How ethical is Google Street View, asks Jon Rafman in Copenhagen

Jon Rafman’s Instagram profile shows an image of the artist at work. Dirt jams the letters of his keyboard while his desk is ridden with the detritus of a chronically online life; half-eaten Doritos packets, rogue DVD cases, empty cans of energy drinks and a litter of cigarette butts. Conversely, the screen in front of him reflects a Kantian scene of sublime, snow-capped peaks. This image is restaged as a video work at the threshold of Rafman’s latest exhibition Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives at Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen, in which a rotating cast of sticky tableaux are foregrounded by Romantic-era paintings. These contradictory vignettes function as a prologue to Rafman’s hyper-accelerated universe, and offer an outline of the tragi-hero at its core; the internet troll locked in a conflict between digital primacy and a decaying physical state.

Curious about the social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life, the Quebecian artist rose to prominence in the late 2000s, coinciding with the launch of Google Street View. This ambitious mapping project blanketed every highway, country road, and suburban street with camera-mounted cars, resulting in an archive that, as of May 2022, had amassed over 220 billion images. In 2008, Rafman began an excavation. Adopting the troll's sense of obsessive escapism he started mining the depths of that massive digital cache for the surreal and unsettling collection of images that form the heart of this show.

Presented together for the first time in a museum exhibition, Rafman’s Street View project, Nine Eyes, reads like a glimpse into the internet’s unconscious – a chaotic place where violence and beauty coexist. The bizarre juxtapositions are the only constant; a man flips off the camera in Scotland while a kneeling woman prays next to a post box in Washington. Some subjects play to its gaze, like the sex worker mooning the camera in Madrid, while others end up in comical situations trying to avoid it, like a man in Romania hiding his head inside a recycling bin. To call these people subjects, however, misses something crucial about the agency of these images, which were not captured by a human but by the indifferent lens of an unmanned camera. It highlights a crucial distinction between the camera and the artist; where one looks, the other sees. Through Rafman’s eyes, these mechanically-captured moments are elevated into scenes of human significance; collective memories in equal parts funny, eerie, poignant, and profane.

Rafman continually examines the condition of memory in the digital age, arguing that technology has fundamentally rewritten our relationship with the past. This obsession is crystallised in his film, You, the World and I (2010), an ironic retelling of the Orpheus myth where the first-person narrator performs a relentless trawl through Google Earth not for Euredyce herself, but for her image, retracing the moment a Google car drove past them on holiday. When the narrator finally locates his lost love, he is confronted with the image’s inadequacy, wistfully proclaiming; 'it seemed to contain our whole relationship. Yet it was so blurry.'

His latest work, shown here for the first time, sees Rafman grapple with the ethical implications of the Nine Eyes project and the moral relationship he has to the people caught in Google Street View’s digital net. Generated by AI, these videos project speculative narratives onto a selection of these random, context-less scenes. This exploration is darkest in the film Report a Concern: 29052 Oak Road Run, Central Shasta, CA, USA (2025), inspired by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, where a person from one of the images seeks revenge on Rafman’s uncanny double, who, having spent years projecting stories onto these frames, can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. It’s a chilling feedback loop we’ve seen reflected in real-world news. Though the internet can still function as a means of escape, these films gesture to its more sinister potential, an abyss of paranoia that reflects your own fears back to you.

Similarly, the exhibition design transforms the space into an abyss of its own, contributing to the troll-like sense of all-consuming immersion. With floors and walls covered in a visual soup of vivid glitch-scapes, visitors are folded into Rafman's digital vortex, a Boschian fever dream where a man plays the trumpet before a car crash, a child rides a bike in a Scream mask and an inmate makes a run for freedom. It’s absurd, and that’s the point. In a time saturated by data but starved of meaning, Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives is an attempt to define a new, technological sublime characterised by the limitless nested realities of digital space. For Rafman, that’s always been less about documenting the internet than it is about finding a way to humanise the very tools that threaten to alienate us.

Jon Rafman's 'Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives' at Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen until 11 January 2026

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