The images in this work are screen captures taken from Google Earth’s real-world mapping interface, collected from various countries across the globe that are covered by Google Street View. Each figure has been carefully extracted from its background and converted to black and white.
The evolving relationship between technology and humanity can often be glimpsed through the images of different eras. If traditional portrait photography once summoned an aura—evoking a profound sense of life—then in contrast, Google’s exhaustive mapping of the earth renders the incidental passersby it captures not so much as “humans,” but rather as data—or even noise—to be erased by algorithmic facial blurring systems. These images, which fully manifest the optical unconscious, seem to mirror a contemporary condition: in today’s world, anyone can be effortlessly laid bare before the global gaze, yet the human subject appears reduced to a mere trace of information, a raw material of surveillance capitalism, stripped of any secret or singular identity.
By re-presenting these figures in the form of portraits, the work seeks to summon the ghosts—those who are no longer present and cannot return—that haunt the digital empire.
