In an amusing malfunction, Google’s privacy software overshot its goal when it blurred the facial features of a grazing cow in England. Wearing a horse head or a diving suit (actually just the diving mask should do) accomplishes the same goal. This filter can be circumvented by wearing certain kinds of masks, like the Japanese group with the bird heads. Street View applies a blurring filter to human faces and license plates to protect people’s privacy. Google employees in London (also in the gallery below) did know exactly when the Street View car was scheduled to pass by their offices and turned out for a large group picture to be included in Street View. The two men in diving suits in Bergen, Norway, for example, or the guy wearing a horse head in British Columbia (both shown in the gallery below) look like they have been sitting patiently curbside for some time before the Google Street View car finally came by. As a result, many performance artists play a waiting game, settling down for a long wait in beach chairs along the expected route of the camera car. Google publishes a Street View schedule that announces when areas and neighborhoods will be visited by their camera cars, but the information is very general, making it impossible to predict any of the actual routes and times. In doing so, Street View performance and installation artists face at least two major obstacles:Ī) How to know when the Google Street View camera will pass by the location of their work andī) How to circumvent (or incorporate) Google’s automated face blurring technology which blurs the faces of people, together with vehicle license plates caught in the shot. While scavengers work primarily at a computer terminal in their office or studio, scouring through the photographs provided by the Street View machinery, performance and installation artists need to interact directly with the Street View scanning devices at specific locations and times in order to accomplish their creative projects. In a recent post, I drew a distinction between two groups of artists that use Google Street View as part of their creative work:ġ) Scavengers who treat the mapping service as a colossal mechanized digital photographer andĢ) Performance and Installation artists who aim to have their work recorded by a passing Street View camera and see their piece included in the public Street View image stream.
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