Discovering the many odd, amusing and unfortunate moments captured by Google Street View has become something of a sport for online voyeurs.
Just this week, eagle-eyed users spotted a South Dakota man toting a rifle in public, and a gent in Melbourne using the loo.
Also this week, a now infamous series of images emerged capturing one of the Google Street View cars hitting a deer in upstate New York. (Google apologized and the images were removed.)
Add to this list a series of incredible Street View scenes from one road in Pittsburgh. All along Sampsonia Way, amazing random events seem to be taking place. There is the woman escaping a third-story window by climbing down torn bed sheets. There is the high school marching band in a shower of confetti. There are the mad scientists in a garage. There are the two costumed men sword-fighting on a grassy lawn.
As it happens, these scenes are not random at all. Rather, they are the work of a pair of artists, Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, who teamed up with Google to integrate art into the Street View platform. The first-of-its-kind collaboration, dubbed Street With a View, injects a dose of subversive performance art into the otherwise utilitarian mapping system.
Working with more than 100 neighbours last May, Hewlett and Kinsley spent a day staging fantastical moments around Pittsburgh’s Northside. Locals observing the event were invited to join in and stage their own scenes.
Street With a View may seem like a chance collaboration between a couple of performance artists and an famously experimental technology company. But the scenes Hewlett and Kinsley staged seem to have solid roots in art history. The unglamourised, slightly surreal happenings call to mind photographic work by Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. Both of these artists stage and capture elaborate events that at first glance seem like candid moments, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be finely constructed scenes.
As for life on Sampsonia Way, Hewlett says slipping art into the fabric of Google Street View is one way to blur the lines between the real and fictitious. “You can navigate the street and discover the more subtle scenes as well as the spectacular ones,” he said. “Turning onto another street, you might wonder if the person walking their dog was also staged? We’re interested in the necessity of sorting it out for yourself and, ultimately, the inability to do so. You’ll just never know for sure what is real and what isn’t.”
