With the likely aim of circumventing territorial restrictions that prevented the American company from extending Street View to many parts of the world, Google began allowing users in 2017 to submit their own 360-degree panoramas. These photospheres enable smartphone owners to encompass their immediate visual surroundings within a sphere covered in photographs. Geolocated through their devices, professional and amateur photographers alike can contribute, following moderation, to Google’s planetary edifice. As a result, these personalized contributions differ from the systematic operational protocol that characterizes Street View. Unlike the automated vision of machines, photospheres reintroduce a human horizon into an environment that previously lacked one. Yet the curiosity of this practice lies not in what it reveals about the landscape from the operator’s anthropocentric viewpoint. Rather, it can be found in a strange geodesire to occupy places. To appreciate this, one need only tilt within the Street View landscape and adopt a vertical point of view by angling the software’s camera downward.
Holding a smartphone above themselves with a selfie stick, the creator of a photosphere almost always ends up leaving their mark upon it. While some take care to erase their presence, most allow their silhouette to occupy the southern hemisphere of the composition, while others insert a logo or simply their shadow. This approach recalls the ingenious methods deployed by Jan van Eyck to place himself in the background of The Arnolfini Portrait (1434). The painter’s appearance in the reflection of the convex mirror at the back of the scene is not the only feature shared by the Flemish master’s painting and photospheres. In Le Portrait de Van Eyck. L’énigme du tableau de Londres (2006), Pierre-Michel Bertrand suggests focusing not on the identity of the figures reflected in the mirror, but on the mirror itself:
Acting like a short focal-length lens, it has the power to capture a 180-degree field of space. Everything within its vicinity is therefore concentrated and distorted by its curvature (see the bed, the window, the ceiling). This absorption of space creates a triple effect of narrowness, depth, and expansion (a bottleneck effect). (Bertrand, 2006, pp. 133-135)
This analysis of the convex mirror in The Arnolfini Portrait coincides with the spherical nature of the images under consideration here. In a photosphere, through a similar logic of specular distortion, the images composing each hemisphere converge toward their respective poles. When one vertically reframes the image toward the ground, the resulting view tends toward the hyper-selfification of the subject positioned at the sphere’s nadir. Based on this observation, the photographic series Hyperselfies, initiated in 2018, proposes a survey of these new forms of self-portraiture.
Through this sequence of screenshots, we witness a process of colonization of the environment peripheral to the photographer’s vision. Yet this way of drawing the Earth toward oneself paradoxically detaches these individuals from their immediate surroundings. According to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, “a situation is a complex state resulting from the interaction, at a given moment, between a living being, a person, and their physical, emotional, and social environment.” Geolocation, on the other hand, consists of positioning oneself in relation to a global navigation system composed of at least twenty-four satellites orbiting the Earth. In locating themselves, these individuals complete their relationship with that which situates them. They thereby relocate themselves toward a planetary vision apparatus that is not local in any sense and is incapable of understanding them.
This survey of Hyperselfies led to the production of an eponymous video. The work proposes a unifocal and hallucinatory journey around the Earth in which these new forms of selfies are considered in their monstrous dimension. Creating this anxious and syncopated montage, derived from morphing techniques, required collecting more than 300 images from the surface of Google Street View. It is based on an image interpolation algorithm commonly used to create smooth slow-motion sequences. Diverted from its original purpose, the algorithm produces an uncertain blending of hands holding selfie sticks or mobile phones at arm’s length.
To accompany the visuals, the soundtrack of Hyperselfies is composed according to the orbital position of Landsat 8. This American Earth-observation satellite is one of the principal providers of imagery for Google Earth. To achieve this, I use a system called OCTO, which I designed and developed. OCTO is an instrument that transforms real-time data streams into musical sequences transmitted to synthesizers.
Photo: OCTObox, an instrument from the OCTO series that enables the musical sequencing of raw data streams.
Bertrand, P.-M. (2006). The Portrait of Van Eyck: The Enigma of the London Painting. Paris: Hermann.
Duméry, H. “Situation, Philosophy,” Encyclopædia Universalis (online), accessed April 11, 2020.
Author
Guillaume Pascale explores the unstable and speculative nature of information technologies. He creates anticipatory works that combine audiovisual production, programming, robotics, graphic environments, and sound creation. His visual research investigates, among other things, the perception of the terrestrial environment through the conditions suggested by digital environments and the contemporary operational modes of image-making.
