Street Ghosts by Paolo Cirio – Street Art made by Google Street View

I received an email a few days ago from Paolo Cirio about his project, Street Ghosts. It’s a pretty nifty idea – he describes it thusly:

“Life-sized pictures of people found on Google’s Street View are printed and posted without authorization at the same spot where they were taken.”

1242 Saint-Laurent, Montreal

Nifty idea is one thing, but in terms of execution it’s truly impressive – so far he has done this in Manhattan NYC, Brooklyn NYC, Denver, Buffalo, Montreal, London, Berlin, Stuttgart, Brussels, Lyon, Marseille, Bilbao, Barcelona, & Sydney.

16 Rue de la bibliotheque, Marseilles

While Cirio’s work is definitely a novel take on street art, there’s a political edge to the work, too.

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.

Street Ghosts hit some of the most important international Street Art “halls of fame” with low-resolution, human scale posters of people taken from Google Street View. These images do not offer details, but the blurred colors and lines on the posters give a gauzy, spectral aspect to the human figures, unveiling their presence like a digital shadow haunting the real world.

This ready-made artwork simply takes the information amassed by Google as material to be used for art, despite its copyrighted status and private source.
As the publicly accessible pictures are of individuals taken without their permission, I reversed the act: I took the pictures of individuals without Google’s permission and posted them on public walls. In doing so, I highlight the viability of this sort of medium as an artistic material ready to comment and shake our society.
The collections of data that Google and similar corporations have become the material of everyday life, yet their source is the personal information of private individuals. By remixing and reusing this material, I artistically explore the boundaries of ownership and exposure of this publicly displayed, privately-held information about our personal lives.

– From the artist’s statement on streetghosts.net

I like the idea of playing with the metanarrative of the overlap of the real and the virtual world – it’s very layered. The whole idea of copyright and ownership in the context of a map of the world made up of street level photos adds yet another layer. I’m not so certain that Google’s copyright is meant as anything more than laying claim to the use of the images within the context of mapping and wayfinding, but it is certainly food for thought. I would love to hear an official response from Google. Does Street Ghosts count as deriviative work in the sense of copyright law since it is only using this material to directly comment on Google Street, making it okay under fair use? Or since it’s only a very small portion of  Google Street View that’s being reproduced, does it qualify as fair use under the de minimus concept? I’m not a lawyer so this is pure speculation, but I’m intrigued. In any case, given the siginificant amount of press attention this project has generated, it seems to be giving a lot of other people food for thought, too.

45 Wadsworth St., Buffalo

A quite extensive gallery of Street Ghosts can be seen here.