For a few months, I lived with an unemployed fellow who largely ignored the outside temptations New York had to offer, choosing instead to remain in his room all day in front of the computer. When I asked him why he did this, he told me he was "making art." But whenever I looked at his screen, all I saw was him wandering about aimlessly on Google Street View, an eternal virtual roadtrip with no final destination. I scoffed at the notion that he could sift through endless stitched up stills of roadside non-attractions and produce anything of consequence. Yesterday he proved me wrong.

As part of their IMG MGMT series, art faggy blog Art Fag City is hosting The Nine Eyes of Google Street View , a visual essay created by artist Jon Rafman. Mr. Rafman spent a good part of the last year traveling the world via mouse, searching for elusive "moments" captured by the nine cameras of Google's omnipresent trucks. His collection is striking--a man patrolling an empty street with a monstrous gun, a child passed out on a curb, working girls and their umbrellas, sobbing men. Here, Rafman explains his motivations for undertaking this mission:

Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.

Yeah, what he said.