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kottke.org posts about Google Street View

Flip Off Symbolically Powerful Places With Ai Weiwei’s Middle Finger

Ai Weiwei's middle finger flipping off the Kremlin

Ai Weiwei's middle finger flipping off Trump Tower

Ai Weiwei's middle finger flipping off the stock exchange

For his project Study of Perspective, artist and activist Ai Weiwei took photos of himself flipping off “significant institutions, landmarks and monuments from around the world”, notably Tiananmen Square in 1995. Using this Google Street View-enabled web tool, you can use Ai’s middle finger to flip off anything you’d like, anywhere in the world.

I’ve included a few examples above from the site’s archive. In a brief review of what folks have done with the site recently, I observed several shots of the Kremlin, the Eiffel Tower, churches, and various Trump buildings, but I also saw the Stonewall Inn and other gay landmarks.


Imaginary soundscapes composed by AI

A Japanese group trained a deep learning algorithm to compose soundscapes for locations on Google Street View. Try it out for yourself.

For a stadium, it correctly concocted crowd noise from a ball game but also Gregorian chanting (because presumably it mistook the stadium’s dome for a church’s vaulted ceiling). A view outside the Notre Dame in Paris had seagulls and waves crashing…but if you turned around to look into the church, you could hear a faint choir in the background.


Google Ocean View

Google Ocean View

Google Street View includes views from under the Earth’s oceans. You can tour shipwrecks, swim with humpback whales, and virtually dive down to dozens of coral reefs.

P.S. You can also climb Yosemite’s El Capitan on Google Street View, which is SO OMG TERRFIYING THAT I CANT BE BOTHERED TO CORRECTM Y TPYING. Are anyone else’s palms soaking wet right now? (via mr)


Blurred Sex and the City

The real-life house that served as the stoop of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment on Sex and the City is blurred out on Google Street View.

Sex And The City House

The house was on the Sex and the City tour for a time, before it was dropped due to pressure from neighborhood residents, and remains a popular tourist attraction. I go by there quite often and there is always someone taking a photo on the stoop. As I’m writing this, the most recent photo of someone standing in front of the stoop was posted to Instagram 16 minutes ago. I can see why the owners would want it blurred out, and it turns out getting your property blurred on Google Street View is a simple process.

P.S. What’s funny about the house is that Sarah Jessica Parker actually lives only a block or two away. I used to see her all the time, walking our respective kids to school. Ollie and I even got caught in a paparazzi shot one day…that’s me in the dark coat right behind Parker and Ollie on the scooter:

SJP

No way to fill out a form to blur out my son’s face though, I reckon. (via @michaeltsmith)


GeoGuessr

This is like CSI for geography dorks: you’re plopped into a random location on Google Street View and you have to guess where in the world you are. So much fun…you get to say “wait, zoom in, enhance, whoa, back up” to yourself while playing. My top score is 14103…what’d you get? p.s. Using Google in another tab is cheating! (thx, nick)


Google Street View first-person shooter

There’s no gameplay asside from firing the gun and moving around, but it’s still disturbing to walk around within Google Street View with an assault rifle. (thx, job)