The new Street View feature of Google Maps is a set of photographs that each gather an entire city into a single, rhizomatic image; in New York, it encompasses thousands of Manhattan city blocks in a frozen tableau stretching thirteen miles from Wall Street to the Bronx, from the West Side to the East Side. Despite this scope, the picture is so detailed you can see two men moving hand trucks of bulk-packaged inventory through a sidewalk loading door on Ludlow Street. You see not just that this bit in New York’s economic data stream exists but how it’s happening. One man is leaning casually on his hand truck, shirt untucked, looking toward the camera, while he waits for the other to pass through the open door. Inside is a dark receiving space with boxes stacked. Two young people are conversing as they wander by on the sidewalk.

Is Street View’s image of New York the most ambitious documentary photograph ever made, a whole city’s routine captured in a single picture? It’s the kind of image Brueghel might have dreamed about, a vernacular comedy of infinite perception. And it’s the kind of map that, as in various Borges stories, makes the viewer begin to imagine a technological singularity in which the drawing’s resolution would eventually equal that of its own subject; or the simulation trope of contemporary sci fi, in which a data set is rich enough to realize an autonomous copy of a person or place. Google, Inc.’s great social contribution may turn out to be imaginative rather than utilitarian, and it’s the same project that pop culture has always pursued: to help us grasp the syntax and grammar made possible by our own technological and political present.

In a strict sense, Street View is a cartographic photograph. A history of that genre’s more heroic moments begins with the first picture of Paris from a balloon, made in 1858 by the Belgian photographer Nadar, also a friend and muse of Jules Verne. It continues with the late-century kite photographs of Arthur Batut, on through the off-kilter 1929 photo of Auburn, Massachusetts, from one of Robert H. Goddard’s first liquid-fuel rockets. Street View’s grainy, glitchy rhetorics have more in common with the look of those early images than with the claims to scientific, military, and aesthetic precision made by contemporary aerial photography and satellite remote-sensing imagery.

But in an obvious way, Street View (unlike an earlier Google product, Google Earth) has no precedent in any aerial photography. Its ground-level, ad hoc, cellular structure owes more to the aggregating, expedient logic of network traversal. Street View’s perspective is esentially a standing person’s horizontal gaze, or many of them joined, rather than the plan view of a downward-pointing airborne instrument. Like other network infrastructure, its imagery becomes more valuable the more it extends and interconnects, and its greatest meaning derives from movement along its filaments rather than from scrutiny of any one site. One of Google’s declared reasons for creating this perspective, at great cost, is that with it you see actual signs on buildings and subway stations. That information can be useful for planning, and the same is true of the more qualitative information in the imagery of each neighborhood. But Street View’s value is not only a use value. Its lowered, manifold perspective lets you see patterns of people coursing to work not as a diagram, but subjectively as the aggregate of the directions and qualities of many individual gaits. There may be little utility in this aspect of Street View since its data is anonymous, ephemeral, and unscientific. Instead there is complexity, subtle honesty, and beauty.

At this point, it’s useful to consider this image’s process of manufacture. A 360-degree panoramic video camera was fixed to the roof of a van, which then drove the length of nearly every street in Manhattan, a looping, chaotic tracking shot that took days to complete. Each frame of the resulting video was then extracted as a panoramic still image, correlated with the camera’s geographic location at that moment, and stitched together into a single complex image. Consequently, the view at 50th Street and 8th Avenue may have been captured either a moment earlier or a moment later than the view at 51st and 8th, depending on which direction the camera was traveling in (on 8th Avenue it happens that traffic, including the camera’s transport, flows northbound only); or significantly earlier or later if the camera was traveling crosstown or if the driver took a break. Despite the linear (if strange), block-by-block scanning movement of this complex exposure, the end result is non-linear. A Street View user can look at any intersection in any order, can smoothly pan from one intersection to the next in any direction, and can look around in 360 degrees at any point. Because no matter where you look you see a frozen frame, and because the viewing interface allows fluid panning both in 360 degrees and across the length of the city, the experience is more like a kind of extended gaze than it is like traveling, and more like photography than video games or film.

The best, most surreal parts of Street View are its inaccuracies and the visible artifacts of its manufacture. Curbs and buildings warble like the visual equivalent of an audiotape played too much, the blended spherical distortions at the periphery of each source frame rendered unpredictable by the camera’s jolts, accelerations, and decelerations. Some trees are crisp collections of leaves, while elsewhere similar-size trees blur into the grain of the image. Strange temporal effects occur, like surprising implications of an advanced physics. A car reappears Cheshire cat-like at multiple intersections because it happened to drive behind the camera for a while. Other disruptions, like a change in the weather, occur when you move your gaze against the flow of the camera-for example, uptown when the camera was moving crosstown. The New York depicted in Street View is an even contest between signal and noise. It is contingent, error-ridden, malleable, membrane-thin, and dreamlike. As a photograph Street View is more Atget than Walker Evans: loose, open to random encounters, relating sympathetically with the city at least as much as with the people in it.

Because of the citywide (if momentary) presence of its camera, Street View’s point of view approaches the omniscient. But it also embraces chance and it doesn’t generalize. These three aspects happen to be crucial to all of Google’s successful endeavors. The company’s approach has always been characterized by a kind of benevolent and active neutrality, by a celebration of the heterogeneous, and by apparent respect for users’ abilities to find their own meanings within data if given a means to engage it. Of course, such instruments are necessarily political, and Google has made significant, occasionally appalling compromises, like its agreement with the Chinese government to censor search results there. Street View has been criticized as invasive, and for publicizing otherwise innocuous moments in a way that renders them notorious. This “magnifying effect of technology” is an argument that’s important to make, but it ought to register more strongly with other technologies (BitTorrent trackers, the NSA’s telcom pattern-recognition algorithms), or with future versions of this one. For now caution should focus not on any particular content but mainly on Street View’s visual language and provenance. Regardless of the lowered, human-scale perspective Street View accomplishes through a manic series of technical convolutions, it is still a surveying if not a surveillance system. It isn’t the disciplinary apparatus of a state, but it is the totalizing product of a massively capitalized corporation, which, with other corporations, is vying for the power to singularly reshape our conceptions and use of public space. In other words Street View is a great hack but it isn’t owned by hackers.

In both its successes and its failures, Street View provides a useful model for design that wants to be both modern and honest. Start by identifying possibilities of current technology and the values to which those possibilities are beholden. If you decide to go ahead because those values are good ones on balance, then don’t try to hide the technical structure of your work, even if that structure is strange, complicated, un-geometric, or surprising. Instead seek beneficial secondary and tertiary effects of your approach, like the pleasing rhythm of a reappearing car, the flattening of a city into a surreal fabric, or unlimited chance encounters.

Google has undertaken the Street View project in several other cities. San Francisco’s imagery, for example, is more crisply detailed than New York’s; it is a much different kind of image. But somehow, despite and exactly because of its many technical failures and compromised postures, this gritty, ghostlike, many-tentacled image is the right one to describe New York.

-published in Modern Painters, September 2007