Artist Brings Street View Bystanders Back Into The Real World

Artist Brings Street View Bystanders Back Into The Real World

Countless thousands have become the subject of candid photos thanks to Google’s Street View campaign. After they’re photographed, their faces are dutifully blurred, and they stand as digital statutes in cyberspace, but one artist likes bringing them back into the real world.

Paolo Cirio likes to search around Street View for a subject, and when he finds one, he does something that is equal parts interesting and strange; he prints out a full-sized picture of them and puts it up where they were standing in the Street View shot. The project is called “Street Ghosts.” Cirio himself put it this way to CNET:

In this project, I exposed the specters of Google’s eternal realm of private, misappropriated data: the bodies of people captured by Google’s Street View cameras, whose ghostly, virtual presence I marked in Street Art fashion at the precise spot in the real world where they were photographed.

So far, Cirio has posted his specters in New York, London, and Berlin, with the potential of more cities to come. So if one day, you walk around a corner and find yourself face-to-blurred-face with a strikingly familiar form, Paul Cirio might be to blame. That or some kind of crazy, botched cloning experiment. [CNET]


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