Duggal’s Jason Isolini Featured on Vice for Google Maps Street View Art
08/26/2019
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Duggal Project Coordinator Jason Isolini has earned a long-form feature story on vice.com, where writer Caroline Haskins explains Isolini’s digital art hidden in plain sight on Google.
Isolini turns Google Street View panoramas into surreal collages by superimposing 360-degree images onto them. It’s a clever hack and creative vision running much deeper than a moment of surprise.
One of Isolini’s 42 works, for example, serves as a memorial to an Arizona pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, who was killed after being struck by a self-driving vehicle. When a user clicks into the Street View of the intersection where Herzberg died, “you’re met with a chaotic, immersive mishmash of stock art and photography that appear to be encasing the viewer,” Haskins explains.
Isolini said he wanted to acknowledge the tragedy on Google Maps using ecommerce as a visual parallel.
“I made it about the sense of abandonment that maybe a user may feel, kind of like if you abandon your shopping cart online, then you have email blasts coming back at you,” he told Haskins. “So it’s like a trajectory that a marketing company or commercial company doesn’t want you go through. I started to think about that as Elaine Herzberg’s trajectory, as she walks through the median that had a brick area. There was a crosswalk miles away from where she was, but obviously it was a place where people cross the street.”
Isolini developed the idea from his experience as a contractor capturing photos for businesses to be used on Google Maps.
“I think it was really a big experiment when I started doing it—it was colliding images in a panoramic stitching software and seeing what happened,” he said. “Now it’s like this 360 playground that I imagined. I really imagined this as how we could actually interact with the internet. How the internet could feel new again.”
Jason Isolini, Incoming Blue Lumps!, 2019; Courtesy of the artist, © Jason Isolini