street with a [discontinuous] view

When the AAC hosted this Google Street View intervention back in 2009, the sheer strangeness of the Street View function never really registered with me. Maybe I was a little too focused on the marching band, the faux marathon, and, oh, yeah, the love laser. To me, Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett were simply challenging our expectations for Google to provide an objective, empirically processed picture of the world.

But what do Street View's equirectangular panoramas have to do with the world as it actually is, anyway? Greg Allen takes a long hard look at their construction and comes to this fascinating conclusion:

"...in the basic, traditional theoretical sense, whatever Google Street View images are, they are not photography."

Read his whole post here.