That People Series, 2019
Art Micro-Spray

The That People video series takes Google Street View as its source material. The work deliberately uses the word “That” in its title to point toward the condition of human existence within contemporary technological systems—or, one might say, toward the “multitude” within the technological empire, remotely marked, captured, and classified.
 

The deformation and incompleteness of the human figures in the work arise from Google Street View cars’ sweeping collection of images across the Earth’s surface. Through the mechanical eye of the 360-degree camera, human beings are not the objects of an intentional gaze; the camera merely passes by, recording everything along its route. The faces of pedestrians captured on the street are also automatically detected and blurred by artificial intelligence systems. These images suggest a kind of “zero-degree gaze” cast by a technological object upon living beings: without the intention to understand, and without the intention to truly gaze, it simply incorporates everything into an image system that can be recorded, located, and processed.