I learned of this project last year on ArtFagCity, but somehow didn’t know about the blog.  Happy browsing, Google Streetview is one of the most interesting tools for understanding space and place today, at least in the online world.  An understanding and appreciation for what it reveals in our society is important, I think.

My halloween costume this year is called Google Ghostview.

It’s a fictional service where Google indexes mediums and ley lines, giving us the ability to see and understand ghosts, in the same way streetview proposes allowing us to see and visualize spaces as something less abstract.  It also involves a physical costume, with me dressing up as the iconic Pegman.

The idea sprang from an ongoing project of mine, Unknowing Eye, which is studying the computer’s inability to understand the nuances of human privacy and interaction.  Ghosts represent the opposite of this: a presence or lingering feeling that is defined by fleeting events or passion, but remains only as something unquantified.

Though it’s started out as a halloween costume project, I’m planning on taking the idea a bit further and eventually incorporating it as a separate project in the Unknowing Eye set.

In the mean time, keep an eye on this flickr stream for halloween photos, always fun. http://www.flickr.com/photos/readywater/tags/ghostview/