The digital magazine Rhizome, when describing Rafman’s work, says that ‘Rafman’s screenshot compositions reinsert meaning to these functional images through the artist’s simple act of selection’. (ref, https://anthology.rhizome.org/9-eyes)

Google's automated capture system is incapable of artistic intentionality - cold and practical, it does not consider the content or meaning of the images it records. It is when a human eye falls upon these images that meaning is derived, and the collection of images reveals fascinating snippets of the real lives and experiences of people all over the world. The images Rafman chooses to archive are not romantic and are reminiscent of street photography.

In his essay on Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Alec Recinos discusses the idea of ‘Internet Aware’ art, or “when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [and] viewed than the object itself.” Recinos also describes Rafman’s archive as a work of ‘post-internet art’ as it “refers to objects and images that have been created ‘with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination.’”

He goes on to state that “Google Street View, as an attempt to fully map physical space onto the digital screen, provides an exemplary source material for such work.”

What I feel is highlighted in Rafman’s archival practice differs from traditional photographers - Rafman’s work is most interested in the layer of separation between himself and his subjects. The common theme running through all these images is anonymity. The blurred out faces and pixelated distortions express a dehumanisation of these individuals, their personhood stripped so that Google can provide a commodity - the ‘universally accessible and useful’ Street View.

“This very way of recording our world, this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience. As social beings we want to matter and we want to matter to someone, we want to count and be counted, but loneliness and anonymity are more often our plight.” (Jon Rafman)

Byung-Chul Han and similar postmodernist philosophers reject materialism - they fail to see the internet and the information and ideas that it contains as a product of the material world and of human labour. The foundational idea behind Marx’s theory of alienation is the disconnect between the working class and the product of their labour. Let us not forget that the internet exists physically and, like any other commodity produced within a capitalist society, requires the manual labour of many workers to maintain. The socialisation of labour, where hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide contribute to the production of one commodity, isolates workers from each other. Due to the scale and complexity of the internet, the discussion surrounding its use and social impact is highly mystified.

Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han discusses alienation and technology in his book Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld where he puts forward a phenomena he calls ‘de-reification’. He claims:

‘Digitisation de-reifies and disembodies the world. It also abolishes memory. Instead of memory, we have vast quantities of data.’ (pg. viii)

He goes on to say that ‘we are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the life world. We no longer dwell on the earth and under sky, but on Google Earth and in the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly intangible, cloud-like and ghostly.’

These ideas regarding the dominance of information as the ‘non-physical’ can be seen in the ideas of net artists of the 90’s and in the ‘post-internet’ art movement. But Bosma highlights the irrationality of this idea and how it actually fetishises the internet. In Nettitudes she discusses ‘Eliminativism’, a technocratic school of thought prevalent in the early net art movement that ‘idolises the machine and bestows upon it ‘fictive powers’, even going so far as to call the machine a ‘duplicate of man’.’ (ref, pg 46)