Thoughts on 9 Eyes by Jon Rafman

Started in 2008, Jon Rafman’s 9 Eyes is an on-going photography project done by taking screenshots of Google Street View as an exploration into its seemingly objective eye. After previously taking many other forms including published books and gallery exhibitions, the body of work has grown in parallel with Google Street View’s platform over the years and is currently accessible through the update-able Tumblr blog page, 9-eyes.com, that continues to expect future additions even though the last update was done in 2014.

It started out though, as a mere pdf file of a collection of screenshots with no apparent coherence between themselves, save for the fact that they all appear to have been taken from Google Street View. The platform’s interface is recognisably present in every image with a lack of additional supporting information such as coordinates as to where one might go to find these images on the platform. This fact raises the question of authenticity, yet the sheer amount of effort and its persistent existence through the years allows us to take a leap of faith and trust the artist that these images do exist somewhere on Google Street View.

The work’s title itself refers to the process behind the ambitious Google Street View, where 9 cameras are attached together in an orb-like formation onto a moving vehicle (cars, motorbikes, etc.) to capture on-site images before then being stitched together into its panoramic views of the entire world. The 9 eyes are objective eyes let out into the world on a quest to simply catalogue the corners of the world without any aesthetical, emotional, or ethical intents behind them towards what they witness, capture, and present.

Some of them capture anthropological nonsense such as one of men running away from invisible pursuers with cardboard in their hands, or another of a woman dragging another one by the hair in a dystopian landscape reminding us that perhaps a zombie apocalypse might be lurking around the corner, while another shows a woman in a blue dress sitting in the middle of a dusty tarmac road with her legs spread wide open.

Some images show technological glitches, colours that appear in gradations in the oddest of places, lens flares resembling ghosts, and ominous virtual twins appear from prolonged exposures.

The images can also be deliberately political. One image shows a white woman doubled over while a black man puts an arm around her. We’ll never know the significance of this gesture for they’re still images captured by an unconcerned eye. The eyes are not concerned about the before or after, the context of what is happening. It will not evoke the same debate that we had when we saw Kevin Carter’s The Vulture and the Little Girl, because we are not questioning what the artist saw, we are questioning what we see.

But what about the alchemical process Rafman has invented with his act of screen-shotting? Interfering in Street View’s capture and show process, Rafman curates and mediates it. He is the nonsensical nature of the internet as an archive of the collective existence of mankind and our consciousness. Shocking us of who we really are as photography did when it was first invented. Because what is artificial intelligence after all but a mimic of ourselves?

In a 2011 interview with AIDS 3D, Rafman highlights his experience with 9 Eyes by stating that “arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason.” And so is the experience of scrolling through the Tumblr page.

It grips you with the same intensity of watching a movie in the theatres, together with strangers in a dark room, having your senses obstructed into nothing but the movie itself that will have you emerging from the room in dazed, confused, and disoriented state of where you are and who you might be.

Rafman further suggests in the same interview that the “Aesthetic experience (for me) is self-justifying… it is very important to maintain a separation between art… and politics and critical theory.” So 9 Eyes with its images of a sword-wielding figure covered in cloth head to toe in a green valley, a lone deformed sculpture of a human face on a grassy field, a Victorian-era dressed woman running towards an English country mansion, is seemingly a catalogue of all human endeavours, present, past, and future. A dystopian one due to the internet, a state of post-human experience, facing us with something vast, ungraspable, and ultimately subliminal.