Jon Rafman's 'Nine Eyes of Google Street View' Gets the Museum Treatment
The era-defining project takes center stage in ‘Report a concert,’ now on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Summary
- Jon Rafman’s “Nine Eyes of Google Street View” takes center stage in Report a concern – The Nine Eyes Archives, now on view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
- The exhibition features original images from the ongoing “Nine Eyes” project, alongside a film and a new AI piece based off the series
When Google unleashed its fleet of camera-mounted Street View cars in 2007, it accidentally gave rise to a new way of seeing — an endless, automated stare that captured life’s strange, funny, poetic and sometimes brutal moments as they unravelled. It’s a gaze, indifferent to beauty and morality, that caught the attention of Canadian artist Jon Rafman.
In 2008, Rafman began his own archive of unusual captures, blossoming into “Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” a move that would later become one of the defining works of digital art history, laying the grounds for surveillance and algorithmic aesthetics as we now know it.
Now, for the first time, the seminal, ongoing series is getting a full-scale museum spotlight. Staged at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Report a concern – The Nine Eyes Archives unpacks the impact of Rafman’s breakthrough project, tracing it into our current technological (and geographical) landscape.
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
Courtesy Of The Artist And Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art
The exhibition gathers 50-large-format Street View images mounted within immersive scenographic installations, alongside an archive of 320 works and the 2010 film “YOU, THE WORLD AND I,” a story of lost love, lensed by Google Street View and Google Earth. Also on view is a new, untitled work which sees AI-animated images from the Nine Eyes archives, furthering Rafman’s ongoing investigation of life in a post-truth world.
“There are the glitches in the technology that point to the artificiality of Street View— the happy accident of error that creates something beautiful,” he reflects. “And then there’s the noir street life — the man with the gun, the prostitute, the drunks, the seedy underbelly. There’s the romantic, the surreal, the abject, the beautiful — all the different poles of existence.”
Report a concern – The Nine Eyes Archives is now on view in Humlebaek, Denmark through January 11, 2026.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl Strandvej 13,
3050 Humlebæk, Denmark
