Street Scene

"Street Scene" is an ongoing collaboration with Jon Horvath. Continuing in the tradition of re-photographic projects, we use the Internet and immersive travel simulators, such as Google Street View and Bing Streetside, to virtually journey to sites where iconic images from the history of photography and cinema were created. Photography, cinema, and newer technologies like Street View share a relation as mediums that have been used as surrogates for travel and a way of augmenting our lived experience. While serving a similar impulse, each platform delivers its own unique perception of reality. In choreographing a mashup of content that offers varied perspectives of a place, we overlay the iconic image with the virtual landscape and then, relying on the vernacular of the digital image, allow an intelligent computer process to determine how those two sets of information will interact and composite. To further the dialogue between the camera’s witnessing of the physical landscape and the mediated experience of its virtual equivalent, the images are written back into by glitching them with information gathered while researching the locations of the photographs. Navigating the Internet to find these locations is an exercise in traversing a hyperlinked set of stories, dead ends, data sets, news accounts, and testimonies. These and many other forms of related content are presented below the image in an arrangement that produces a dialogue between the physical world and the datastream, past and present, banality and spectacle, filmic narratives and anonymous landscapes, amongst many other unanticipated relations. We seek to leverage these complex layers of mediation in creating a new form of image that asks questions about our experience or non-experience of places through the proxy of the electronic image.