HUMLEBÆK.- The Canadian artist Jon Rafman's breakthrough project, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, is a milestone in the recent history of art. Starting 8 October, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents the first major museum exhibition of how Rafman since 2008 has worked with a vast archive of images found on Google Street View – images by turns hilarious, uncanny, glitchy and trippy.

Jon Rafman (b. 1981) uses images found online to take a critical and empathetic look at how technology is shaping our lives. His landmark work, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, is continually added to and growing. In the Louisiana’s exhibition, it is unfolded in photography, video and installation within an overall scenography designed by the artist.

Despite their “nine eyes,” the technology and the cameras don't actually see anything. They are indifferent about what they photograph, the artist says. Rafman’s project in effect develops the images for the first time, a throwback to a time when people went in the darkroom to develop – and see – the photographs they had taken. -- Mathias Ussing Seeberg, the exhibition’s curator, Louisiana.

Nine Eyes

In 2007, Google despatched a fleet of cars on an endless mission. Equipped with nine cameras, GPS and laser scanners, the cars rolled out to photograph highways and byways around the world. This was the beginning of Google Street View. The cars are still out there. According to Google, they have by now taken 200 billion images while driving millions of miles across more than 100 countries.

As the cars photographed everything and everybody they passed, they gave rise to a new online discipline: finding weird situations and phenomena randomly caught on camera. In 2008, Rafman started an archive of such images gleaned from blogs and websites. He also joined the culture by finding pictures himself. This was the beginning of his Nine Eyes project, which is still being updated and continues to provide material for new artworks.

There are the glitches in the technology that points to the artificiality of Street View, the happy accident of the error that creates something beautiful. There is also the more noir, hard boiled street life scenes like the man with the gun, the prostitute, the drunks, all of the seedy underbelly. There is romantic imagery, the surreal, Jeff Wall-like images. There is ironic imagery, there’s the abject, there’s the beautiful, all the different poles of existence. -- Jon Rafman, in Louisiana Magasin, No. 60, 2025

Street photography, video works and the archive

The Louisiana is the first museum to present a comprehensive survey of Rafman’s work with Google Street View. The first section of the exhibition unpacks Nine Eyes as a form of “online street photography,” “developed” by the artist and framed like conventional art photographs.

Two video works derived from Rafman’s work with Nine Eyes make up the second section of the exhibition. Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008-2025) is an hour-long slideshow transforming the scale of the laptop into something almost landscape-like. You, the World, and I (2010) is a detective story about love and memory based on Google Street View and Google Earth, reflecting the fleeting nature of the internet.

The third section focuses on Rafman’s archival practice, which constantly provides material for new artworks. Hundreds of images from his archive are printed out as small holiday photos and displayed in the 60-metre-long curving corridor of the East Wing. This section also features a new work made especially for this exhibition. In this yet-to-be-titled work, Rafman uses sophisticated AI technologies to animate images from his archive. The exhibition title, Report a Concern, refers to a phrase that Google used to place in the corner of all its images. The phrase was later replaced with the more technical ”Report a Problem.” Now, visitors are asked to consider whether anything they see gives them cause for concern.

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman (born 1981, Montreal) belongs to a generation of artists who use the internet as their primary material to examine our existence between screens and real life. The Louisiana explored this theme in the 2017 exhibition Being There, featuring a number of Rafman’s peers, including Ryan Trecartin, Cécile B. Evans and Ed Atkins.

Rafman builds archives of internet activity in the awareness of the fleeting nature of online platforms and worlds. Many of his main works have grown out of this practice. In 2023, Rafman was featured in the Louisiana’s exhibition The Irreplaceable Human: Conditions of Creativity in the Age of AI. His work in that show, Counterfeit Poast (2022), has since been acquired by the museum and can be experienced in the show of new acquisitions, opening 2 December.