Ghosts of Google

This series first debuted in 2019. Continuing the portraiture theme of the work, it metaphorically reflects contemporary life situations, with the constant element being a sense of estrangement.

The images in the series are captured using Google Street View as the source material, with screenshots serving as the photographic method. The completed works in the series include: Maps Remember (2022), Ghosts of Google (2021), Anonymous (2020), and the That People Series (2019).

The relationship between machines and humans may be reflected in the image production of different eras. The birth of photography was closely tied to the production of portraits. In early portrait photography, the long exposure time gave the figures in the image what Walter Benjamin referred to as “aura”: at that time, mechanical technology still served the human subject, and through the prolonged process of image-making, conveyed a sense of human dignity and solemnity.

In today’s highly developed technological society, however, the forms and functions of photography have become increasingly complex. Images are no longer merely media of gaze, memory, and representation; they have also gradually become technical components of positioning, identification, classification, and governance. In the street-view mode of Google Earth, the camera does not intend to gaze at anyone in particular. It merely passes by and records everything. Under this overwhelming illumination, individual lives often appear as fragmented, incomplete, misaligned, or blurred images.

The blurred human faces in Techno Ghosts might, within a traditional mode of viewing, be intuitively associated with a sense of emotional or poetic ambiguity. Yet here, they are the result of Google’s response to privacy regulations: an AI system designed to automatically detect and erase human faces. These anonymous figures, deprived of identifiable features, are nevertheless precisely located within coordinates jointly calibrated by satellite systems and the internet. Can they then be regarded as a kind of “portrait” that reflects the existential condition of contemporary life?