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Image Credit: Apres Garde, by way of Google Maps Mania

The above image is the Saturday, November 13th entry from the Tumblr photo blog of local writer Matt Bucher, Apres Garde, where he collects picturesque images from Google Street View. Apres Garde is one of several Google Street View art sites featured on Tuesday by the Google Maps Mania blog along with Montreal-based artist Jon Rafman's 9 Eyes Tumblr which presents a mixture of scenic views and interesting or suggestive situations captured by the Google Street View Camera alongside Lehel Kovács Google Street View inspired cityscapes and Bill Guffrey's Virtual Paintout. All of these blogs use the images captured by Google Maps street view as (or for inspiring) their work. 

In exploring this body of street view (inspired) art, I was particularly struck by the question posed in the title of the Google Maps Mania post, "It's Street View but is it Art?" The selection and recontextualization that shape Bucher's and Rafman's collections particularly intrigued me. The images that they select are essentially random, taken by the nine cameras on a pole attached to the roofs of Google's hybrid vehicles. 

Image Credit: 9 Eyes Tumblr logo

Bucher and Rafman have both given recent interviews on other art and Google Sightseeing blogs. Bucher describes the origins of Apres Garde in an image of the Texas coast with an directional arrow pointing off into nowhere. Other such transcendent or subliminal experiences like the trip to inferno posted on Reddit and reposted on Gizmodo last year have been made possible by the nature of Google's image capturing. For Bucher, this image from Port Lavaca, TX was the spark that culminated in Apres Garde:

Image Credit: Matt Bucher, by way of Google Sightseeing

Bucher writes off the aesthetic interest of the image in his post on Google Sightseeing, claiming that it is a "throwaway image" and an example, like the inferno, of the not uncommon "idiosyncrasies" of Google imagery (Google Sightseeing). However, it led him to post screenshots like the following while asking a question similar to that posed by Google Maps Mania -- "is this just cool or could it be art?"

Image Credit: Apres Garde

In his entry on Google Sightseeing, Bucher justifies his decision not to "link to the map of the location or embed a zoomable map" because he finds Street View to be a tool for "exploring the world" and he chooses to simply report back. Bucher finds static images taken "out of context" to be "more powerful than the embedded map" where instant locatability "takes some of the fun out" of exploring. 

Image Credit: Apres Garde

Similarly, Rafman writes in an essay on his Street View collections that the presentation of images (for which he also, at least on 9 eyes, does not provide locations) that Street View "reflect[s] the excitement of exploring this new virtual world" which seems "more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality" and "the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording" as well as "vastness" of the Street View project (AFC). 

Image Credit: Rafman's The Nine Eyes of Street View Essay at AFC

Rafman explains the artistic qualities of the Street View images themselves, as well as the act of recontextualizing when he describes them as "a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering" (AFC).