<p>Nine Eyes documents screen captures taken from Google Street View. In 2007 Google began adding street views to its maps, photographs taken by a worldwide fleet of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing a nine-lensed camera mounted on a rooftop pole. This clothbound volume includes images from The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, an ongoing project by artist, filmmaker and essayist Jon Rafman (born 1981), whose work explores the impact of technology on consciousness. The photographs range from the beautifully symmetrical to the disturbingly violent―each, in some way, an extraordinary moment captured forever through a mapping service. Rafman's project reveals that while the world as presented by Google appears to be truthful and transparent, this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist can assist in constructing and deciphering.</p>

Jon Rafman: Nine Eyes

Arts & Photography

Jon Rafman

Sandra Rafman

Joanne McNeil

Photography & Video

New Documents

Jon Rafman caught the art world's attention with his ambitious photo project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a collection of hundreds of images carefully selected from blogs and searches. Hauntingly evocative, the work utilizes extremely personal moments to reveal how digital ephemera and media shape our desires and threaten to define our being. Since his appearance on the art scene just a few years ago Rafman has garnered remarkable international success and this first monograph, produced so early in his career, testifies to the pertinence of his practice. Using a wide range of media Rafman blurs the boundaries between virtual and physical realities with works that can be either digital or material, found or made. By moving back and forth from video and photography to sculpture and painting, he brings attention to how such a transformation has become intuitive for us, changing the different ways in which we know ourselves, and how we perceive and relate to the world around us. Though Rafman rarely takes a moral stance toward the messaging behind his art, it consistently asks us to evaluate what it means to be human in the context of these new and ambiguous digital realms.

Jon Rafman (English and French Edition) (French and English Edition)

Mark Lanctot

History & Criticism

MAC Montreal / ABC Art Books Canada

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Books by Sandra Rafman