Address Is Approximate (1219 Maple Street; 2305 Taylor Street; Rosewood & Edisto), 2012

More instructive in making sense of Google Street View than the metaphor of inside/outside is the one of depth and surface. What appears on the screen in the use of Street View iconically represents what is not, perhaps, literally deep beneath it. But Street View is an index; in its use, not only are the sites we try to find indexically represented by the photos taken at the actual places, but even more importantly, the whole coded structure that makes Street View functional is indexed, but not iconically, in its very interactivity.

Appropriating three addresses from Google Street View, I have blended them together into the image of an impossible site, an icon of an unnatural location, which approximates no real space, and addresses no particular user, but is itself stitched from the indices of real spaces. This composite image is repeated here four times. In each instance, “buried” in the image’s code is a natural language text, which is indexed on the “surface” of the image in subtle distortions in the picture. The contents of some of the texts, as is likely clear, are in tension with what they are doing here. They are, in a sense, performing the tension inherent in interactive indexical images.

Two Photo Prints
6 x 9 inches each 

Two Photo Prints
6 x 9 inches each 

Two Photo Prints
6 x 9 inches each 

Two Photo Prints
6 x 9 inches each