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Artist bringing the ghostly citizens of Google Street View to life with full-sized posters

Artist bringing the ghostly citizens of Google Street View to life with full-sized posters

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Street artist Paolo Cirio took inspiration from the ghostly, sometimes blurred images of ordinary people captured by the Google Street View cars and has started printing posters of those people to plaster them up in the exact spot they were originally captured.

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While Google's street view is an exceptionally useful tool, it also captures citizens throughout their day-to-day life and puts them up on the internet (sometimes engaged in behavior they don't want shared with the world). Street artist Paolo Cirio took inspiration from the ghostly, sometimes blurred images of ordinary people captured by the Google Street View cars and has started printing posters of those people to plaster them up in the exact spot they were originally captured. He calls this project "Street Ghosts" and has put up images in New York City, Berlin, and London thus far, with more cities planned for the future. If you have a particular street ghost you've seen that you'd like to see printed in real life, Cirio's site even contains a suggestion form.

Cirio's inspiration behind the works is his believe that Google is making profit from images of cities, places, and even people that it didn't have permission to photograph — so he's taking Google's Street View images and making art from it without Google's permission. While the privacy debate over Street View data is a bit more nuanced than Cirio makes it out to be, there's no doubt that his artwork is a clever repurposing of Google's data. While most people might not get the significance of seeing this art on the street, looking at it side-by-side with the original Street View image (as in the photo above) highlights the creative and clever nature of Cirio's project — regardless of the politics behind it.