Upon writing the visionary statement “Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” the Boston doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes’s face was probably flushed with excitement. In 1859, he believed in the great victory of photography over matter, promising the duplication of the world in the “mirror with a memory”: a new, light world able to strip off the heavy weight of matter forever. “In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer. . . . Pull it down or burn it up, if you please.” A “human triumph over earthly conditions,” he added euphorically. His desire for the next European war to deliver stereographs of battles was—with some delay—fulfilled.

This idea that the world duplicates itself in photography, that it continues to exist in duplicate—in the world of form, of photography, and in the world of matter—has meandered its way through the darkrooms, in photographic delusions of omnipotence, ever since its invention. The sheer mass of photographs, as well as the ease of their production, seemed to sanction this idea in the twentieth century. Yet it took another 150 years for Holmes’s project to actually be realized. Today, with Google Earth, we elegantly and gracefully plunge straight down from the stratosphere onto what was once called Mother Earth. We race down toward a pinpoint on the earth in fragments of a second, and hover like drones in the air a few hundred meters above the ground. From there, we investigate the flat-roofed housing developments, the swimming pool on the neighbor’s lot, the row of parked cars, or a person who is in the process of opening the garden gate. Everything has been thoroughly photographed by satellites in perfect focus and montaged into a blanket of images that is stretched over the primordial matter (and built matter)—over the globe, that is—like a second skin.   

Google Street View operates as a continuation of this visual journey. From the hundred-meter distance that the satellite view allowed us, we sink even further down, to about 2.5 meters above the ground, the position of the nine cameras used by the Google-mobile to photograph streets and front yards. The cameras photograph the streets as thoroughly as the satellites do for Google Earth, although from a different perspective. City upon city, location upon location, street upon street, step by step around the entire world—with a 360 degree horizontal and 270 degree vertical view. Millions of photographs transform the streets into endless tubes with turning moments through which our eyes can steal exciting virtual glimpses, as in an audacious playground slide. At first from a distance and then up close, photographed digitally directly in the front yards, as it were, then uploaded to the worldwide web and made constantly accessible: a skin of images, which conserves a certain perspective and moment in time as in plastic wrap, is pulled over the world and (if there is no resistance) welds it together seamlessly. Straight ahead, then left, turn around in a complete circle—and the suspicion is confirmed that the resort is not as elegantly constructed as it is made to appear on the brochure.

If this picture package is not colorful or radical enough for you, then try visiting gigapan.org to experience a nighttime panorama of Vancouver, Barack Obama’s inauguration, or the skyline of Dubai in large, attractive panorama images. Pictures that can be zoomed into, so that individual apartments, faces, and signs are brought into sharp focus. This is made possible by the incredible number of photographs (20,000) that are melded together to make a single twelve gigapixel image. 20,000 photographs mathematically combined to a single image! 20,000 individual images, details, woven into a single visual tapestry by the computer, which easily allows both an overview and a detailed view. The electronic density of information is pushed up to such a degree that the images seem watertight and dust-proof, as if the picture’s appearance sealed the old, material world like a printed silicon film [bedruckter Silikonfilm; wortwörtlich, aber vielleicht eher plastic wrap [wie frischhaltefolie]]. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s belief in progress is realized here at an astounding level. Combined images with an extraordinary quality of information, perfect surrogates that suffice to make us forget the state of the material world behind them. But do we also want to burn them exactly for this reason?

Artists, too, have dealt with the image film [Bildfilm; aber vielleicht wie oben auch “image wrap?”; anspieledn auf frischhaltefolie?] that Google Street View has stretched over the earth. Jon Rafman or Doug Rickard, for example, sift through the giga archive, select, appropriate, and recompose images into a new context as A New American Picture. In many areas of the world, wealth keeps itself hidden, while poverty is played out in the streets. In the two artists’ compositions, this is presented to us clearly. Street View not only documents streets and the façades of houses; it captures the everyday life on the street as well—nine cameras take nine photographs every twenty meters, which are then electronically archived. Thus, in a different arrangement, a new form of street photography has arisen. That looks like Eggleston, like Sternfeld, like Shore! Look, a Eugene Richards! The comparisons refer to an aesthetic resemblance, but the namedropping makes it easy to forget that these images were produced not without interest, but certainly without passion. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s vision of a light world comes at a great cost—with the loss of passion, scents, sounds, with the exclusion of the (extra-optical) sensory world. …