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Artist Creates Life-Size Street Art Posters Of The Glitchy Inhabitants Of Google Street View

Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts gives the blurry images of people caught by Google’s camera physical form.

We’ve all heard the cliche about art imitating life, but how about art imitating Street View imitating life? It makes for a tangled web of the digital and physical mixing together to become some kind of simulacra squared. Or something. But this is what artist Paolo Cirio’s been doing in his Street Ghosts project. He creates life-size posters of blurred, glitchy images of anonymous people caught on Google Street View and plasters them onto the wall in the same spots where they were caught on camera.

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The artist calls the posters “specters of Google's eternal realm of private, misappropriated data” where the figures are “unveiling their presence like a digital shadow haunting the real world.” The artist says he’s reversing the act of these people’s images being taken without their permission by taking the images off Google without asking the company’s permission and so subverting the way our information is taken and used online without our authorization.

The artist then marks their position on a map, collating them all together on his site. So far he has ghosts in London, New York City, and Berlin.

Dircksenstraße / Rochstraße, Berlin

Ebor Street, London

214 Lafayette Street, New York

80 East Houston Street, New York

[via Nerdcore]

@stewart23rd