The project Nine Eyes, considered a milestone in recent history of art, was presented for the first time in a museum exhibition. The work, which is Jon Rafman's breakthrough project spans almost two decades and focuses on both the everyday and the existential aspects of life in the age of digital surveillance.
Canadian artist Jon Rafman (b. 1981) is renowned for a multifaceted work that revolves around our relationship with digital technologies and surveillance. He often uses images and stories from the internet, which he adapts and reworks seeking to cast an empathetic and critical look at the way technologies affect modern life – emotionally, socially and existentially.
The story behind Jon Rafman's seminal work, Nine Eyes, dates back to 2007, when Google sent an army of hybrid cars on a never-ending mission. Each car was equipped with nine cameras, GPS and laser scanners and the aim was to photograph every highway, country road and dirt path in the world. The cars are still running, and Google itself states that since 2007 they have shot more than 200 billion photos and driven more than 10 million miles across 100 countries.
strange situations
The cameras’ registering of everything and everyone that the cars passed by created the fertile ground for a new discipline on the internet in the first years of Street View’s existence: finding strange situations and phenomena which had accidentally been picked up by a Google car.
As early as in 2008, Rafman himself began to create an archive of these images, which he collected from countless blogs and websites, just as he became part of this subculture and found his own images. Nine Eyes is a never-ending work that continues to be updated by the artist from time to time. Although it is still unfinished, it stands as a milestone work both in Rafman’s career and in the history of 21st century art.
The exhibition, entitled Report a concern – The Nine Eyes Archives, was the first full-scale presentation of the project in a museum and consisted of over 50 large framed street views installed in scenographic environments designed in collaboration with the artist. In addition, an archive of 320 individual works and a slideshow from the project were presented, as well as the film You, the World, and I.
The exhibition further presented new work in which Rafman animates with AI, a technology he has worked with for years, interested in how developments in digital technologies and photography relate to our perception of reality and truth.
