Ghosts of Google, 2021
Single-channel video, holographic Projection, 8'58".

Images in this work are captured as screenshots from Google Earth’s Street View. They were collected from each country or region covered by Google Street View, then extracted from their original backgrounds and converted into black and white.

The relationship between technology and human beings may be reflected through the images produced in different eras. If early portrait photography once summoned an aura, evoking a profound sense of life and presence, then today, within Google’s sweeping collection of images across the Earth’s surface, those who happen to be recorded in passing are treated less as “people” than as information, or even noise—faces to be erased by AI systems.

These images, revealing a kind of optical unconscious, seem to reflect a certain condition of contemporary life: anyone today can be easily laid bare before the eyes of the world, yet the human figure appears only as a piece of information, or is even reduced to material for surveillance capitalism, stripped of the secrecy of personhood. By re-presenting these images in the form of portraits, the work asks what ghosts remain beneath the technological empire.