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Businesses Earth Google

Brooklyn-Based Artist Jason Isolini Is Hacking Google To Create Surreal Street View Art (vice.com) 58

An anonymous reader shares a report from Motherboard: Brooklyn-based artist Jason Isolini worked as a contractor for Google Maps, capturing 360-images inside businesses and uploading them. Now, instead of capturing true-to-live panorama images, Isolini is uploading surreal collages that subvert the purpose of Google Maps: to be a tool that brings users from their current location to a business. "Since August 2017, Isolini has made 42 'contributions' to the Google Maps landscape and they've accumulated just shy of 200,000 views," the report says. "In some of his earlier works, Isolini inserted collages of photos -- like street signs, monopoly pieces, laundry detergent bottles -- into spaces around Brooklyn."

"More recently, in addition to his memorial at the site of the accident at Mill Avenue and Washington Street [in Temple, Arizona, where a self-driving car developed by Uber struck and killed Elaine Herzberg in March 2018], he's superimposed his work onto 360-degree views of art buildings like the Simon Lee Gallery and inserted a images of abandonment and destruction over the entrance to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A cigarette, a broken glass screen, USB ports on a slab of stone, leading to nowhere."
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Brooklyn-Based Artist Jason Isolini Is Hacking Google To Create Surreal Street View Art

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  • by cdsparrow ( 658739 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @11:45PM (#58791878)

    I would call this more gaming the system or similar. Hacking is way overused these days. Did you hear about that old hack - put butter on some toast!?! Totally uses that toast in a way the original designer did not intend.

    • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Thursday June 20, 2019 @12:55AM (#58792032)

      Agreed. It’s a misuse of the service, but certainly not hacking, and it’s arguably not even art. It seems more like trolling or petty vandalism parading as art.

      • Agreed. Nowadays you can throw shit at a wall and call it art, daring anyone to say it ain't. If they say it ain't, they're obtuse.
        SJW FTW!

        • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          You think Dadaism is because of SJW??
          • As a matter of fact, it was all about social justice, back then, so yes.
            The issue is that nowadays Social Justice has become all about petty things, rather than grave issues as it was in the past, therefore being derisively called SJW.
            Social Justice started around 1820s if I remember correctly, bot contemporary age corrupted the term, blame Gamergate for that.

      • You clearly do not know what art is. In fact, I am disgusted by your ignorance.

        Petty vandalism has LONG been recognized as art - and expensive art as any follower of Banksy can tell you.

        Art is not required to be sold, nor is it required to be in frames.

        First result from google search for "definition of art"
        "The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words."

        The collages themselves are

        • You clearly do not know what art is. In fact, I am disgusted by your ignorance.

          Petty vandalism has LONG been recognized as art

          Prepare to be even more disgusted, because I agree with almost everything you said, and even had most of it in mind when I wrote my previous comment!

          While I clearly gave you the impression that I think otherwise, I actually agree with you that vandalism can be art, I agree that bad art is still art, I agree that a work does not need to be sold or framed to be art, and I would even say that art does not need to be recognized to be art. There's a reason I used "arguably" and "seems more like" in my previous c

    • I prefer the jelly on top of peanut butter toast hack. In your face, George Washington Carver!

    • This is not the way the designers intended the system to be used, so by your definition, it's a hack.

      The purpose of the system is to get users to contribute mapping data, and to get other users to use the map so they give up location data. It's not to be a virtual art gallery.

      "Gaming the system" is hacking.

      Seriously, at least try to understand your own argument.

      • Well, first thing, the entire second half of my original post was sarchasm. Sorry if that didn't come through.

        But no, uploading some stuff and having google choose to show it to people isn't hacking. Uploading a malformed file that gave them write access to google's source map files and changing stuff there to show his art would be hacking.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Wished more people contributed to Open Street Map instead. So many people didn't know that they are working for Google and FB for free so they can make billions.

  • It's TEMPE not TEMPLE
  • Just thought you'd like to know.

    Won't you join me for a handcrafted artisan stout brewed with authentic Madagascar civet droppings, and listen to my indie mix cassette? Then we can watch my videos on Google Maps. Cool!

    • What's a cassette? Some kind of musical instrument?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        A cassette is a religious artifact used by hipsters in a form of ancestral worship.

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Pretty sure they've already moved onto portable record players. Gotta hand it to some people though, milking retards of their trust funds has helped the world.

          • Gotta hand it to some people though, milking retards of their trust funds has helped the world.

            It would've helped the world more if that money had stayed in the trust fund, professionally invested in capital and enhancing the productivity of labor. At least cassettes and records are cheap to manufacture, with most of the purchase price going toward monopoly rents to the copyright holders and thus quickly returned to the market as someone else's investments. While it's their money to spend as they wish, others would be much worse off if the beneficiaries of these trust funds chose to spend their inher

            • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

              Yeah, they might actually have to work for a living. And god forbid...work in a manual labor job.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is that what most US roads look like? That's a shocker.
    https://www.google.com.au/maps/@33.4377086,-111.9433858,3a,60y,104.71h,70.17t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sMXeGtc7kZtNZ8CqXrLFRLA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

  • It's not subverting anything if all you're doing is obnoxiously screaming out something everybody already agrees with.

  • Is the proper term here. If you think this is art, wait until advertising companies start doing it, see how you feel about it then.

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

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