governments and corporations” (see www.privacyinternational.org) 21

For some, the media furore that followed the protest in Broughton merely served to highlight the paucity of the

argument that Street View constitutes an invasion of privacy, as the village and its residents were soon broadcast around the world via television and newspaper coverage (see Parsons, 2009; Cellan-Jones, 2009). 22

Big Brother Watch is an offshoot of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, which campaigns for a low-tax society. Alex Deane, director

of Big Brother Watch, has close links to the Conservative Party (see http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk).


Given that the surveillant capacities of Street View appear relatively insignificant when

compared to many geospatial technologies, this conflation with state surveillance appears

somewhat contrived. However, by using cameras mounted above the street as a method of

geographical survey, Street View does bear a close resemblance to the most pervasive

symbol of modern state surveillance, the CCTV camera23 (Bannister and Fyfe, 1998). In their

formal complaint about Street View, Privacy International stress the “substantial

intersection” between it and CCTV, and thus argue that Google’s failure to adhere to the

standards of the CCTV code of practice, in photographing private property and neglecting to

inform the public of its presence, supports their argument that it is illegal (Davies, 2009).

While Google’s mapping practice serves a completely different purpose to CCTV surveillance,

Google’s camera-car shares the CCTV camera’s enigmatic qualities; “it has no eyes but it has

the ‘gaze’” (Koskela, 2000: p259), and as such appears in some cases to provoke similar

emotions to CCTV cameras, where “those being watched may feel guilty for no reason,

embarrassed or uneasy, irritated or angry, or fearful” (p257). Thus rather than indicating any

real surveillant capacity, in the sense of monitoring populations in order to govern them, I

would suggest that the construction of Street View car as a surveillant apparatus stems from

this sense of unease generated from apparently panoptic gaze of Google’s cameras. In a

context where CCTV cameras have become ubiquitous, it is easy to conflate Street View with

this surveillant technology, thus inevitably rendering it an “invasion of privacy”

5.3. Representation/Misrepresentation

Despite this depiction of Google’s surveying method as a means of surveillance, it was only

once the results of this practice were represented online that Street View began to receive

sustained media and public attention. While the photographic detail of Street View may

generate a richer “sense of place” than topographical maps (Parsons, 2008), for others the

visual form of the map is a cause for concern. In media coverage of Street View, much has

been made of the dramatic increase in the level of detail that Street View affords in

comparison to “conventional” maps – “it makes the aerial views of Google Earth look as

antiquated as Christopher Columbus’s map collection” (Gordon, 2009) – with journalists

keen to emphasis the minutiae of what can be seen: “the level of detail is such that your

home can not merely be spotted but a considered opinion given on your choice of curtains”

(Phibbs, 2009). For some, such as the aforementioned protestors of Broughton, this

23

For instance, the symbol of Big Brother Watch is a defaced CCTV camera.


photorealistic perspective is a bridge too far in itself: “they are crossing the line when they

show every detail of our homes” (Paul Jacobs, quoted in Hardman, 2009).

If privacy is understood as the possibility of restricting the exposure of something, then

despite the level of detail that Street View offers, it only represents what is visible from the

street, and thus already exposed to a degree. However, given the inevitable partiality of

Street View, capturing fleeting moments stripped of all but locational context, it does

threaten people’s ability to control how they, or their home, are represented, posing the

possibility of misrepresentation24. Thus it is argued that “if you happen to be doing

something embarrassing during the snapshot where your domestic life is captured, to

remain on the Internet for all to see, well tough luck” (Phibbs, 2009), whilst The Telegraph

suggests that in the face of this “dangerous gizmo”, “the choice is lace curtains – or brighter

lights in the front room for a better impression next time” (2009a, own emphasis). In their

formal complaint against Google, Privacy International reinforce the strength of this fear of

misrepresentation, providing reports of “numerous instances of embarrassment and

distress” (Davies, 2009) resulting from how people have been represented on Street View,

citing for example the case of two heterosexual men photographed such that they appeared

to be kissing.

The issue of misrepresentation arises because in using street-level photography, Street View

has an air of naturalism and a level of detail that other maps do not, placing individuals on

the map, and as such reworking the always present ethical dilemmas of mapping (Harley,

1991). Thus while in the case of the “conventional” topographic map these decisions may

focus on the degree of abstraction and the method of selection to be adopted, the street-

level perspective and photographic realism of Street View means that once the decision has

been taken as to where to map, these considerations are elided. Rather, the possibility of

mapping the world in the world in unprecedented detail, potentially representing everything

visible at a particular time and location, raises a new set of questions. At the same time,

these apparent anxieties about misrepresentation serve to remind us that despite the

heightened sense of realism that Street View offers in comparison to other maps, it remains

a partial representation of the world – at a particular time, from a specific point, and

reduced to a purely visual register in which events are wrenched out of context. Thus Street

24

In the case of Windsor, Canada, the local government claimed that the whole city had been misrepresented by Street

View as the cameras passed through during a refuse collector’s strike. Google has since agreed to re-map the city (Schmidt, 2010; CBC News, 2010)


View potentially undermines an individual’s ability to control how they are represented to

the world, threatening the control over “exposure” that is fundamental to common

understandings of the right to privacy.

5.4. Use/Abuse

While its unusual visual form may cause certain ethical issues to arise, Street View is only

made meaningful by way of the practices through which it is used and viewed. Thus at this

final site of mapping, of viewing practices, further anxieties have been raised about the

ethics of Street View. While one may revel in the “liberating spatiality” that Street View

affords, it also realises the possibility that “every freak can cruise Britain’s streets from their

armchairs, snooping, studying, imagining unpleasant theories” (Nicoll, 2009). Thus layered

on top of concerns about what can be seen on the Street View map – individuals and homes

(mis)represented in unprecedented detail – and how this information is obtained – using

apparently surveillant technologies – is an anxiety over who is using this technology. As such,

in this context Street View has been interpreted not just through the lens of privacy and

surveillance, but has also been located within existing discourses of fear of the deviant

Other.

Primarily, the tabloid press has been quick to exploit a pervasive fear of crime, with the

assumption made that if affluent homes are rendered visible to the world via Street View,

they will instantly become targets for thieves now able to assess them virtually.

Subsequently Street View has been labelled a “burglar’s charter” (Gallagher et al, 2009), or

“an encyclopaedia for the burgling fraternity” (Hardman, 2009), with an “expert” reformed

criminal suggesting that “this is nothing less than a burglar’s paradise” (Taylor, 2009). While

fear of crime may predominate in “middle England” (Dunhill, 2010; Hardman, 2009), as the

context changes so does the owner of the deviant gaze being cast on Street View. In the

Unionist press in Northern Ireland, fears have been raised that Street View could be used

“for evil purposes” by dissident republicans (Murran, 2010), while following the recent

extension of Street View to cover the whole of the UK, the presence of military bases on the

map has also been seized on by the media and even some politicians as a “serious security

breach”. In “a time of perceived terrorism”, there is a fear that terrorists could be “inspired

by these pictures” (Paul Keetch, MP, quoted in Hough, 2010; Daily Mail, 2010) (Figure 5.2.).

If these fears concern what the ability to view the world through Street View could lead to,


there is also concern over the act of viewing itself. While the innately voyeuristic nature of

the Street View user is often emphasised (Webb, 2009; Telegraph, 2009a), in the wrong

hands (or eyes) it becomes perceived not just an issue of privacy but of “public safety”;

when images of a semi-clothed child were found on Street View, the possibility of the

technology “being exploited for more sinister purposes” by paedophiles was immediately

raised (Merrick, 2009)25.

These anxieties highlight the manner in which the images that make up Street View’s

mapping environment are able to be imbued with new meanings through practices of

viewing. The fear is that depending on who is using it, Street View can become not just an

aid to navigation or virtual tourism, but a tool for planning crimes, or even a source of

deviant sexual pleasure. Certainly, in combining the naturalism of photography with the

accessibility that the Internet affords, Street View does allow anyone to anonymously view

“realistic” representations of distant places on an unprecedented scale. While the

democratisation of access to mapping offered by the Internet is often praised (Hudson-

Smith et al, 2009), it does not always follow that these newly available resources are used in

a positive manner. However, the over-emphasis placed on the potential for Street View to

be used for “evil purposes” (Murran, 2010) ultimately tells us less about the technology

25

This fear of paedophiles using Street View to search for images of children has also been raised prominently in the USA

(see www.stopinternetpredators.org)

Figure 5.1. British Special Air Service Base, Credenhill, Herefordshire *Author’s screenshots, 22 March 2010]


itself, and more about the pervasive discourses of fear that are reproduced in the media;

there has, after all, been no recorded instance of Street View being used to aid crime and

terrorism. To interpret Street View only through this narrow lens is to ignore how Street

View is actually used, and the myriad of practical and imaginative possibilities it presents.

5.5. An Invasion of Privacy?

Given the mutable and contested nature of the concept, any attempt to definitively judge

whether or not Street View constitutes an invasion of privacy would inevitably be

contestable, and as such this chapter has instead sought primarily to understand how and

why Street View has been constructed as such. While it would be erroneous to deny that for

some people Street View does constitute an invasion of privacy – as the protests in

Broughton demonstrated – the effects of the discursive construction of this technology in

the popular, and especially tabloid press, in shaping these responses must be recognised.

Clearly, it is apparent that many of the criticisms levelled at Street View by the media and

campaign groups have been determined more by the structures of pre-existing discourses

that by any close examination of the technology itself, as demonstrated by their

contradictory nature; Street View is hardly effective as an apparatus of the “surveillance

society” if it is also capable of facilitating crime and terrorism. However, underneath the

media scaremongering, there remains something of an anxiety about the “explosion of

space” that Street View affords. In contrast to other maps, the authority of “visual truth”

assumed by a street-level photographic representation of the world raises the somewhat

uncanny spectacle that anyone is able to “see” anywhere from anywhere else, and that we

ourselves might be “seen” on this photographic map. While this possibility may raise new

ethical issues previously beyond the purview of cartography, it also raises some exciting

imaginative possibilities, and it is to these more creative engagements with Street View that

I wish to turn to in Chapter Six.


6. Rethinking Street View

While one may question the legitimacy of the popular media discourses that have become

associated with Google Street View, to restrict analysis of this mapping environment solely

to issues of surveillance and privacy, regardless of on which side of the debate one may fall,

would be to adopt what Kingsbury and Jones have termed an “Apollonian” approach to

cartography, whereby mapping is situated within a “fear-hope dialectic of “either

surveillance or resistance” (2009: p503, own emphasis). That is not to suggest that the

debates about privacy and surveillance are wrong, or unimportant, but that this novel

mapping environment raises other possibilities, and carries other meanings, that extend

beyond this rigid binary determination. Therefore in this chapter, in order to bring into

sharper focus the “partial, open and contingent qualities of the map object” (Cosgrove,

1999: p14) I will examine three artistic projects that have engaged with Street View in

different ways. There is a long history of interaction between art and mapping, and both

artistic and academic interest in this productive tension has exploded in recent years, with

some arguing that technological developments have “rekindled interest in the artistic

dimension of maps” (Caquard et al, 2009: p289; Cosgrove, 2005; 2006; Wood, 2006;

Watson, 2009). However, just as Street View redefines what we conventionally think of as a

map, the artistic interventions that I will consider do not fit easily into any simple definition

of “map art”.

First I will consider the artistic practice of Bill Guffey, whose use of Street View as a tool for

painting the world’s landscapes from the comfort of his own home demonstrates an

imaginative viewing practice that affirms both the prosthetic and aesthetic qualities of this

mapping environment. Second, I will turn to the “Street With a View” project organised by

Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, which by staging a series of bizarre scenes along one

Pittsburgh street when the Street View car passed by, reinterprets Google’s mapping

practice not as an act of surveillance, but as an opportunity for people to regain control over

their own representation. Finally, I shall consider the more critical engagement with Street

View offered by Montreal-based artist Jon Rafman, whose collections of Street View images

and accompanying essays draw attention to the affective dimensions of this mapping

environment whilst also reflecting on the way in which Street View echoes the alienation of

modern experience.


6.1. Street View as virtual travel

Bill Guffey, a previously unknown artist from Kentucky, USA, has received global exposure as

a result of his use of Google Street View as an artistic resource for landscape painting

(Huessner, 2009; Telegraph, 2009b; Battenbough, 2009). Embracing the “ability to see the

world with endless opportunities” (Guffey, email interview, 2010) that Street View presents,

Guffey has painted over one hundred landscapes of scenes from around the world without

leaving his home studio, many of them collated into geographically themed collections, that

he displays and sells online (see Figure 6.1.).26 As he says: “Street View has changed

everything for me because it means I can go to all of those places I am in love with, sit and

paint them as if I am really there” (Guffey, quoted in Telegraph, 2009b). While some have

critiqued the constraints of the “DigiPlace” offered up by the Google search bar (Zook and

Graham, 2007a; 2007b), for Guffey it provides an entry point into Street View’s “virtually

endless” reference material:

I sometimes use the search function to get myself into areas I’m interested in. If I

want a grungy, more dirty, area of a city I’ll search for tattoo shops or biker bars.

That will usually get me in the general vicinity and I can look around from there.

(Guffey, email interview, 2010)

Through Bill Guffey’s artistic practice, Street View becomes imbued with new meaning, as it

becomes not just a narrowly functional mapping environment, but “a resource for travelling

the world to find interesting locations and subjects to paint” (Guffey, 2010a). Furthermore,

an increasing number of people are engaging in this creative use of Street View through

Guffey’s “Virtual Paintout” project, in which amateur artists are invited to paint from a

particular segment of the map, chosen on a monthly basis, before sharing their work

online27.

In contrast to the fears over deviant viewing practices highlighted in the previous chapter,

Bill Guffey’s artistic practice demonstrates a creative engagement that affirms the prosthetic

qualities of Street View as a means of virtual travel. Indeed, it was this “liberating spatiality”

(della Dora, 2009b: p337) that first attracted Guffey to Street View: “I had liked the idea of

26

See www.bnguffey.com; http://billguffey.blogspot.com. 27

See http://virtualpaintout.blogspot.com;. As reported online, the number of people contributing to the “Virtual

Paintout” is increasing month by month. Bill Guffey also wishes to continue his efforts to promote the use of Street View by disable artists, as he says “that area has really yet to be touched, and the implications are huge” (Bill Guffey, email interview, 2010).


Figure 6.1. Bill Guffey’s Street View art websites. [Top] http://billguffey.blogspot.com, showing his Street View State

series; *Bottom+ http://virtualpaintout.blogspot.com *Author’s Screenshots, 12 April 2010].


travelling to cities and countries virtually, and enjoyed “walking” up and down streets

looking at the areas that tourists don’t normally go. I began to find areas, buildings etc. that I

thought would make great paintings” (Guffey, email interview, 2010). Bill Guffey’s artistic

practice thus brings into sharper focus the manner in which Street View extends the

imaginative capacities of the map to combine “the seduction of travel with the security of

staying at home; the attraction of broad horizons without leaving one’s house” (Jacob, 2006:

p76). In some senses this quality demonstrates the continuities between online mapping

environments and older map objects; in its earliest sixteenth century incarnation the atlas

was valued for its ability to “put the world or a place before the viewer without making him

travel” (della Dora, 2009a: p243). However, it is the unique visual form of Street View, its

naturalism and street-level perspective, that lends it the aesthetic qualities to act as a

resource for landscape painting, facilitating this novel interaction between mapping and

artistic practice.

6.2. Street View as self-expression

If Bill Guffey’s work demonstrates a creative viewing practice, then Street with a View can be

seen as an artistic intervention in the process of mapping itself. Staged on Sampsonia Way,

Pittsburgh, on 3rd May 2008, Street with a View was self-styled as the “first ever integration

of art into Google’s Street View mapping platform” (Street with a View, 2008). Co-ordinated

by local artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett in conjunction with both members of the local

community and Google itself, the project sought to “create something that blurred the

boundaries between reality and fiction” (Kinsley, quoted in Inscho, 2008) by staging a

number of bizarre and unlikely scenes as the Street View car passed by and photographed

the street. Thus a virtual stroll down Sampsonia Way on Street View reveals a litany of

unexpected sights: a medieval sword fight; a giant chicken; a marching band; even a mad

scientist’s laboratory, and many more besides (Figure 5.2.). As Robin Kinsley explains: “we

were interested in interjecting something staged, something fictional, into Street View and

playing with – and subtly questioning – the notion of reality in something that we perceive

as a factual representation of our world” (quoted in Nephin, 2008). By intervening in the

process of mapping at the site of survey, albeit with Google’s approval and co-operation, the

artists were thus able to both stage a one-off piece of performance art, and create a lasting

and novel piece of “map art” by altering how Sampsonia Way is represented in Street View’s

mapping environment.


In its attempt to integrate “fiction, community storytelling and performance art into the

Street View platform” (Street with a View, 2010), the Street with a View project highlights

some of the more ludic qualities of this mapping environment. Just as Kingsbury and Jones

(2009) have argued with respect to the satellite views of Google Earth, Street View is of as

much interest for the bizarre and intoxicating images it throws up as it is for its rational,

Figure 6.2. Scenes from Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, staged as part of the Street with a View project [Author’s

screenshots 9 April 2010].


practical uses. While in this cases scenes were deliberately staged to catch the attention of

any passing virtual flâneurs, the myriad of unstaged oddities contained within Street View

attract just as much attention, as demonstrated by the multitude of websites devoted to

sharing such images28. However by intervening at the site of survey, Street with a View can

also be read as a challenge to the assumption that Google’s mapping practice threatens

privacy by removing people’s ability to control how they are represented to the world by

instead highlighting the possibilities of “looking back” at the Street View camera. As the

artists explain, part of the aim of the project was to work “together with the local

community to take back the power of representation – defining themselves and their

environments and using technology as a tool of self-expression” (Street with a View, 2008).

Perhaps if Google were to publicise more widely exactly when they would be mapping

certain places, then this potential could be exploited more widely in many imaginative ways.

6.3. Street View as modern experience

While the work of Bill Guffey and the Street with a View project both draw our attention to

the positive and creative uses of Street View, they also eschew any close critical engagement

with the technology, instead focussing on embracing the possibilities it offers. I therefore

wish to turn to the practice of Montreal-based new media artist Jon Rafman, whose practice

offers a deeper and more nuanced reflection on Street View. Inspired by Web 2.0 culture29,

Rafman describes his artistic practice as akin to a flâneur, surfing the Internet with “that

same sort of detached neutral gaze…that you might have found in walking the streets, the

arcades of Paris in the nineteenth century” (Rafman, interview, 2010). In a series of recent

works, he has compiled a number of photographic collections and essays using images taken

directly from Street View, lifted out of the context of this online mapping environment to be

framed as works of art in themselves (Rafman, 2008; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c; 2010)30. Thus

reminiscent of the way in which the act of removing a map from an atlas to frame it for

display is able to “crystallize and magnify its aesthetic qualities” (della Dora, 2009a: p248),

on one level Rafman’s work highlights the affective, rather than representational dimensions

of Street View, as images framed and taken out of context are stripped of their mapping

function, instead standing alone as examples of what he sees as “the logical conclusion of

28

See for example www.googlesightseeing.com; www.streetviewfun.com; www.streetviewfunny.com 29

“Web 2.0” is understood as the shift towards a “participatory web” whereby a large proportion of web users have

become not just consumers, but producers of information (Haklay et al, 2008: p2012). 30

All available at www.googlestreetviews.com


photography”(Rafman, interview, 2010). In curating the multitude of images that Google has

captured, producing collections of photographs that range from the beautiful, to the bizarre

and even unsettling, Rafman seeks to “re-establish the human” within the dehumanised

world produced by the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera (interview, 2010) (Figure

6.3).

However, while Jon Rafman’s work may affirm the aesthetic and affective qualities of Street

View in a similar manner to the artistic practices discussed above, unlike them it also

explicitly invites us to think more critically about Street View itself by placing it in a wider

context. For Rafman, rather than any exaggerated concerns about privacy and

surveillance31, it is the epistemological questions raised by Street View that are of most

interest. He argues that the manner in which this technology represents the world “is a great

manifestation of the present view of reality” (interview, 2010). Inspired by Walter

Benjamin’s interpretation of photography as the medium that reflects the alienation of the

modern subject, Rafman sees Street View as the logical extension of this process; an

automated camera photographing the entire world as “pure data”, where no image is valued

above any other (interview, 2010). Thus Street View is interpreted as a mode of

representation that reflects the modern experience, as Rafman asks in his book 16 Google

Street Views: “Does not Google’s mode of recording the world make manifest how we

already structure our perception? Our own experience often parallels this detached,

indifferent mode of recording with consequent questions about our own significance”

(Rafman, 2010). Rafman’s collections thus seek to demonstrate the alienation of this

“Google-ised” reality” (interview, 2010), highlighting the tension between “an automated

camera and a human who seeks meaning” (Rafman, 2009a).

In the act of curating and “remixing” the images contained within Street View, Jon Rafman’s

artistic practice thus makes the viewer think again about this mapping environment and

imbues it with another new meaning; certainly Google never intended their product to be

read as a meditation on the modern condition. However, in relating Street View to such

fundamental issues as the very experience of modernity and the nature of modern

consciousness, Jon Rafman’s work reiterates the need to consider Street View in both a

broader, and a longer-run historical context than merely that of Internet cartography. Read

in this context, Street View appears not only as the “logical conclusion of photography”, but

31

“I think paranoia about it sometimes is kind of lie a hidden megalomania, what’s so important about your life that

Google’s capturing that you’re so paranoid” (Jon Rafman, interview, 2010)



Figure 6.3. Examples of scenes from Street View used by Jon Rafman. From Rafman, 2009b.


the logical conclusion of the commodification of “cartographic rationality and its

representational logics” (Pickles, 2004: p133) that was apparent in the myriad of visual

technologies that emerged in the nineteenth century. In reducing reality to visual

representations such as the panorama, the arcade, and the world exhibition, these

technologies produced the world as an object for a detached observer; the “world-as-

picture, -as-exhibition; -as-museum, and –as-miniature” (Pickles, 2004: p137; Schwartz,

1996). Thus Street View can be seen as the latest manifestation of the desire to “put the

world in a box” (della Dora, 2007), objectified and commodified for the modern gaze.

6.4. Multiple meanings

In this chapter I have sought to illustrate the instability of meaning and openness to

interpretation that is as inherent to Street View as it is to any map (Cosgrove, 1999).

Through the different artistic practices outlined above, Street View is given meaning beyond

the limiting media discourses that construct it simply in negative terms as an invasion of

privacy: for Bill Guffey it is a prosthetic tool for surrogate travel and artistic inspiration; for

the Street with A View team it is a means of self-expression and playful interaction; and for

Jon Rafman it is a reflection of the tensions of the modern experience. These examples thus

highlight the limitations of the “fear-hope dialectic” (Kingsbury and Jones, 2009) within

which maps are primarily interpreted; to question whether or not Street View constitutes an

invasion of privacy remains important, but there is always an excess of meaning that does

not fit into this binary determination Furthermore, these imaginative engagements with

Street View demonstrate the importance not just of the representational qualities of Street

View, but also of its affective dimensions, that draw us in emotionally and imaginatively

(Craine and Aitken, 2009). However, engaging with these artistic practices does not negate

thinking critically about Street View, but rather, as Jon Rafman’s work shows, can open up

new critical interpretations that go beyond the narrow focus of popular media discourses.


7. Conclusions

As stated in the introduction, in this study I have sought to understand some of the systems

of meaning that coalesce around the online mapping environment of Google Street View,

addressing this digital cartography as a complex and contested element of material culture

in the same way as a traditional map object. First I focused on the mapping environment

itself, arguing that while in adopting a photographic, street-level perspective it is able to

construct a richer sense of place than the abstracted view of a “conventional” map, it also

reproduces a detached and voyeuristic way of seeing akin to that of a virtual flâneur.

Second, I suggested that while the discursive construction of Street View as a dangerous

invasion of privacy may reveal more about existing media discourses of fear than about the

technology itself, the manner in which Street View represents the world in photographic

detail does recast questions about the ability of individuals to control their own

representation on a map. Finally, I highlighted the possibilities for thinking differently about

Street View by considering a number of artistic engagements with this technology that draw

attention to its imaginative and affective dimensions, whilst not necessarily negating a

critical approach.

When read together, these three sections illustrate the impossibility of assigning any

singular of fixed meaning to Street View, and as such I do not wish to definitively endorse

any of the many totalising claims that have been made about Street View by simply

concluding that it is a “dangerous gizmo” or the “next level” of mapping. “Maps, like any

other representations, are open to interpretation; contested and mutable” (Del Casino and

Hanna, 2006: p39), a statement that applies equally to interactive online mapping

environments as it does to “conventional” map objects. As Crampton (2003a) has argued, it

is important not to assign novel technologies with inherent logics, but to trace how they are

constituted through their mutual relations with society. It is through these mutual relations

that Street View is constantly reinterpreted and remade: through media discourses that

have constructed it as a dangerous surveillant technology and shaped public responses to it;

through artistic engagements, which have variously recast Street View as a means of virtual

travel, of creative self-expression, and of reflecting on the modern condition; and through

mundane everyday practices, including my own, where it is as much an imaginative,

prosthetic device as it is a practical tool.


Thus while much of the popular debates about Street View have revolved around the issue

of whether or not it constitutes an invasion of privacy (and continue to do so, as a recent

letter of complaint from the data protection authorities of ten countries demonstrates

[Stoddart et al, 2010]), it is not sufficient to think about Street View only in these binary – or

to use Kingsbury and Jones’ language, Apollonian – terms. That is not to suggest however,

that these issues should be ignored or dismissed. While the manner in which Street View has

been represented in certain sections of the media has at times bordered on histrionic

scaremongering, it cannot simply be argued that these discourses are “wrong”. Privacy itself

is a social construct, and it is clear that through the effects of these and prior discourses,

Street View is held to be an affront to privacy by some people. While it may be the case that

as the initial novelty of the technology wears off privacy will become less of an issue, it

seems that these concerns will continue to be raised by both the media and members of the

public for the foreseeable future32.

Certainly, there is a need to remain somewhat sceptical about Street View. As others have

pointed out, the de facto digital globe of Google Maps, Google Earth, and now Street View,

is controlled by a for-profit private entity with worryingly monopolistic tendencies, that has

accumulated an unprecedented degree of control over the flow of information through the

Internet33 (Zook and Graham, 2007a; Crampton, 2010). Ultimately, Google has created

Street View with the aim of making money. However, to write Street View off simply as an

invasion of privacy, or an act of commodification by “amoral” corporate “menace” (Porter,

2009), would be to deny the excess of meaning that is always present, that I have tried to

draw attention to in this study by examining both my own use of Street View and the various

artistic engagements that it has inspired. According to Craine and Aitken (2009: p152)

“maps, are at base, representations, and yet it is not an overstatement to suggest that when

they represent space well they also draw us in imaginatively and emotionally”. Thus these

imaginative, affective dimensions of Street View, that allow it to be performed as a

prosthetic means of virtual travel, or a stimulus for creative activity, are just as important as

any concerns as to its “dangerous” or “surveillant” capacities.

32

As I write, Google has just begun surveying the Isle of Man for Street View, and inevitably complaints are already being

made to the Manx government on the grounds of privacy invasion (BBC, 2010). 33

Google has been criticised repeatedly with regard to issues of data privacy and online surveillance (see e.g. Porter,

2009).


7.1. A world-as-picture

Much of the emphasis of this study, and other work that has engaged with the recent

proliferation of online mapping technologies, has been placed on the novelty of these digital

cartographies; the “epistemic break” (Crampton, 2003a) that they have arguably heralded.

However, I would caution against overstating the extent to which Street View and similar

technologies constitute a “break” from older technologies for the visual representation of

space. Jon Rafman’s interpretation of Street View as a reflection of modern experience

invites us to place this novel visual technology in a broader and more long-run historical

context. If the epistemological privileging of vision and sight, an understanding of the

“world-as-picture, -as-exhibition, -as-museum, and-as-miniature” (Pickles, 2004: p137), is

central to the social imaginary of modernity, then surely Street View can be placed within

the long lineage of visual technologies, from panoramas through photographic slideshows,

to world exhibitions, that have as their goal the “rendering up of the world as a thing to be

viewed”; as an “object on display” (Mitchell, 1989, p220-221). If advanced GIS and

computerised “virtual reality” offer a “radicalized vision of modernity” which “at once set

the world at a distance – accessed from a platform, seen through a window, displayed on a

screen – and yet also promise to place the spectator in motion inside the spectacle”

(Gregory, 1994: p66), then is Street View not simply the latest incarnation of this vision?

In combining the exemplary modern visual technology of photography, long valued for its

assumed verisimilitude and objectivity, and its ability to dislocate space and time (Schwartz

1996, Wells, 2004), with the liberating dimensionality of the map, freeing the viewer from

the “confining perspective” of the photographic image (Cosgrove, 1999: p2), Street View

works perhaps more effectively than any visual technology before it in conquering space and

acting as a “surrogate for travel” (Schwartz, 1996: p31). While mapping the world from

street level may not reproduce the omniscient totalizing, yet also transcendent cartographic

gaze in its entirety, Street View will never be a transparent window on the world, but as this

study has shown, offers its own partial, contested, but detached way of seeing. Perhaps

then, to employ another oft-employed symbol of the modern experience, the notion of a

“virtual flâneur” does offer an appropriate metaphor for the gaze of the Street View user: a

fundamentally ambiguous wanderer of the streets (Frisby, 1994; Gluck, 2003); caught

between immersion and detachment; oscillating between an objective, rational “detective”

(Frisby, 1994) and the “idler” seeking sensation and aesthetic pleasure (Featherstone, 1998);


potentially voyeuristic, and ultimately complicit in the “empire of the gaze” (Tester, 1994:

p18).

7.2. Where next?

Inevitably this study contains a number of omissions and uncertainties. First, I make no

claims that the interpretations I have presented here correspond to a “true” or objective

account of Street View and the web of meaning surrounding it; indeed, this study itself adds

another layer of contested discourse to the mutual relations between this mapping

environment and its societal context. While the inevitably subjective nature of this study

does not compromise its validity – all knowledge is partial and situated – it is worth

reflecting upon the impact of my positionality on my findings. Importantly, as a twenty-one

year old living in the affluent West, using the Internet and its associated technologies is a

part of my everyday life, and it is inevitable that this familiarity has shaped my interpretation

of Street View in a particular way. Second, undoubtedly this study could be improved. In

particular, I was disappointed not to be able to carry out a more extensive range of

interviews, particularly with those more critical of Street View, as this would have enabled

me to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the basis for their opposition, which could

have served as a counterpoint to the inevitably overstated discourses circulating within the

popular press.

While the exploratory nature of this study hints towards numerous avenues for further

research, here I want to highlight just three. First, when considering the issues that have

arisen around Street View concerning privacy, I deliberately restricted my focus to the UK.

However, one of the striking points about this mapping environment is the considerable

geographical differences in the extent to which Street View has been opposed on the

grounds of privacy around the world, from general acceptance in North America to a

complete ban in Greece (Smith, 2009). A comparative project could investigate the reasons

behind these geographies of privacy, and trace why they have led Street View to provoke

such contrasting reactions. Second, in focusing primarily on Street View itself as an element

of material culture, and on the social and cultural meanings attributed to it, I have elided any

serious consideration of the political economy of Street View. As Dodge et al (2009: p230)

argue, little attention is generally paid to the “monetary and political structures underlying

the production of maps” (p230), yet given the increasing dominance of private corporations

such as Google in the sphere of online mapping, this lacuna clearly needs addressing; why is


it that companies such as Google see so much opportunity for profit in cartography? Finally,

whereas this study has been necessarily small scale, a valuable further project would be to

attempt a more extensive approach, to get beneath the media discourses and investigate

what the public actually thinks of Street View, and if and how people are using it on a daily

basis.

While these and many other topics may offer pertinent foci for further research into Street

View and similar technologies, perhaps the most pressing challenge for geographers and

others seeking to interpret these new ways of representing the world is simply keeping up

with the latest developments. Even as I write, Street View is undergoing some subtle

transformations that make fears that “the universalizing mantra of digital information and

mapping” merely constitutes “a new set of global exhibitions for the dissemination of

information and goods” (Pickles, 20004: p13) seem ever more prescient. As of April 2010,

Google has begun to integrate its directory of local businesses into Street View, placing

hyperlinked icons within the mapping environment at the corresponding location (Lafon,

2010), and it has recently been reported that software has been patented to enable the

insertion of real-time adverts over the top of photographed billboards (Barnett, 2010). In the

longer term, undoubtedly the desire to visually represent the world around us will continue

to manifest itself in new ways as technology develops. Some have suggested that we might

soon see a “Second Earth”, a fully three-dimensional, “social” representation of the world,

populated by our own personal avatars, exploring and interacting in virtual space (Hudson-

Smith et al, 2009a). As Street View expands and develops, perhaps in the near future David

Gelernter’s dream of a complete “mirror world” will truly come to fruition:

You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world – the

town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital –

will hang there in a sharp colour image, abstract but recognisable, moving subtly in

a thousand places. (Gelernter, 1992: p1).


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Appendix A

A.i. Semi-structured Interview schedule for Jon Rafman

Give brief introduction – what I am doing, aims of the research, inform that the interview is

being recorded.

Could you give me some background as to the kind of things that generally interest you in

your artistic work?

- How does the Street Views project fit in with your other work? Is there a common

theme here

What first gave you the idea of using Street View in this way, to produce collections of

images?

- Is there something particularly interesting in the visual form of Street View? The way

the images are produced?

- A certain “truthful” quality of the images?

How did you go about producing the collections?

- How did you find images – process of collecting

- How did you choose images? Are there any particular type of scenes that interest

you the most? Or any particular individual images? Why?

- Did you have certain ideas in mind when looking for images? Or did images provoke

you to think about artistic precedents etc.

Do you think that there is a wider significance in having the world offered up for our gaze in

this way by Google?

- What do you think of the privacy issues that have been raised?

- Do you see this as a form of surveillance?

- Is Google’s ability and power – their capacity to “frame out cognitions and

perceptions” a concern? Why?

In my research, and certainly in the opinion of Google, Street View is about representing

places, giving a “sense of place” that other maps can’t, yet it seems that in your collections

you are more interested in images of people than of places, why is this?

- Why did you not include the location of the images in your collections


- What do you think the significance is of presenting these images out of context, as a

collection of photos, rather than as elements of a mapping environment? Does this

change their meaning?

- Do you even think of Street View as a map?


A.ii. Interview Transcript

Interview with Jon Rafman, 5/4/2010, 11pm GMT (6pm EST), conducted via Internet

phone (Skype)

BC = Ben Connor, interviewer

JR = Jon Rafman

Prior to recording, exchange greetings, I explain that I am just setting up the program to

record the conversation and ask Jon if this is OK, he says that it is fine.

BC: Thanks a lot...alright, well I’ll just let you know what I’m doing with my project and stuff.

As I said in the email I’m studying geography at the University of Bristol, and so for my

masters research project I’ve been looking at Google Street View, and you know, as part of

that I’ve been trying to kind of look at how people have like responded to it and reacted to it

differently. So like over here certainly a lot of that kind of response has been about debates

about invasion of privacy and stuff like that. So I found your work online that you’ve done

with Street View and I found it interesting as a different take on this new technology, and so

yeah, I just wanted to ask you a few questions about the work that you’ve done with Street

View and kind of your thoughts on this new technology and that.

JR: Right...I mean...ask away

BC: OK, so yeah first like, could you just give me some kind of background as to your work as

a whole as an artist, what kind of stuff do you try and do.

JR: So, basically, Google Street View emerged out of, one second [There is a phone ringing in

the background, Jon goes to turn it off]. Sorry, so it emerged out of...I’m a new media artist,

and it emerged out of my practice of surfing the Internet basically, and I saw like Street

View, surfing Street View as like in a way a perfect extension of my practice, which in many

respects was inspired by like what I found online and basically Web 2.0 culture, Internet

culture today and how that reflected the contemporary consciousness in general, and that

by focussing....Google Street View has this sister project which is called Kool Aid Man in

second life. Are you familiar with that one?

BC: Yeah, I saw it refereed to on your website...

JR: Yeah, in both projects I see myself as a flâneur...I mean in the nineteenth century

Baudelairean sense, and there’s a certain sense of that’s tongue in cheek, but on one level it

is somewhat of me being a flâneur, because it allows you to...surfing the Internet in general


allows you that same sort of detached neutral gaze that’s at the same time apathetic, that

you might have found in like walking the streets, the arcades of Paris in the nineteenth

century. So, first of all, in a way I found like Google Street View just from a perspective of

photography as in a way reflecting, or almost...it’s like the logical conclusion of photography

in some respects, and I use my...the theory that I was adhering to, was inspiring me was that

of Kracauer, and other like Frankfurt School theorists, like Adorno and Benjamin. In a way,

like Benjamin, I see photography as the medium that’s reflected the twentieth century, and

sort of the alienation, the self-alienation that occurs, and how...like in contrast to let’s say a

painting , which is like, for much of history was a mirror, was seen as like, representative of

reality, the painter represents reality, but somehow like photography just quickly took over

as the like more objective representation, and it seems like to us just almost intuitive...yeah,

it’s more representative of reality because its neutral, and it reflects the light perfectly...of

like...it reflects space right, it seems like it mimics what our eyes do, but I think there are

much more deeper things that are going out there...what was it about photography at the

turn of the...in the nineteenth century, and then up until the twentieth century with the

advent of cinema that was like somehow so...I mean, you can use a photograph in a court of

law right, but you can’t really use a painting in like proving something. So why is it that the

photograph that is seen in many cases as objective, and true of what like its representing. So

I think that the reasons it does is like reflect on what the modern consciousness is, and like

the way that the photograph sort of captures reality, it mimics in a way...the modernist view

of the subject, and then I saw that in Street View in the twenty-first century as taking that to

even the next step, where like not only is it a photography but it’s like photographing the

entire world, and there’s no photographer in a way, it’s like an automated camera, and ...at

least with the photographer you have like some agency, he chose, he pointed at this instead

of that, and in a way there’s still human meaning there. But with the Street View cameras

it’s like literally just an automated camera that’s taking a picture every few seconds that’s

going across the free world. The only thing that unites the images is spatial...is geography in

a way, it’s the spatial contiguity. And in a way that’s like, it takes the alienation that was first

present in a photograph in itself...in a painting there’s a direct connection, there’s the artist,

and his interpretation of what he sees, in a way it’s very connected to his subjective vision of

reality. Well with the photograph it’s already taken that away and having it mechanical, and

yet there’s still the photographer. And here it’s the next step, there’s no photographer, and

it’s all connected just through geospatial contiguity. So in a way it’s like...I don’t see...I think

it’s still connected to modernity in a way...if its postmodernity it’s not like a break, it’s just


like a continuation to the next level, where know it’s like...I mean reality in way has been

sucked of meaning to the point where it....I don’t want to call it like...I don’t like using the

word commodified, just throwing it around, but in a way it’s like the true, ultimate

commodification of reality in that respect, where it’s become data, pure data, and all data is

equal, so there’s no...no image is like more valued than the other image, there all just the

same, it’s all ones and zeros, or whatever you want, however you want to put it. So in a way

it’s like, maybe, first in modernity people were objectified and made into I don’t know,

objects that were just made to increase capital by........workers in the minds or whatever,

but now everybody’s made into information, information right, it’s like part of that

informationalising of everything. And I don’t want to make it like it’s all negative, it’s...like a

logical continuation....I can go on, if you want to ask another question to interrupt me just

feel free.

BC: no, it’s ok, keep going

JR: I’m going to ramble a bit, it will come out eventually...

BC: Yeah...

JR: So I guess like one question is like...who...you can blame Google, because like Google’s

the one who’s doing it, but on one level...I feel like it’s more than that. The reason why this

is happening, the grounds are already sown for this; it’s almost...the reason why we are

accepting it to a large extent... I mean there is a lot of uproar in Europe, but I mean in North

America, it’s pretty new the criticism, and to a large extent people see it more as a beneficial

tool, and like the 1984 mentality of Big Brother has kind of been transformed into like...we

all have access to the information, it’s not like it’s an authoritarian dictatorship that controls

all of this. To some extent its democratic, it’s not like Google is hoarding it and selling it off.

It’s going to be monetised still, but on one level it’s democratic, and there’s something in a

way strangely pleasurable about the voyeurism that it allows. It’s not the same as the 1984,

it’s like qualitatively different. It would be naive to say that its completely democratic, the

control the source code or whatever, they still own the copyright to the images, but it’s not

so clear cut as you know, 1984 type reality where it’s just like some Big Brother watching

over everybody. I’m sceptical about the pure demonization of Google, because in a way it is

still just a capitalist organisation...I think Google thinks it is a morally...I mean it sees itself as

like a morally right organisation that’s trying to like, be good, be like ethically correct in

decision making, which is problematic in one sense, because its...what is good right, its

philosophical, it raises philosophical. I don’t think Google...like it has no desire to like create


this image of itself as Big Brother, a centralised Big Brother organisation, it would be bad for

its self image economically, it wants to be transparent, and it will do whatever it can to seem

transparent and good for its own benefit ultimately. So I think it’s different from like CCTV or

whatever. I can go on...I mean like how much of your article is about the surveillance

aspects...because to me it wasn’t....in a way it was like the least interesting aspect of all of

it... I do...it is important and like everybody’s talking about it so I do have a lot of opinions

about it, but if it’s not like a huge aspect of what you’re doing...

BC: Well I’ve kind of done a section about the surveillance and privacy issues related to kind

of how it’s been reported in the media here in England. That’s interesting, but I was

interested in how you see that as only a small part of it...

JR: I think it’s like been transformed a little bit, ideas of surveillance amongst us have been

transformed...like become a little bit more friendly, like Facebook is the ultimate surveillance

right, I think it’s a generational thing and also a societal thing, like in Europe there is a history

of Stalinism and Fascism that’s not in North America. There’s a little bit of that, and there’s

also just like the anti-Americanism of like an American corporation coming in, it’s all those

things. I think it’s dangerous, it obscures the truth to like focus on the surveillance as the

main thing because in a way it obfuscates a deeper ideology that’s at work I think, and that’s

about what I was... alluding to a little bit...with you now, how all reality is commodified, and

that’s not the same thing as like Google’s an evil corporation that is spying on the population

of the world. In a way Google is no more culpable than any other corporation, or

anybody...in a way it’s the truest manifestation of this reality, of this abstract order that’s at

work in the world right now. In a way it...it’s a symptom of this in its most acute form in

some respects, that’s what attracted to me. But it’s like...it’s not that it’s positive or

negative, it’s a social fact, this, now what does it say about society right now? That’s kind of

like what I’m interest in, and I don’ know, I think paranoia about it sometimes is kind of like a

hidden megalomania, like what’s so important about your life that Google’s capturing that

you’re so paranoid. Is there...sometimes it’s a way to excuse your own narcissism by

attacking it...by making it seem like your being spied on. Being excessively paranoid I think

reveals a certain kind of hidden, I don’t know, narcissism, in some respects. I don’t want to

harp on that too much though. I mean you can get all psychoanalytic about it, about you

know what’s going on too, with all the negative reaction, anyway....

BC: So, when...what were you trying to achieve, I’ve been looking at your Street View images

that you’ve got online, what were you kind of trying to achieve by collating the images in

that way?


JR: I think that in this day and age, with the content boom that’s occurred on the Internet,

there’s so much stuff, so much being created every second, so much information, creative

content, every kind of content imaginable out there, that curation in itself has become more

and more important in this world, as something necessary...I mean in a way Google in

itself...a search engine is a form of curation right...having this algorithm that finds the

most...your narrowing down information, but it’s still like automatic and dehumanising in

some respects. In a way or consciousness, the way we think about the world is completely

mediated by this algorithm that Google’s created in many respects. So I don’t think you can

take that back, you can change that or fight that and be like, no I’m just putting a stop to

that, that’s the nature of the world. But I do think that you can like highlight that and at the

same time maybe take a little bit of it back, or at least put an eddy here and there, or...I

don’t even know... I don’t want to say that....I don’t like to speculate on what art can

accomplish, I think it works on a very indirect level, some things change your consciousness

very indirectly, and maybe can lead to emancipation, but if you try to do that actively it

becomes propaganda and it actually doesn’t it work. It appears to me like a hermetic work of

art, like a modernist work of art can actually be more revolutionary than and agit-prop

poster right, that says “down with Israeli imperialism” of something like that. So through the

act of curation and through structuring this chaos or other structure, through remixing, you

can like re-establish the human within this dehumanised world. I mean on a simplest level

that’s what I think. In a way...it’s a classic humanist view of art work, its romantic in many

respects. Yet at the same time I don’t feel like I have the desire to create something new,

because it feels like everything’s been created. I’d rather go through all the information and

junk and everything create, curate out of that and maybe remix and change it, I mean just

the act of framing is a *+ of creation, so that’s how I kind of see... my process, like the

purpose as being, so ....yeah.

BC: OK, cool. So like, when you were producing these collections of Street View images,

what was it that you were looking for, were there any particular things in the images that

you wanted to draw attention to?

JR: Well, I guess for me...it depends on the specific collection...I had my processes. At first

it’s intuitive, and I’m taking a lot of stuff, I’m taking a lot of snapshots that I like, just on an

intuitive level, I mean it’s hard to explain what’s going on, I think your whole background as

an artist is at work, and it’s working like in your subconscious and you don’t even know

what’s going on. And once I have, like...you know...it’s like a first draft, I have a first draft to

gather a bunch of images, and I cut it down to different collections, so like a recent


collection I have is that I’m, and this might, I don’t know, relate to geography...it was about

the individual in the landscape. So I was comparing the individual in the landscape, like the

solitary individual in the landscape, of like a romantic landscape painting of the sublime, like

there’s that famous one by that German artist, what’s his name...slips me right now, but it’s

like this man whose back is to the canvas, I mean back is to the audience, and he’s looking

like over a huge cliff and it’s just like fog, and the romantic sublime. Part of the goal of art in

like the romantic era, or just like...basically ultimate human experience was that of

connecting to nature and like feeling the oneness with nature and that by experiencing the

sublime infinity, and the immensity of unexplainable, unconceivable, like either massiveness

of nature, or like infinitude, or just beyond beauty, like terror of nature. Like, in feeling that

it points back to your own freedom, feeling that there is like this possibility of the infinite,

points back to the human infinity inside of us right....at the same time you feel at one with

the universe and at the same time transcendent over it because you can indirectly begin to

conceive of it all as one entire like...an then how strikingly different..contrasting

that...romantic view between the one of like the man in the street view landscape...where

it’s just like you know, anonymous, blurred faces, with...surrounded by, ongoing, endless,

there is still that feeling of endless space, but I’m interested in like endless space...how the

same experience has changed in the modern, contemporary experience of man in the

landscape, and what that reveals about how, you know, experience has changed in general,

like the experience of reality, like what does that reveal...I’ll send you the essay.

BC: That would be great, thanks

JR: Um...yeah

BC: Yeah that’s great. Another thing I was thinking about is, obviously coming from my

background as a geography student, and also kind of from the way that Street View is talked

about my Google, it’s very much...I’ve been kind of thinking about it in relation to Google

maps, and how it’s kind of you know, a new way of mapping the world. And yet, I don’t

know, I get a sense in your work, in your approach to it, you see it more as photography, and

the photographic aspect, the photographing of individuals as more important than the

mapping aspect in terms of depicting places. So yeah, I wondered what you thought about

that point.

JR: I think....what I find is interesting is the...it changes our view of space, because I think as

Street View and Google become more wired into our everyday lives, when everybody has an

iphone and like, iphones can easily access, you know Google Maps...well they can already


easily access Google Maps and Google Street View, in a way you’re like...it completely

changes your view of space, because now you can see what’s around the block at your

fingertips...it modifies...even distances seem different because everything is...you have

another perspective on it that’s in this digital realm right, and in a way it becomes like, you

know, McLuhan, it becomes an extension of your own mind. So in many respects, yeah, the

mapping, I’m not sure it’s so reflected in my photographs, but yeah, I definitely agree with

you in that...these technologies, especially these mass ones like Google Maps, that are like

used by everybody practically, become extensions of our own perceptions of space, and

alter it to some degree, or mediate it. And yeah....you don’t have to go to places any more to

get the pedestrian perspective of something, that’s huge. Or you’ve already experienced it

through Google Street View, and then when you do see it it’s like what does that do to your

experience of it, when you’ve already experienced it in that virtual space. There’s a lot of

interesting questions that it raises, but yeah, I’m not sure how the photographs, I mean the

photographs...I’ve been working on a piece right now where it’s like yeah, you know...I have

a picture of ....an abandoned house that says “Rod Stewart fan club”, imagine, I’m

thinking...I’m going to England next month for a conference ...if you’re in Manchester, I’m

presenting my Google Street Views there

BC: Oh really

JR: I’ll give you the dates; I think it’s like the thirteenth

BC: Oh, that’s the date that...

JR: Bristol’s down south?

BC: Yeah, Bristol’s down south, I would definitely have gone, but that’s the date that my

thesis is handed in, the 13th of May

JR: Oh really, oh well

BC: So that’s shame

JR: Well I’m just thinking, I’m thinking of making a short film, or like, have you ever heard, do

you know the story, or the movie “Blowup”, you know, it’s like from the 60s.

BC: No I don’t

JR: It’s by Antonioni, it’s like this movie in the 60s called blowup, where it’s about a

photographer who, it actually takes place in London, and he accidentally takes a picture of a

murder...but he doesn’t realise it, he’s going through his pictures and he thinks he sees a

gun, and he thinks he sees a body in the background, so then he blows up the body but then


as it gets closer and close her loses the image...if you blow something up more and more it

kind of becomes pure abstraction right. And then he goes, and he actually finds the body in

the park but like doesn’t call the police, then he comes back and the body’s gone, and then

he’s confused as to...basically there’s a mystery in the photograph that he can’t solve, and

he doesn’t even try to solve, because there’s no way he’s morally ready to solve that

mystery. So in some respects Street View is like the ultimate example of that, because you

know, there’s like tons of mysteries in these images that are not...that are being

captured...maybe there is...a murder was captured on Street View...you know there’s that

report a concern button but what does that even do, who are you reporting a concern to, on

one level it’s like the ultimate....you used to have to do that you know...Jamieson says this,

people used to actually feel profound grief when something sad happened, then it became

to the point where you have to like, you don’t have to necessarily feel the grief but you have

to show, you know, like the right signs that your experiencing the grief. But now it reaches

the point like you know, let’s say you see something bad on Street View, all you have to do is

report a concern by pressing a button, in a way it’s like it’s the ultimate...I’m not sure how

that led to “Blowup”, but yeah, I guess it’s like the sense in Blowup of like the photographer

in a way has to be able to see his own picture. What happens when the photographer isn’t

even able to see the truth in his own images...just like that question, its raising that

question, a photographer can’t see the truth in his own images, can’t see the violence

behind his own images, what’s that saying about society, and like Google Street View I see as

like, there is no photographer even, who’s the photographer? What happens in that case, it

goes from the photographer can’t see the truth behind his own images to what’s the truth if

there is no photographer, did somebody really get killed on that street corner when the

Google Street View truck was passing by, I don’t know. You see what I’m saying kind of?

BC: Yeah I do, yeah.

JR: I’m interested in mostly the epistemological questions it raises, and what it says about

epistemology right now and consciousness right now, and what that reflects about our

present age, and in a way, yeah, I think Google Street View is a great manifestation of the

present view of reality, which is a Google-ised reality. It’s not like Google is...Google is

changing our perception of reality on one level, but at the same time it’s an acute

representation of what’s already there, it’s a manifestation of what’s already underlying...it’s

a dialectic that’s at work, the same thing for what we were saying about space, and how

these technologies affect our perception of space, I don’t think it’s going one way, I don’t

think it’s just like its changing our perception of space...the seeds of that are already there in


our mind and in a way this is just...things are accepted...I think photography originally in the

nineteenth century like took off partly because it corresponded already to like our modern

consciousness, like I was saying before. It’s not so much like a technology emerges and

changes...technology emerges out of the consciousness that’s already laid the ground for it,

that’s why we can see, why we created technology in the first place you know. It’s not so...I

don’t like views of the change of history as technologically determined, I think it’s much

more complex than that, like more a dialectic. Anyways...

BC: Yeah, I agree with that yeah

JR: So can I ask you a question?

BC: Yeah, go ahead

JR: Like first of all, geography, I always wondered, tell me, what’s like geography, what

aspects of geography, geography seems so massive to me, what’s it like these days in

academia, what is geography these days? Or is it a lot of things depending on your

department?

BC: Yeah I think, you view of it seeming very massive is probably...

JR: Or is it just like other social sciences, where it doesn’t have its grounds...are very...what’s

like the foundation, where does its foundation lie these days? Is it unstable? I feel like it’s an

exciting discipline to be in.

BC: Yeah, certainly in the UK, I think its perhaps different in North America, different

departments and stuff, but yeah it is quite, as you say, the boundaries aren’t very fixed,

certainly over the last twenty years or so, the definition of what geography is, especially

human geography, as opposed to physical geography, I mean physical geography, you know,

glaciers, mountains, rivers and stuff is still quite fixed but then human geography is kind of

developing in a lot of interesting ways, the project that I’m doing, the context that that has

kind of emerged out of, starting to do it I was approaching from you know, quite a

traditional geographical topic, looking at mapping and how the world is mapped and you

know, as I said before it branches out into a lot of other things. To try and pin down what

the central thing is with geography, I guess the issues of space and place are perhaps the

things...

JR: So nowadays the Internet’s so huge, so much a part of present life, is there geographies

of virtual space, cyberspace, how do you tackle that?


BC: Yeah, probably in two senses really, there’s work being done on the physical geographies

of cyberspace, in terms of looking at where people are connected, and you know, kind of

networks that are growing up around that, both in terms of people and the actual

infrastructure and stuff. And also kind of, you know, yeah, this idea of virtual space, and

there’s some people, certainly there’s been some PhD students here at Bristol looking at like

computer games and stuff, and that idea of virtual space, and so I think Street View also kind

of relates in to that, it blurs the boundaries between what you think of as a map and it also

in some ways resembles that kind of virtual space of a computer game and stuff like that.

JR: Yeah, it does. What are you looking at, are you looking at it in terms of how it affects our

view of real space, or are you looking at how mapping, how virtual maps like Google Maps

and Street View affect our perception of real space, is that what you’re interested in?

BC: Yeah, I would say that that probably is kind of...I mean because, you know, Google Street

View, with it being quite new, no one’s really looked at it from an academic geographical

perspective before, so I’ve been trying to take kind of quite an exploratory approach to it,

but I think that question of how it affects our perceptions of real is quite important, that’s

probably quite a central question. I think there’s something quite significant in this...shift

just in visual form, from you know the very kind of what’s been naturalised as a conventional

map, in terms of a top down, abstracted view, and then Street View kind of challenges that

with the photographs and the Street level perspective. I’m trying to look at the significance

of that and as I said before, trying to look at how people have interpreted that in different

ways, which is why I was interested in, you know, talking to you and getting kind of a

different perspective, perhaps a more interesting perspective than what is generally rolled

out in the media and stuff.

JR: I’m just thinking if there’s anything else that I can say off the top of my head.

BC: Well, I think, all the points that I had written down have...

JR: Feel free to ask me any...email me if there’s anything else that hasn’t been covered

BC: I think you’ve covered everything really yeah.

JR: Well I’d love, to see, to read your thesis when you’re done, if you don’t mind.

BC: Yeah sure, I’ll email you a copy when I’ve done...

JR: Do you like your professors, do you feel like they’re, they understand what you’re doing,

or are they doing any sort of similar research?


BC: Well my supervisor, is...yeah she’s really good, I do like her...she kind of...her work tends

to be...she’s done some work on Google Earth, she does also a lot of historical stuff, to do

with maps and landscape representations and stuff, so she’s been looking at Google Earth

and trying to trace some of the continuities with some of the atlases in the past and also the

materialities of it as much as how it represents space, and also how people interact with it,

how you’ve got, with Google Earth obviously , the way that people can contribute to it and

add their own information, and relating that back to how atlases used to be circulated

around and people would add annotations.

JR: From any researcher’s perspective, imagine Google Street View fifty years from now,

when Google will have a historical...you will be able to see a neighbourhood change in a

given city, you know, perfectly, or at least from the street perspective, and from the satellite

perspective, just imagine how valuable that information is, and the fact that one company

owns this, are geographers...I guess maybe institutions will have to pay a fee to have access

to that information, it will be interesting...I mean it’s really interesting to see what’s going to

happen with all that...just as an archive you know

BC: Yeah, and we’re really only at the start of that kind of thing I think

JR: And from a moral standpoint it is something to be sceptical of, but that’s not to blow it

out of proportion and not to compare it to a fascist dictatorship, but it is you know a big

corporation that’s commodifying our space around us, but maybe it’s because we already

see space that way, do we not look at the person we walk by in a busy street as just a...there

is something like that represented in it, how we see reality on one level. Anyways, I think I’ve

pushed my point home pretty much. Yeah, just keep in touch man.

BC: Yeah, that’s great, thanks a lot, thank you yeah, really thanks a lot for your time.

JR: And yeah, send me the essay.

BC: Yeah I will do.

JR: Good luck, and feel free to ask me anything

BC: Thanks a lot

JR: Alright

BC: Ok, see you, bye.


Appendix B

Email transcript from asynchronous online interview with Bill Guffey.

Hi Ben,

Here are some answers to your questions. If you have any follow-ups just let me know.

What gave you the idea of using Street View as an artistic resource?

I had liked the idea of traveling to cities and countries virtually, and enjoyed "walking" up

and down streets looking at the areas that tourists don't normally go. I began to find areas,

buildings, etc. that I thought would make great paintings. So I contacted Google to ask

permission (which they have given for any artist to use Street View).

What qualities do you see in the Street View images that attracted you to using them as

artistic inspiration?

The vastness of the reference material. Virtually endless.

How do you go about finding and selecting Street Views for your paintings?

I sometimes use the search function to get myself into areas I'm interested in. If I want a

grungy, more dirty, area of a city I'll search for tatto shops or biker bars. That will usually get

me in the general vacinity and I can look around from there. Same goes for all places. If I

want a vineyard I search for it to get me in the general area.

What do you look for in an image to paint from?

Composition mainly. I can change the colors and the values easily enough. I also change the

comp, but there has to be something there that caught my eye to begin with. Then the

artistic license kicks in.

What do you think is gained and lost by using Street View rather than painting from real

world observation?

Gained...The ability to see the world with endless opportunities to use the material that's

already there. I just can't get to it in person. Sometimes I'll find a building that interests me

and I'll save it for inclusion in a future painting.


Lost...Nothing beats painting from life. Nothing. Street View is fun, but unless you, as an

artist, are grounded in the fundamentals of landscape painting, it just won't work. You have

to have the knowledge before painting from photographs. On a technical note, the

perspective is skewed and pushed in Street View. Compensation must be made for it to look

believable in a painting.

A lot of people seem to be contributing to your "Virtual Paintouts", why do you think the

response has been so enthusiastic?

It's something new. Not many people were painting from Street View before I started, but

there are many now that see the value in the reference material. Also, people like doing

something together that they all enjoy. Artists especially, have always done this.

In Europe Street View has caused a considerable amount of controversy due to people

seeing the images as a violation of their privacy. What do you think of these issues and is it

something you worry about when producing your paintings?

If I walked down the sidewalk with a camera, and took pictures of the different houses; that

is not illegal. Or, in my humble opinion, a violation of privacy. The cameras on the vehicles

are the same. There are differences of course. But I just don't see the problem. I think it's a

good reason to take down your Christmas lights, clean up the mess, and mow your yard. I

don't worry about it.

Do you think you will continue to use Street View as an artistic resource in the future?

Yes. Endless resource of reference material.

Are there any other particular projects using Street View that you are looking to do?

I've got several series planned. Some of particular cities. Some of certain subjects. I also

want to continue my effort to spread the word about using Street View for artists that are

disabled. That area has really yet to be touched, and the implications are huge.

Thanks,

Bill

-------------


Bill Guffey

P.O. Box 785

Burkesville, KY 42717

cell: 270-406-0189

home: 270-864-3737

Check out my website at:

www.bnguffey.com

and my blog at:

http://billguffey.blogspot.com

----- Original Message -----

From: "B Connor" <[email protected]>

To: "Bill Guffey" <[email protected]>

Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 3:46 AM

Subject: Re: Inquiry from your website

Bill,

Thank you very much for your help. Just to give you a sense of what I am doing, as part of

my research project I am looking at how people have interacted and engaged with Street

View in different ways, and your art projects struck me as a really interesting example of

this. Please feel free to write as little or as much as you like regarding each question, and if

you have any additional comments that you think might be of interest then I will be glad to

hear them! Please don't worry if you do not have time to respond immediately. Here are

the questions I am interested in hearing our response to:

What gave you the idea of using Street View as an artistic resource?

What qualities do you see in the Street View images that attracted you to using them as

artistic inspiration?

How do you go about finding and selecting Street Views for your paintings?

What do you look for in an image to paint from?

http://www.bnguffey.com/

http://billguffey.blogspot.com/

mailto:[email protected]



What do you think is gained and lost by using Street View rather than painting from real

world observation?

A lot of people seem to be contributing to your "Virtual Paintouts", why do you think the

response has been so enthusiastic?

In Europe Street View has caused a considerable amount of controversy due to people

seeing the images as a violation of their privacy. What do you think of these issues and is it

something you worry about when producing your paintings?

Do you think you will continue to use Street View as an artistic resource in the future? Are

there any other particular projects using Street View that you are looking to do?

Thanks again for your help, it is much appreciated.

Ben

On 24 February 2010 07:36 -0600 Bill Guffey <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello Ben. I'll help in any way I can. Just let me know.

Bill

-------------

Bill Guffey

P.O. Box 785

Burkesville, KY 42717

cell: 270-406-0189

home: 270-864-3737

Check out my website at:

www.bnguffey.com

and my blog at:

http://billguffey.blogspot.com



http://billguffey.blogspot.com/


----- Original Message ----- From: "Ben Connor" <[email protected]>

To: "Bill Guffey" <[email protected]>

Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 4:18 AM

Subject: Inquiry from your website

Hi Bill,

Ben Connor has sent you a message via your "Contact" form on your Artspan website. You

can respond to them by simply replying to this email. Their message is below.

Visitor Message:

Dear Mr Guffey,

I am a Masters student studying geography at the University of Bristol, England. For my

research project I am investigating Google Street View, and am interested in finding out

how people have engaged with this technology in different ways. I am therefore

interested in finding out more about your art projects using Street View, and would like to

ask if it would be possible for me to email you some questions on this topic to assist me

with my research. If you would be willing to answer some questions then please let me

know, and I will send them via email in the next few days. Thank you for your time,

Yours sincerely,

Ben Connor

Message sent from website: www.bnguffey.com

----------------------

B Connor

[email protected]





Documents

The Virtual Flaneur? Exploring Google Street View