Please Note the Difference Between Street View ART and Street View TRAVEL | Post 33 | Montana
“There’s something inherently exciting knowing that you might be the first person to ever gaze upon a scene that happened in the past.” Those are the words of artist Jon Rafman, whose 9-Eyes project gathers compelling (and sometimes shocking) Google Street View images from around the world. I agree with Rafman, but the word choice that rung for me — out here along the virtual roads west of Butte, Montana — was “scene.”
Artists that base their work on Street View imagery — like Rafman, Doug Rickard, and Jacqui Kenny (The Agoraphobic Traveler) — typically use a single frame for any given piece. Having scoured a landscape, they settle on one particular Street View image, perhaps for its beauty, composition, eccentricity, etc., but almost certainly, also, for its story. That is, a great Street View screenshot conveys not just a frozen moment, but a scene evoking emotions and thoughts about the people and places depicted beyond the 1/125th second of time snapped by a Google camera.
Yet for this project — for a virtual traveler pursing a continuous, unbroken course across the U.S. — scene is a massively different concept. My encounter with Street View America is in no sense a moment with broader peri-moment significance, but a scene as dynamic and live as, say, reality.
I have made similar arguments earlier in this project: In New York, I suggested that, when grooving to a smooth click, pause, look… click, pause, look cadence, “virtual road tripping very much generates felt experience, the same sensations as ‘brick and mortar’ travel.” In New Hampshire, I contended that my memories of a man visible in Street View (informed by his domestic surroundings) would differ little from my memories of the same man had I chatted with him briefly on a real road trip.
But there is more.
Sometimes, events really do unfold before my eyes. Near Clinton, a train passed by:
Outside of Drummond, I nearly hit a dog, and its owners — a father and son riding an ATV — totally saw me:
Sometimes I feel the sensation of time passing, or, simply, progression of activity. In the warm light of an October evening, I spontaneously turned into a suburban Missoula neighborhood, and its rhythm was viscerally apparent as folks returned home from work, leaves were raked, and a family loaded a U-Haul.
The presence of people aids the perception of life, of scene, but artist Rafman points out that Street View carries biases (or “ideologies,” as he puts it) since “the camera only captures who’s on the street during daylight hours, while most, let’s say, white-collar workers are in their offices somewhere.”
Yet people are not necessary to scene. The backlit trees on the off-ramp into Drummond foretold a main street (Front Street) whose post-rain, early-morning shine projected as much a sense of place as the Missoula suburb, each building populating the town with character.
Perhaps it helped that the Street View car pulled into the gas station at the town limits.
On that point, Street View travel reveals a further divergence from Rafman’s conception of scene. “There’s no cameraman — it’s just a robot,” he says. Peering at Street View imagery is “almost like looking at a memory that nobody really had. Photographs are so connected to human memory, but these are photographs of no one’s memories.” As the gas station image makes clear, Rafman is wrong. There is indeed a “cameraman” forming memories, namely the Street View car driver who experienced the very same scene. And it is these hints at the driver’s existence — and, importantly, the driver’s unbroken movements — that convert virtual back to reality. As I noted in New York:
Often, when I click along the same road for an extended period, it becomes clear that I am following in the precise footsteps of the driver of Google’s Street View car. My road trip may be virtual, but I am step-for-step, scene-for-scene replaying someone else’s real-life journey. And so I take on the details of his or her day; my mind wanders as his or hers must have. I seek and imagine someone else’s experience.
Finally, a core discovery of this Street View experiment is that, like cross-country bike and car trips, Street View travel reveals infinite stories about America through repeated — not single — scenes. Sure, as for the aforementioned artists, an isolated screenshot certainly can inspire one to ponder a particular place…
…but while traveling in Street View, I have found that discovering patterns (e.g., self-storage facilities, outdoor basketball hoops on reservations); or progressing from the familiar to the unfamiliar (e.g. rural Ohio); or, here in Montana, moving through diverse representations of “rural”…
…are what constitute scenes, such scenes formulated and accessible only by uninterrupted travel across a landscape.
As I contemplated in western Ohio, “I may be traveling virtually, but at least I am here.” Gazing, moving, and learning.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Butte, Mont.
- Anaconda, Mont.
- Drummond, Mont.
- Clinton, Mont.
- Missoula, Mont.
- End: Lolo, Idaho
Trip to date:
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Labor and War on U.S. Route 12 | Post 34 | Idaho
