2012. Inkjet prints on coated paper, dimensions variable.
Life-sized pictures of people found on Google's Street View were printed and posted without authorization at the same spot where they were taken. The posters are printed in color on thin paper, cut along the outline, and then affixed with wheatpaste on the walls of public buildings at the precise spot on the wall where they appear in Google’s Street View image. The physical evidence of the ghosts’ appearance may vanish quickly, but its documentation will remain forever. Street Ghosts reveals the aesthetic, biopolitical, tactical and legal issues, which can be explored through the artist’s statement and theoretical considerations.
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"The Street Ghosts are life-size printouts of images of people found on Google’s Street View, posted in the same spots where they were taken. Paolo Cirio has put up these images in cities on different continents, usually without the permission of public authorities. As part of the exhibition The Public Private, they appear on the façade of The New School’s 2 West 13th Street building. By teleporting people from the online to the physical public realm, the artist raises questions about the differences between these two spheres. How do we perceive our presence in these distinct spaces and who has the authority to post our portraits? The blurry quality of the enlarged digital images gives people a spectral quality, turning them, in Cirio’s words, into “a digital shadow haunting the real world”."- - - - - - - - - - - -
Christiane Paul, Street Gohsts, essay in the course of the Exhibition:The Public Private 7.February - 17. April 2013, New School, New York, http://www.sjdcparsons.org/tpp/, 26.08.2014