Google’s cameras were designed to map the world efficiently; Rafman finds poetry in their mistakes.
The project turns Google’s mapping of the planet into an exercise in God-like voyeurism. Rafman is searching an inhuman image system for signs of the surreal and atypical.
Some images recall what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment”: the instant when an ordinary scene becomes extraordinary.
People are caught mid-fall, bodies are warped by digital glitches, animals appear improbably in the street. Rafman gives us fleeting confrontations, accidents and other small ruptures in everyday life.
This concept is brilliantly extended in The Cleaners (2025), which invents conspiratorial narrative connections between disparate Street View images. The work is a haunting meditation on automated surveillance and the people caught within it.
BLOCKSTREAM HQ
Rafman effectively sequences and fictionalises his Street View material into a video work about digital erasure. He takes the viewer through documented streets as they are progressively deleted, distorted and transformed. The hypnotic visuals are accompanied by an ominous voiceover that gives the journey the atmosphere of a dystopian thriller.
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