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Mirrors Behind the Curtain: Royal Palace of Amsterdam, Google Museum View Screenshot, 2012
Over the past fifteen years Google has grown to become a ubiquitous omniscient entity, which has peered into almost every aspect of our public and private lives. It has documented everything from vast stretches of the earth’s terrain to the most personal emails. The word “Google” suggests a possible answer to almost every imaginable question. Google acts as both all-seeing God and prying Big Brother, a vast repository of objective fact and personal revelation.
Mirrors Behind the Curtain reveals the self-censored workings of this all-seeing, all-knowing medium. The screenshots in this series are rare glimpses of Google’s elusive "Street View" camera, busy at work, virtualizing the interiors of different museums, castles, and institutions of power around the world. Unlike normal street view though, in which Google’s car and camera have been easily masked out, the museums’ and castles’ plethora of mirrors present a situation where Google cannot cover its tracks. These images are ambivalent portraits of the often invisible, panoptic power of Google’s observation.
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