Street Ghosts: Surveillance & The Unrepresentable

This essay takes as its main object Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts, which is both a digital archive and a physical street art project present in cities around the world. According to the artist’s statement about the work: “In this project, I exposed the specters of Google’s eternal realm of private, misappropriated data: the bodies of people captured by Google’s Street View cameras, whose ghostly, virtual presence I marked in Street Art fashion at the precise spot in the real world where they were photographed.”