Night at the Museum http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/07/night-at-the-...

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Night at the MuseumJuly 7, 2014 | by Dan Piepenbring

“The Camera in the Mirror”

Google is growing up. Its cameras have entered the mirror stage. Since 2011, the company has sent elaborate camera-mounmuseums as part of Google Art Project, which allows users to browse galleries around the globe, clicking through room bythe sense of space. Sheathed occasionally (and abstrusely) in shimmering Mylar blankets, Google’s cameras take photograpwhenever the trolley passes a mirror, it takes an accidental self-portrait.

Now, just as Jon Rafman’s “9-Eyes” presents moments of incidental beauty and sublimity from Google Street View, a neMario Santamaría called “The Camera in the Mirror” captures Google’s cameras as they capture themselves: unsettlingly

Night at the Museum http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/07/night-at-the-...

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in a kind of perpetual anachronism, surrounded by art and artifacts from centuries past.

If Lacan and Baudrillard somehow procreated, and their child ate some bad LSD, the hallucinations might resemble someCamera in the Mirror.” There are no people in these photos—only an inert, mechanical totem pole seemingly obsessed winot to ascribe human motivations to the thing, in part because it resembles a sleek bipedal extraterrestrial and in part becachilling deliberation, at the center of every frame. In certain shots it looks imperious, haughty; in others it becomes almostIn only a few minutes it takes on a kind of personality, and so the whole project becomes tinged with the rhetoric of sciencdoes the machine want? Where is it going? Is there any stopping it?

I thought of a few lines from Sartre’s Nausea and gave myself the willies: “People who live in society have learnt how to mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”

And yet, as terrifyingly impenetrable as they seem, these photos are signs of fallible life from the Googleplex—they shatterseamless museum-going, showing us the leering, error-prone business end of one of the world’s most ubiquitous and powerThey testify to Google’s mind-boggling wealth: among other niceties, these trolleys are mounted with the CLAUSS RODHD and CLAUSS VR Head ST, two panoramic cameras that take photos with about a thousand times more detail than tcamera. They cost upward of five thousand dollars apiece. Of course they want to look at themselves.

Night at the Museum http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/07/night-at-the-...

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Night at the Museum http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/07/night-at-the-...

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