A brand new exhibition explores the ethics of Google Road View’s surveillance pictures

Jon Rafman’s Instagram profile exhibits a picture of the artist at work. Dust jams the letters of his keyboard whereas his desk is ridden with the detritus of a chronically on-line life; half-eaten Doritos packets, rogue DVD instances, empty cans of vitality drinks and a litter of cigarette butts. Conversely, the display in entrance of him displays a Kantian scene of chic, snow-capped peaks. This picture is restaged as a video work on the threshold of Rafman’s newest exhibition Report a Concern – the 9 Eyes Archives at Louisiana Museum of Artwork, Copenhagen, during which a rotating solid of sticky tableaux are foregrounded by Romantic-era work. These contradictory vignettes operate as a prologue to Rafman’s hyper-accelerated universe, and supply an overview of the tragi-hero at its core; the web troll locked in a battle between digital primacy and a decaying bodily state.

Curious concerning the social and existential influence of know-how on modern life, the Quebecian artist rose to prominence within the late 2000s, coinciding with the launch of Google Road View. This formidable mapping undertaking blanketed each freeway, nation highway, and suburban avenue with camera-mounted vehicles, leading to an archive that, as of Might 2022, had amassed over 220 billion photographs. In 2008, Rafman started an excavation. Adopting the troll’s sense of obsessive escapism he began mining the depths of that large digital cache for the surreal and unsettling assortment of photographs that type the guts of this present.

Offered collectively for the primary time in a museum exhibition, Rafman’s Road View undertaking, 9 Eyes, reads like a glimpse into the web’s unconscious – a chaotic place the place violence and sweetness coexist. The weird juxtapositions are the one fixed; a person flips off the digicam in Scotland whereas a kneeling lady prays subsequent to a put up field in Washington. Some topics play to its gaze, just like the intercourse employee mooning the digicam in Madrid, whereas others find yourself in comical conditions attempting to keep away from it, like a person in Romania hiding his head inside a recycling bin. To name these individuals topics, nonetheless, misses one thing essential concerning the company of those photographs, which weren’t captured by a human however by the detached lens of an unmanned digicam. It highlights a vital distinction between the digicam and the artist; the place one seems, the opposite sees. By means of Rafman’s eyes, these mechanically-captured moments are elevated into scenes of human significance; collective recollections in equal elements humorous, eerie, poignant, and profane.

Rafman frequently examines the situation of reminiscence within the digital age, arguing that know-how has basically rewritten our relationship with the previous. This obsession is crystallised in his movie, You, the World and I (2010), an ironic retelling of the Orpheus delusion the place the first-person narrator performs a relentless trawl by means of Google Earth not for Euredyce herself, however for her picture, retracing the second a Google automobile drove previous them on vacation. When the narrator lastly locates his misplaced love, he’s confronted with the picture’s inadequacy, wistfully proclaiming; ‘it appeared to include our complete relationship. But it was so blurry.’

His newest work, proven right here for the primary time, sees Rafman grapple with the moral implications of the 9 Eyes undertaking and the ethical relationship he has to the individuals caught in Google Road View’s digital web. Generated by AI, these movies undertaking speculative narratives onto a number of these random, context-less scenes. This exploration is darkest within the movie Report a Concern: 29052 Oak Highway Run, Central Shasta, CA, USA (2025), impressed by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the place an individual from one of many photographs seeks revenge on Rafman’s uncanny double, who, having spent years projecting tales onto these frames, can now not distinguish truth from fiction. It’s a chilling suggestions loop we’ve seen mirrored in real-world information. Although the web can nonetheless operate as a way of escape, these movies gesture to its extra sinister potential, an abyss of paranoia that displays your individual fears again to you.